Extracting Profit From Your Blog

While blogging may not propel you to millionaire status it could potentially net you a healthy income. To achieve this you will have to approach blogging with the same effort and ethics you would use with any business. Coupling this with some good keyword research and you’ll be off in running in no time at all, of course most of this would be best to plan out from the start it’s not to late, the internet encompasses many different people from many different countries giving you multiple opportunities.

Let’s get started shall we? One of the best ways to monetize your blog would be reviewing & recommending products and or services that’s relevant to your followers. This will work great one because your followers are already interested in what your writing about and two search engines tend to rank these reviews highly, especially if you have an authority site/blog. I think the results you receive from this will be the most rewarding, you may also choose to go about this by placing advertising on your site (ad sense), but your potential earnings may prove to be less substantial.

How do I choose which products or services to review?

For the sake of this post let’s say you are running a blog about snowboarding, so you will want to research and find the top keywords that people search for on this subject. This will encompass things like snowboards, bindings, boots, and other apparel related to the sport.

To find the top keywords use a tool like wordtracker, and first search for “snowboarding” here are the results:

From this keyword, we can now see some potential and what to target. You could now become an affiliate and review and promote these products (collecting a small commission), or you could possibly do something more. Let’s take a quick search around Amazon and see if they offer these products, the results:

This looks a little more promising for profit, and here’s why: You can join the Amazon affiliate program which can pay out up to 8% on sales from these items, which equals more money for your hard work. Stick with this and overtime your profits will eventually start building up with every new review you put out there. To put some numbers to this let’s take the amount of searches conducted per month 2000, this puts your visitors around 2000 a month, and let’s say you’re a pretty good writer and your pages are setup well, so that you convert around 10%. This means around 200 sales per month with an average commission of 2 dollars, that equals $400 a month. Once you start adding on to the products you review, these numbers will easily start increasing and before long you’ll be making an extra thousand or two every month.

What if you want to monetize with ppc ads?

Now let’s take a look at this method of monetizing your blog. Once again you’ll have to dive into the keyword research, to find out which are the best for you to target. This can prove to be very tough, but here are a few things you can do to figure out how to get the most money out of every click.

First you’ll want to start with google’s keyword discovery tool, once again I’ll be using “snowboarding to illustrate this. I’ll be using 5 random results out of the top 10 keywords related to “snowboarding”, let’s begin:

Now that we have them let’s copy and past them into a test Google Adwords campaign, and pretend that we want to be the top bidder for these words.

Then, let’s plug these terms into the traffic estimator and bring up the estimated CPC for each as them. Now by sorting through according to the CPC, we will be able to see which terms will be the best (most profitable) to target.

As you can see in the above chart the keywords snowboarding apparel, snowboarding jackets, and snowboarding packages are the most profitable, but you will still be making less then you could possibly make using other methods.

I hope that this post drove home the importance of keyword research even when blogging, if you want to turn a profit from your hard work. Although it’s very time consuming, it’s still a very valuable process that will help you determine how to best monetize the traffic coming to your blog.

One last thing I would like to touch on before I go, you might have noticed that throughout this post I used a few different keyword research tools, this is because each of them provide their own strengths depending on what your searching for. So I hope that you will take the same approach when conducting your own search, to find the top paying keywords.

If you still have some questions or would like to learn more leave a comment or contact me for farther assistance.