14 Vital Tips On How To Monetize Your $5K Site

Monetizing your site is actually not that easy and it is a lot of work. This is shown by the fact that 81 percent of all bloggers never make more than $100 from their blog.

Products

The first thing you need in order to monetize your site is solid products or services. You can’t build a business on products that don’t work. The products you offer need to be very of high quality and solve a real problem for your visitors.

The products you offer can be yours or they can be someone else’s (affiliate system).

You need to establish the demand for the products that you are promoting. There should be enough sales value (number sold times price) of that product to make it worth for you to promote it.

When I say “enough sales value”, I don’t just mean your small niche segment. Let’s say you are selling organic eggs and there is a demand for 20,000 organic eggs per month in your area. You should look at the demand for eggs overall, which is let’s say 250,000 eggs per month – that is the potential market sales value you should look at. If you can bring down the price and do a marketing program, you could potentially sell to everyone who wants eggs.

Part of “enough sales value” is related products. If someone buys eggs, they may need a dish to cook it, flour, etc. If you sell an SD card, also sell the SD card converter for USB. You should be targeting all those items to properly monetize your site. A great example of this is Amazon’s “Those who purchased this item also bought….”

Product Pricing

You should have some low ticket and some high ticket products.

If you have low-priced products, you need to be able to sell more of them to make the same amount of money as from selling high-ticket products.

Real profit comes from selling high-ticket items at your back end. On the other hand, low-priced items below $25 are good for an initial sale, as they are more of an impulse buy.

Selling Yourself

Before you sell any products, you need to sell yourself. The importance of this is easy to see if you look into your spam e-mail folder.

I would never buy anything from those e-mails and if you don’t know how to sell yourself, your communication about your products becomes spam.

Selling yourself is first of all a matter of building trust wit your visitors and it could also be called “pre-sell”.  There are many things that go into this:

  • Having a nice-looking website
  • Communicating your own story
  • Photos of yourself and your team
  • High quality images, videos
  • The knowledge and authority that your posts convey
  • Your branding (logo, colors, business name, domain name)
  • Having a real address, phone number, e-mail address, contact page
  • Communication with your visitors through comments
  • Social proof, such as Twitter followers, Facebook fans and likes
  • Lack of spam (e. g. your site is not flooded with ads)
  • Number of website visitors, domain DA, backlinks

The main thing is communication of the correct data that resolves your users’ problems. This gives you authority and altitude.

Your Unique Selling Position (USP)

Having a great product is not enough, you also need a unique selling position, i. e. you need to offer your product in a way that no one does. This could be an unusually low price, free help to set up, etc.

The easiest way to establish your USP is this: look at the top websites of your niche and see what products/services they offer. See if there is anything impractical, bothersome or annoying about these products and offer something that fixes this problem.

An example would be a WordPress plugin that costs $24 per month. This is annoying for a new business owner who is not necessarily making a profit yet. You could offer a similar plugin for a one-time fee of $45, and this would present a unique selling position for you that would make your offered plugin more attractive for startups.

It doesn’t matter what your USP is, just make sure no one else is offering it the way you do.

Adsense And Advertising

I personally don’t recommend using this form of monetizing, especially on a new site.

  • Ads are ugly and decrease user experience
  • They can reduce your search engine rankings and increase bounce rate
  • Most importantly… it makes you less money!

It is more profitable to post actual products for sale on the spots where you would be advertising.

Once your website has a lot of traffic, it may be profitable (and a fixed income) to sell advertising spots for a fixed fee.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is very popular and you hear a lot about it. is promoting a product or service from another company and earning a commission for it.

Sounds simple? It’s really not. There is a lot to learn and a lot to do to set this up. Don’t be fooled by get-rich-quick programs that suggest that earning hundreds of thousands through affiliate marketing can be done with minimal effort.

I don’t recommend going with big affiliate networks, as a new site is usually difficult to get approved.

Adding affiliate programs is not a one time activity. You need to keep adding them as you add more pages to your site.

Promote the products you use. This works because you know exactly what you are promoting, it is easier to write about it and people can see you using the service or product.

Affiliate commissions unfortunately don’t come instantly. Here is the best description I have seen on how to earn money with affiliate programs and you can check out this affiliate post that was written to rank in Google and for conversions.

Your Own Digital Products or Services

In addition to affiliate products, you can create your own digital product right now and make money from it. Potentially more money than from affiliate sales. No matter how long you’ve been in the game or how large your audience is.

From a digital product

  • You can sell as much as you want.
  • You can’t run out of stock.
  • You don’t need to do shipping or pay money on it.
  • You don’t have to work yourself to death to try and meet demand. Your product is always available.

Digital products can be in several forms: e-books, online courses, photos, music, software, scripts.

You can

  • Keep 100% of the profits
  • Set your own prices
  • Hire your own affiliates
  • Have complete control over the content

Your own services represent another way to monetize your site.

You could offer a consultation service or any service that can be paid for.

Are you good at taking photos? Offer a service.

Are you good at writing articles? Offer a service.

You can look at websites like Fiverr for ideas.

An eCommerce Store

I don’t want to go into this deeply, but this post would be very incomplete without mentioning eCommerce as a way to monetize your site.

This is its own science and mainly its profitability depends on finding high demand products and suppliers that can give you competitive prices. This latter is not easy at all and has been the downfall of many stores.

An eCommerce store has four possible models:

  • the physical product store
  • the dropshipping store
  • the affiliate store
  • the digital store

In terms of the platform I actually don’t recommend WordPress. There are several Store WordPress plugins, such as WooCommerce, however in my opinion WordPress and eCommerce form a forced marriage. Your store will never be so clean-looking and trust-inspiring.

Therefore I recommend the use of PrestaShop, which is the WordPress of eCommerce. Similarly to WordPress, it is built with modules, which is the equivalent of plug-ins.

Website Traffic

The next ingredient in monetizing your website is driving traffic to your pages and affiliate programs.

There are factors that will outright stop you from getting traffic. The most basic mistake is trying to get traffic from places where there is no traffic. Spending all your time trying to rank and get instant traffic to a new website from Google is one of these strategic mistakes.

You can review the worst errors you are probably making in the Why Your First 5,000 Visitors Never Came.

However knowing these gross errors by itself is not going to generate traffic. You need the techniques that help you get traffic from sites that HAVE a lot of visitors.

Promoting Your Content

There are certain forms of content that generate sales. Review posts, list posts, ultimate guides and comparison posts are some of the most popular posts for affiliate marketing. Include both the pros and cons of the products you’re mentioning.

After the initial setup of your site you shouldn’t just keep adding content.

Content needs to be epic, but content is NOT king. Content and promotion are together king.

You should have a rotational schedule of

  • researching a problem based on forum and Facebook comments
  • writing your next piece of content with your product recommendations in it
  • promoting this content (80%)

Your Own Affiliate Program

If you are selling your own products, real or digital, your own site’s affiliate program is a must.

It can increase your sales by 25 percent. Especially if you have a new site, it is vital to enlist the help of others who are in a niche that is related to your product.

Giving a fair commission can be an incentive to choose your affiliate program over others.

When your site is new, it could be a good idea even to give a 50 percent commission to start the flow of sales going.

Your Mailing List

It is important to start a mailing list from day one.

If people sign up to your mailing list, you have more chance to make money from them because of the repeated purchases.

You also need to care for your list, keep sending them stuff to keep them alive, otherwise they will not recognize you and unsubscribe.

Duplicate Content And Republishing

There is an idea that duplicate content is always bad.

This is not true. In fact, Matt Cutts, Google’s former Head of Webspam said so here.

This opens the door to the ability to republish your content, while keeping certain guidelines.

This resolves a huge problem: A new site has few visitors, therefore publishing your content on your new site is like giving a lecture to your family in your living room.

You can make a lot more out of your content that you spent so much creating by having your articles republished on sites with high traffic. That is more like giving your lecture in the stadium during Super Bowl.

I hope that clarifying this will help you a lot…

Conversion Rate

Once you start getting traffic, the next point that will show up is high bounce rate and low conversion.

Your visitors are not going to sign up for your list.

You will need to improve your headlines, your sales copy, your opt-in text and your opt-in freebie.

You will need to make several different landing pages and freebies for different audiences.

You constantly have to monitor your traffic and conversion and constantly improve.

Use images, videos, etc. to boost your website.

Blog Profits Blueprint

If you want to make money on your blog, this will help you:

The 2017 Blog Profits Blueprint, an 88-page free report in text and audio by Yaro Starak.

It’s 100% free and will guide you through the four steps of setting up a blog and email list designed to sell your products, including:

  • How To Refine Your Topic To Make Sure You Are Going Where The Money Is
  • What Type Of Content You Need To Create To Attract The People Who Will Eagerly Buy Every Product You Offer
  • How To Create “Traffic Assets” So You Only Need To Set Them Up Once And The Traffic Keeps Coming
  • How To Quickly Turn Your Knowledge Into An Information Product That Sells On Autopilot

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, monetizing your blog is not easy and it is lots of work. There are many ways to monetize a site. The above give you the general outline and books could be written about each sub-subject.

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About the Author

I am into expired domains, niche sites and sales funnels.

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