I’m going to divide up the success model into smaller chunks that could be reviewed separately.
A successful profitable blog requires two main elements:
- Traffic
- A business model that allows for monetization
In terms of traffic, the main reason people visit blogs in the first place is content. This could include different forms:
- Blog posts
- Educational articles
- A membership platform, forum, or another engagement engine
- Infographics
- Whitepapers
- Research studies
- Podcast episodes
- Ebooks
That said, why would people subscribe to or even browse a blog regularly in order to facilitate the profitability in the blog in the long run?
It comes down to market need and penetration.
Before starting a blog or when molding a young website into a profitable engine, there are several considerations that would tailor the content strategy toward the right business model:
- What is the target market that the blog would serve?
- What is the estimated volume of readers (locally or worldwide) that would benefit from a given online resource on the subject?
- Which are the pain points of your target viewers?
- What does the competitive space look like (other blogs covering similar topics)?
- Are there other relevant content approaches which would be unique and cater to the needs of visitors who would prefer consuming content in a different way (video, audio, visually)?
The overly saturated markets are harder to penetrate due to the large volume of blogs and magazines that have already covered most of the educational aspects. However, the number of potential readers is also higher, which hides promising opportunities in the future.
Very niche markets may have a limited number prospects who would enjoy your content. The traffic will be low and won’t allow for advertisement profit or any other revenue model that depends on large audiences. However, there are other monetization opportunities related to consulting or reselling high-end services and products for that niche audience (especially for B2B markets).
Here’s an actionable approach by Moz on keyword valuation and estimates:
There are also ways to penetrate an existing market by innovating in terms of content. If your field of interest is flooded by magazines writing brief articles of 500-words each, consider crafting long-form content that is more detailed and discusses problems in depth. Otherwise, if everyone aims for large studies and whitepapers online, think about a “Quick tip of the day” format that would cater to busy readers who want to assimilate content one step at a time.
Textual content-driven competitors could also be tackled using other formats such as YouTube videos, webinars, podcasts or other areas that aren’t as widely used. Maybe your target market is busy and travels a lot and would benefit from subscribing to a podcast or a video course that they can watch at the airport or listen to while driving to a conference?
Traffic sources
Google Analytics breaks down incoming traffic in four main actionable categories:
- Organic search
- Social traffic
- Referral traffic
- Direct visits
A. Organic search
Organic visitors come through search engines such as Google or Bing. That’s where SEO comes into play as your goal is identifying the pain points of your customers, what are they looking up online while figuring out how to position yourself among the first results online.
The current utilization of Google is quite proactive, hence the great potential for landing ongoing traffic through search engines:
Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
Generally, when planning for content after analyzing the target audience and their needs, focusing on certain keywords is an important part of the process. Most people target short keywords (1–2 words) in hope that customers would look for these and land on their website.
However, shorter keywords are harder to rank for. There are likely tens of millions of results for most combinations (if not over 100M) and customers are aware of the polluted space with inefficient results. One of the key strategies nowadays is focusing on long-tail keywords:
An example being the real estate space, if you’re looking for a flat in New York, you may fail to filter the right results as going for “NY flat”. Possible combinations that may yield better results would be:
- “Two bedroom apartment in Manhattan”
- “Cheap apartment rentals New York City”
- “How can I find a one bedroom flat in the Brooklyn area”
- “What are the best rental websites for New York City”
Note the different variants that you could use while looking for the very same thing. When catering to the customer needs and the plenty of targeted options, the ranking opportunity is far more rewarding and will still give precedence to your results in the long term for people looking for shorter key phrases.
That comes in combination with writing high-quality content on relevant subjects and helping out with relevant results.
With regards to high quality content and professional content marketing, Neil Patel’s Advanced Guide to Content Marketing is a perfect go-to resource (among his thousands of blog posts and answers here on Quora as well).
B: Social Traffic
Social traffic is all incoming traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other social networks where tens of millions of potential users may browse.
When reviewing your target market and defining buyer personas for your ideal readers, you can evaluate the most promising social networks for your type of business. B2C products are often best promoted on Facebook while more conservative niche resources may be best suited for LinkedIn.
If you have the time and resources to maintain pages or groups in several channels, go for it. There are plenty of studies about different niches and what are the best promotional mediums for them - here’s one targeting 2800 marketers in 2014 and what they say:
Other than that you can leverage your targeted and valuable content and share it on your feed, on your brand/blog page and in other relevant groups online. Be careful about spamming - no one likes intruders joining a community and posting a myriad of self-promotional links.
There are different formulas that work but participating for a few weeks with comments and other helpful resources first would be highly beneficial and warm up the mood. Then, you can apply the 80–20 rule by posting several relevant and helpful sources from other websites and pitch one of your stories in-between.
Social traffic can be utilized through partnerships with other entrepreneurs running blogs or business websites. You can do cross-promotions and pitch content in each others’ groups in order to share and grow your traffic accordingly.
C: Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is quite important as well since it revolves around links to your website in other online resources.
Since Ramit Sethi has already joined the conversation here, I’ll post one of his charts from How to get 150,000 people to read your blog in 1 week:
While numbers may massively vary as Ramit has noted himself, the importance of crafting outstanding content is indisputable. This branches off into two different areas:
- Content for your own blog
- Pitching other sources for guest posts
When you land publications of your content in other magazines and blogs, this will also help with your referral traffic. However, there’s another important aspect that may very well help out.
Backlinks are one of the key trust factors that Google takes into account when ranking results for a Google Search. Content quality, length, and potential usefulness for customers is also super important. But receiving trustworthy links back to your piece is a testimonial for quality as high-profile sites would not accept random and fishy links if they want to continue maintaining a good volume of traffic.
That said, backlinks will increase the domain authority of your website and the page authority of various resources that you link within your guest stories whenever possible and applicable.
Guest posting is a successful strategy utilized by plenty of successful entrepreneurs, bloggers, marketers over the past years.
Brian Dean has been notorious in coming up with genuine strategies for building links back to your website. His definitive guide to guest blogging is a great go-to resource:
The Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging
Conducting regular outreach and providing invaluable content for your readers and those of the outlets you’re promoting yourself on is key. Consider focusing on other forms of content like infographics that may get additional exposure or cross-promoting products which would allow you to grow your email list and utilize it for all sorts of promotions, upsells, and general brand awareness.
D: Direct traffic
Direct traffic are visitors who type in the domain name of your website in their address bars. For starting blogs, that’s usually you and your friends - but later on passionate fans and advocates of your writing would likely go straight to your website without having to look for it online.
Okay, in terms of traffic, that covers most of it. What about monetization?
Blog Monetization Opportunities
Depending on your niche, there are different ways to profit from your blogging efforts. Using traditional and emerging marketing strategies together will provide the stability of the proven results with some groundbreaking innovation in certain areas of marketing and business development.
#1. Consulting
Consulting is one of the common approaches used by starting bloggers who have already initiated their outreach and consulting activities prior to jumping to proactive blogging.
Providing consulting activities through a well-maintained blog is certainly helpful. There are millions of consultants online and there is no formal requirement for placing “Consultant” before your name or job title. As a result, finding an industry expert among the pool of self-proclaimed consultants may be a challenging task.
Bloggers, who have successfully identified their business needs, manage to bring a steady and growing flow of traffic to their blog. As a result, selling consulting services resonates with readers who can value free advice and this ensures that you are knowledgeable and involved in the best community practices.
#2. Advertising options
Aside from the standard advertising networks, you can offer paid sponsorship/ad models for businesses that would like to purchase a banner or any form of placement on your website.
This may also be extended to other paid revenue options - if you start a podcast, you can feature your sponsors with a 20–30 seconds promo intro or when featuring a product. Writing an ebook or conducting detailed research can also launch a collaboration with another party - who pays for the heavy lifting in exchange for a logo and link.
This model may not be massively successful for you, but it still works quite well in some cases.
#3. Affiliate resources
Joining an affiliate network may provide you with some upselling opportunities for your readers. Many bloggers fail to build a successful affiliate model that doesn’t come off as too spammy, although this may very well work if you receive steady traffic and cherry-pick the possible options.
For example, Amazon has an affiliate program where you can resell featured books in your stores or even embed a search widget listing books by a predefined keyword.
Various tools and services provide partnership, reseller and affiliate programs for hosting plans, marketing tools for small businesses, or anything related to your field.
Often times there is a win-win-win deal when a company pitches their product for promotional activities on your blog:
- The product owner/brand generates more traffic and sales.
- You receive a percentage of each deal from your affiliate or coupon code.
- Clients may also receive an additional discount if they use your code (i.e. 10% or 20% off the base price when using your code).
That model is quite lucrative for product businesses and the higher your traffic and reader engagement, the better the results.
#4. Selling your own products/services
You can create new products under your brand and sell them to your audience, or create a designated page (or a set of landing pages) for different buyer personas.
#5: Product reviews
Writing product reviews can also be monetized in different ways - through affiliates, charging for paid reviews, building comparison charts and categories and more.
#6: Featured and Paid blogging
Some bloggers are “writers by heart” and would love the opportunity to write for a living.
Running a well-established blog would allow you to find clients easily willing to pay for freelance content, ebooks, or other content resources. You can also write and post copy on your blog in exchange for a fee. Full-time or consulting writing or editing jobs are available if you’re great at what you do.
Some successful bloggers land publishing deals for books, others start selling on Amazon as solo entrepreneurs.
On top of that after growing a successful business and publishing at various outlets, some of the largest magazines and blogs may be willing to work with you. Some of them pay their regular writers or contributors, but even if they don’t, you can generate some solid exposure and grow your brand immensely - which could lead to other paid gigs.
#7: Training programs
As an industry expert and reputable blogger, you’re uniquely qualified for teaching, coaching, and mentoring opportunities.
You can start personalized or group training programs or membership-based coaching services. Opportunities can vary a lot but if you have at least a hundred dedicated readers, who engage with your content all the time, a good percentage of them would line up for added coaching and inspirational advice for a fee.
#8: Speaking gigs
Successful blogs are somewhat rare to find and are a great source of information, data, and advice.
In addition to the training aspect, you can pitch a case study-based talk at various events. Generating millions of hits a month or even hundreds of thousands would be something that starting bloggers and writers are eager to learn more about while also studying your techniques and numbers.
If you spend a lot of time experimenting with Internet marketing and implement different strategies all the time, those results could be invaluable to others. Once you gain some traction, you can start charging or organize training events yourself - including cooperation with other successful entrepreneurs around you.
#9: Influencer Marketing
Since digital ads are no longer “the holy grail”, Influencer marketing is a popular trend in 2017.
The more you write, rank higher and grow your monthly traffic, the more you will boost your reputation and credibility in the space. You can partner up with large industry players who want to get closer to consumers, interact directly with them and use trustworthy methods of brand promotion.
Influence marketing is a fairly new field, although it’s been around for decades - using actors, sport players or other VIPs for brand promotion. Some companies also pay for brand ambassadors and company advocates promoting their brands in their official company roles.
#10: Email Marketing
Some marketers would say that email is the most valuable instrument of ’em all, despite of all the rants against email with the rise of other collaboration tools over the past years.
Email marketing ROI is higher than other promotional sources. It’s been here for decades. Everyone has an email nowadays. People use it for work which justifies spending a lot of time in their inbox.
And so on.
Email marketing could combine all of the strategies enumerated above and then some more, while engaging with a group of users who deliberately chose to read your stories. Use it wisely and help your audience at all times - and see what sort of profitable opportunities would be available in the meantime.
In a nutshell, building a successful blog revolves around growing its traffic and customer base and implementing monetization strategies suitable to the blog model and the customer market.
- Research your audience properly, define your buyer personas, and see what your competitors do.
- Find out a model that’s unique yet still valuable, and start producing content on a regular basis.
- Think about SEO - don’t robotize your content, utilize tools such as BuzzSumo, SEMrush or Ahrefs in order to see what goes viral and what keywords generate a higher volume of traffic and hits.
- Build outstanding content - ultimate guides, industry reports, whitepapers, large How to or “Step by step” walk-throughs. Talk to prospects first, browse social media groups and find out what are the common problems that clients deal with in the field. Then write the cheat sheet and distribute it across the web.
- Start pitching other blogs and magazines and publish some outstanding guest posts there as well. Don’t forget to share it across your social media channels and other social directories.
- Keep an eye on monetization opportunities along the way. Try to keep your traffic growing at all times, and convert some of it to your email list with some freebies as an incentive.
- Keep in touch with other industry leaders and organizations - or even bloggers - that you can collaborate with. Could be a partnership for traffic share, or a business deal.
- Offer your consulting services in the meantime. Keep in mind that working with different clients will expand your horizons by building expertise in different markets which you can translate to actionable advice as well.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
A revenue model should be planned in advance, but it should not be the sole reason you should start blogging.
Nobody has the time to educate for free if they are unemployed. Free advice comes as a byproduct of a successful business run by the brand. Which is why you have to be truly committed to helping and educating your prospects and giving them the best content and deals possible. The more determined and persistent you are, the larger your audience will be and it will reveal different revenue models as you grow.