Earning money on the Internet is a very lucrative business, especially if you have the know how on promoting your website. Many website owners have just a standalone blog, which they only except guest posts. This means the website is full of content, sometimes about many different business sectors, but no real services. In this post I will explain how to turn your blog website to earn other streams of income other than Google Adsense.
Do You Own A Blog Website?
Anyone can create a good-looking blog website for vey little money and very little work. Publishing guest posts on your blog will create high quality content on a regular basis and will only take up a couple of hours a week of your time. You will need another couple hours a week to promote your site through social media and Internet marketing.
Many blog website owners use Google Adsense to generate an income from their site. Creating a Google Adsense account is really simple and all you need to do is install a piece of HTML code on the areas of your web pages you would like Ads to display. Every time your reader clicks on one of these Ads, Google will pay you a small commission.
Your blog can earn a lot more money and gain higher search engine rankings and social followers. The key is to find a niche and setup affiliate accounts with companies within your niche.
Find A Niche
Many blog websites I have come across publish content about anything. One day there could be a post on how to change a light bulb and the next day there could be a post about politics! Publishing content about anything will be hard for Google to distinguish a theme for your website, therefore they wont know what keywords to rank your site for and many people will not follow you on their social media accounts for the same reason.
To make money from your website you need to find a niche. Take a look on Google keyword tools and trends to find a subject people are searching for today and in 6 months time. Once you have found a niche, and it is something you share and interest in, only publish guest posts about this niche. This will give your website a theme, which will allow Google to start ranking you for keywords and social users to view your site because it’s a niche they are interested in.
Affiliate Accounts
Now you have found your niche, search for companies that offer products and services within your selected niche. Affiliate programs gives you a good commission every time a users clicks through your website and makes a purchase. The commission on affiliate programs is a lot higher than Google Adsense.
How To Promote Your Site
Now you have real services and products on your site, you will find visitors will start interacting on your site and viewing more pages. The key is to drive visitors to your services/products page rather than your blog pages. After all, the money is in the affiliate programs, not your Adsense account.
You have 2 methods of traffic to your website, search engine traffic and social media referrals. Both methods require you to create an Internet marketing strategy on how to achieve these goals. Your strategy should contain your website goals. These should be to gain more social followers/shares and higher keyword rankings for your affiliate programs keywords.
You need to remember, the owners of your affiliate program will always outrank you on Google, after all, it’s their product! Instead focus on long tail keywords and pick up visitors from Google, which your affiliate is missing out on.
You can gain a lot of visitors from Facebook by advertising your affiliate services. With over 1 billion active Facebook users, there is no way your affiliate can connect to all these people. Using your Internet marketing strategy and advertising budget you can start promoting your services to your local area and start branching out. Try to promote your affiliate program to a different country than your affiliate. This will pick up more visitors to your site.
When creating your Internet marketing strategy you should always research how and where your affiliate is promoting their services then look for gaps they are not targeting.
Following these points will increase the sales from your site, social signals, keyword rankings and visitor interactions. There is a lot more you can do with a website instead of just publishing guest posts.
Featured images:
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
This article is by Kev Massey. Kev works at SixtyMarketing in the UK and loves finding new gaps in the market to break into with new websites. Please follow Kev on Facebook to view his latest projects.