The 5 Most Profitable Ways to Monetize Your Content

So you have opened your mind to the possibilities, you have selected a profitable niche and you have started to get your unique content out there, now it's time to start generating an income from your content. It's important to remember that getting unique, targeted content out there is the most important step... but this is where it gets fun!

Affiliate Links

A simple, effective way of monetizing your content is to incorporate affiliate links. That is to say, to promote products directly related to your niche in return for a percentage of the product price if you make a sale. You want to try to pick products that offer your readers value and will convert a large number of visitors into sales.

Consider products that you currently use, do they have a webpage? If so, the chances are they will have a re-sellers/affiliate/referral section where you can apply to advertise their products. There's no better way to promote a product than to already be a satisfied customer! You should also remember the need to be a balanced reviewer, if you don't like something about a product you are advertising, don't be afraid to tell your readers. They will appreciate your honesty and it will add credibility to the times you give products a glowing review.

The two most profitable marketplaces for Affiliates can be found at Clickbank and Commission Junction.

Creating eBooks

Creating your own eBooks for your niche can make the difference between earning a few hundred dollars a month, to earning a full-time income online. If you are not in a position to do so already, I strongly suggest that you work towards releasing a dedicated eBook based on your passions. If you are a photographer you could put together a coffee table album, a cook could write about baking the perfect loaf of bread or a martial artist could evaluate how he integrates the skills he has learnt into his professional life. These are just a couple of niche ideas, be sure to go through our ‘keyword research' again to find the most profitable sector of your niche.

With your own unique product, not only will you receive a very high portion of the sale price, but you will also have the advantage of having already built up a level of trust with your reader.

I can also recommend setting up a dedicated website purely for your eBook. Again, don't forget to promote the release of the book on your blog, Twitter, Facebook etc. You can also offer a sample chapter for all of your readers to sample before they decide whether or not to purchase the full eBook.

Whether to promote your work using a third-party is often a decision people struggle with. Yes, they will take a percentage of your profit from each book, but they can also provide invaluable exposure to get your book out there with minimum effort on your behalf – this is why I believe you should decide to advertise your eBook through 3rd parties. Using this incredibly simple setup atClickbank, you can also make your book available for sale via over 100,000 advertisers.

Adsense

I personally do not use Adsense on many of my niche blogs. I find that they take the personal edge from the site and will often direct visitors away from my site and possibly to competing sites. Despite this, many people insist that it is an almost guaranteed, simple way to monetize your site.

I have found that the trick with advertising using Adsense, contradictory to pretty much all other advertising, is to make it not stand out from the rest of the content. The more the adverts are seamlessly integrated into your general blog content, the better your conversion rates will be.

Monetizing a Forum

One of the features of a forum is the ability to password-protect all or certain areas of the content by supplying selected users with a username and password to enter. This could provide an opportunity for you to monetize your niche site by charging members a fixed monthly fee for access to all or certain parts of the forum.

If you decide to go down this path, I recommend allowing access to a free part of the forum for non-members, as this provides a great way of getting traffic to the site and increases interest in the full forum monthly membership. You should also only consider this option once you have started to generate respect within your niche

Advertising on Blog

By the time you have built up a flow of regular traffic to your niche site, you will be in a great position to offer advertising space for related products on your site. The chances are, as your blog develops, you will receive enquiries from visitors who have a product they would like to advertise, it is up to you to negotiate a suitable rate depending on the amount of traffic you are generating.

All WooTheme designs come with an ‘advertising manager' feature built-in to the software, which makes it amazingly easy to upload a picture and link to an affiliate product at various points around your blog. You can even tailor adverts to specific niche pages. So if you had an ‘abs' category on your fitness blog, you could charge an advertiser $10 per month to have a ‘Six Pack in Six Exercises' eBook advert in the header image of all blog posts contained in the ‘abs' category. If you can get to the stage where people are actively contacting you to get their adverts on your site, you can then really start to profit from your passions.

This is an excerpt from my free eBook, 'How to Make a Living From Your Passions'. To receive the full eBook (no, there are no catches!), simply enter your email address on the top right of my website, found here. Thank you for reading.