While it’s true that starting a blog means doing several things at once, monetizing it is a whole different part.
As a newbie blogger, you might have been overwhelmed with the amount of work you have to do yourself because it takes several days to understand different stuff not to forget the time it takes to implement each one of them.
While starting a blog is quick, and requires minimum expenses, buying a domain to setting up a fully functional website is truly one of the best moments for a new blogger.
However, as soon as a few weeks pass and you see your blog is nowhere to be seen in the search results, you now understand that it was just a 10-second trailer while the whole three-hour movie awaits before your blog gets established and earns handsomely.
You might find it discouraging at first but this is how I and several other successful bloggers started their careers.
The truth is that Yes, it is possible to monetize your blog from day One but you need to know more before you jump to some conclusion.
In this guide, I will not only teach you how to monetize your blog from day One but will also expose the Truth about Monetization that will keep you on the right track to earning a good amount consistently.
The Truth About Monetization Early
The fact that a blog can be monetized from day one is fantastic but this is not possible for a majority of new blogs out there. This is one of the harshest truths about blogging.
Still, what matters is knowing the Right Time to monetize your blog which you can only know in two ways.
Number one is through manual trial and error where you start understanding how monetization on the website works. The second method is to seek help from already-established bloggers which is why I created this guide if you don’t want to waste a lot of time through the first method.
If you are not someone who has already done a lot of homework before making your site live, then it might take a few weeks before you can monetize your blog.
Nonetheless, there are certain things to keep in mind before you even try to get your blog monetized.
Now coming to the available options for monetization, I am not going to list all the ways through which you can earn money from your blog.
Some guides recommend that you should create your own product, collect subscriber emails for promoting your products, host webinars, collaborate with sponsors, and whatnot. But you neither have subscribers nor any company would want to collaborate with you at the beginning.
Also, it’s not even possible to have such monetization methods on every blog as many niches simply don’t allow them or don’t benefit from them like the others.
The (Only)Best Ways to Monetize from Day One
That said, this leaves most new bloggers with only two options: Affiliate and Advertisements.
Affiliate
When we talk about Affiliate programs, if you have already prepared 10+ posts to publish from day one, your site might get accepted into some affiliate programs. Affiliate programs will manually check your site to see if your blog fits their requirements and if your content quality is top-notch, some of them might accept them in a few days.
Amazon Associates program is one of those but then there are other affiliate programs that might not accept you before they check your site stats.
Some programs require you to have a few hundred or at least a few thousand visitors per month. They may not ask you directly but they can check your site stats from online tools such as SEMRush which is one of the best tools for new and professional bloggers.
Advertisements
The second way to monetize is perhaps the easiest way to start earning from your website. By displaying advertisement banners on your header, sidebar, and in-content, you can literally start from day one considering that your site gets approved by Google Adsense.
Getting approved by Adsense might take a few days to a few weeks and you need to have at least a couple of high-quality articles covering similar topics in the beginning.
As the approval process is manual, you don’t want to risk it by throwing AI-generated or $1 articles.
The good thing about ads is that most niches are accepted and once you start getting a good amount of traffic, you can level up your earnings by applying to other Ad programs such as Ezoic, Valueimpression, Videoo.TV, Adthrive, Mediavine, etc.
As the majority of bloggers struggle to generate 100,000 page views per month, Ezoic is their best partner that has linient requirements and also doubles the ad income.
Will it Guarantee any Income?
Your income depends on your traffic. Both types of monetization methods work differently.
In some cases, advertisements make more money while it is vice-versa if the site is mostly hosting affiliate content like “best products list”.
Now if you want an answer to whether you will start earning some bucks from the first day of your monetization considering that you are dependent on organic traffic from Google and other search engines, the answer to that will be NO for the majority of new bloggers.
In case you have already been receiving hits to your site and monetized after you started getting some traffic, you will be earning from the very first day.
Or if you can drive traffic through social media promotion from the very first day, you are already good to go.
However, social media promotion is not easier than getting organic traffic. You either drive traffic from your already established pages or you spend on ads to send targeted traffic to your site for making some sales.
How to do that is entirely a different topic for another time but this sums up pretty much what you should expect at the beginning of your blogging career.
I remember earning my first dollar in the 5th month when I started blogging in 2015. The earnings increased several folds in the next months. So, it’s not like a 9-5 job where you have to wait for a whole year to see a 10% increment.
This is what you should keep in mind when you start blogging that there is no way you can earn a handsome amount unless you have the patience and the ability to be consistent in your efforts.
How to Boost Your Revenue Quickly?
Not optimizing your revenue can be a colossal mistake and considering that we have so many options for boosting revenue without having to struggle to gain more traffic, optimization is a no-brainer.
Even if you are a total newbie, you can still boost your revenue through experimentation and it only takes a couple of weeks to find out what works best for your site.
Optimization still doesn’t guarantee a revenue boost in every case but can definitely result in little improvements over time. Remember that it is a trial-and-error method and you should never stop experimentation.
Optimizations for Increasing Advertisements Earnings
Ads optimization can be done in two ways: By manual or auto placements of ads. For doing any of them, you can either take a fully manual approach by doing everything yourself or you can use the default settings of your Ad program or you can even take the help of a plugin.
If your ad program works on CPC(Cost Per Click) basis like Adsense, it is crucial to place the ads in places where the visitors are likely to click on them. However, the ad placement shouldn’t overlap with any of your content whether it is the text, links, or navigation buttons because it’s against Adsense guidelines.
Therefore, you should learn the behavior of your visitors before you start placing ads in weird places that can ruin the user experience. Increasing the CTR(Click Through Rate) is not easy for everyone as it requires understanding your site layout, user behavior, and knowing the best ad banner sizes.
It is recommended that you use 728×90, 300×250, and 300×600 ad banners more frequently in the header/footer and sidebar respectively while the native ads will suit the best in-between content.
Your ad banners should naturally blend into your content so that readers don’t skip them on the first look. They should still look minimal with simple and clear fonts and should use attractive color combinations that can catch visitors’ attention.
Source: creatopy.com
If you don’t want to do everything manually, there are ways to make everything automatic. Adsense has the option to turn on Auto Ads that will automatically fill the required spaces with suitable ads. Ezoic has a similar but more flexible option and is turned on by default.
You can also use plugins to give your site functionality for different scenarios. For example, if you want to show a small horizontal ad banner for mobile readers, it is not suitable to show them the same 728×90 banner ad because it is wider than what the mobile screen is capable of fitting in.
By default, if you place an ad with this size, it is going to show on both desktop and mobile devices as there is no functionality to stop it from appearing on only one device. This is the best time to use a plugin like Ad Inserter which gives you a lot of flexibility with ad placement experimentation.
It is free of cost and I have been using it on my sites for a good amount of time. WPQuads is another good plugin for manual/auto ad placement but the options are limited.
You can learn more about the functionality of Ad Inserter in this post as the options are too many and it’s not possible to cover it all in this one.
Optimizations for Increasing Affiliate Earnings
Using affiliate programs the right way is one thing but optimizing is another. While the former gets you started earning your first dollar, the latter helps you obtain extra cents.
With generic Amazon banners and affiliate buttons, it’s quite possible to earn handsomely but optimizations like correct placements of links, attractive banners and buttons, in-text links, tables, and other such stuff will help improve users’ attention to your products.
Just like readers get attracted to a set of colors when seeing advertisements, they also find certain color combinations and representations of affiliate links more appealing.
You can do such optimizations manually but it will take a lot of time and effort to finally know what works better. However, with the piling up of complex code after code, your site may slow down not to mention you have to repeat those codes again and again in the same post.
This is why I recommend using Shortcodes Ultimate which is a free plugin that can create custom affiliate boxes and buttons without having the need to add several lines of codes manually.
If you are looking to optimize Amazon earnings even further, AAWP is perhaps the best tool to do this job. It’s not free but requires a one-time payment. I have been using AAWP for now over 2 years and it has been the best decision I have made.
AAWP product box grid
Not only you can create custom boxes and buttons, but you can also create affiliate product lists, comparison tables, and best sellers lists. You can further customize them with different types of free templates available which is definitely an advantage over generic product displaying.
Some websites also do well with their sidebars. If you display banner ads on your sidebar, you might want to switch to displaying affiliate products in the sidebar to increase your revenue.
A single product purchase can exceed the total revenue you may earn from the ad banner you have on your sidebar. Of course, this is also a trial and error method because not every site will do well if you replace the ads with affiliate products.
For example, replacing the ads with products on an anime or movie-related website is not going to convert as good as a site that writes product reviews.
How to Earn Even More?
Apart from using the traditional earning methods, you can add some more bucks to your earnings through a few more methods. This doesn’t mean you have to implement an entirely new method of monetization but you are going to extend the already existing ones through the following ways.
Increasing Ad Revenue- Unpopular Method
Have you ever noticed that some websites have videos embedded into their content and whenever you visit their pages, these videos start auto-playing?
These videos are not just for grabbing your attention to see more content but also pay the webmasters through showing advertisements.
Unlike Youtube, there are a few programs out there that allow you to monetize your videos on your own website right from the beginning. They show video ads before the actual video starts playing or sometimes in between the video to maximize the earnings.
Although these video ads don’t pay as good as Youtube, we can agree that something is better than nothing.
One of my favorite programs is Ezoic Humix which monetizes your videos through instream video ads. In order to use it, all you need to do is signup for Ezoic and add videos to the side through Humix.
It needs a whole step-by-step illustration if you want to know how you can use it but it’s a topic for an entirely different post. As I am about to drop a full case study on Humix soon, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter.
Another such program is Videoo.TV which is a standalone out-stream video program where you just need to copy-paste some lines of codes to your website and now you will have a slideshow of your own blog posts that will also show video ads in between.
This is entirely another way of monetizing your website without having the people go somewhere else and also decreases your site’s bounce rate. I have a complete guide on how to earn from Videoo.TV in detail. So, check it out if you want to earn a few more bucks daily.
Earn More Through an Affiliate Store
Some websites can do well through a product store if they are already getting some good hits. While it might not be a good idea to start a product store right after you set up your blog, once you have enough visitors to direct them to your store, you will earn extra bucks for sure.
The thing is that you don’t need to own a single product to create your own store. You can just list affiliate products in your store and let the users buy through your affiliate links.
Great thing is that there are plugins that let you create such stores without much manual effort. My favorite one is the WooCommerce Amazon Affiliate plugin which has so many functionalities to add products, customize your store, and automate several things at the same time.
With this strategy, you are not only showing your recommended products but you are also saving yourself from the headache of integrating the payment system, shipping, and returns as everything will be handled by Amazon.
Have Patience, it’s not a Paypal Money Generator
Building a reader base requires time, and so does making money. It can take somewhere from 6 months to 1 year before you can earn some bucks. Some people are able to do it sooner while some don’t see success before a year or two.
If you are in school or college and don’t have financial responsibilities, it is the right time to start blogging now. Those who are pursuing a job may start blogging part-time without having to leave their jobs.
Rest is up to you on when and how you want to start because blogging requires dedication which, unfortunately, most don’t have.
Let me know if you need any help with starting a blog and I will be glad to help.
