Are you striving for more visitors to your blog? Don’t worry, everyone does. I have yet to hear a blogger who complains of having too much traffic. Almost every blogger is on the race for more readers, more page views and more advertising income.
Of course they all have it wrong.
Increasing the number of visitors is hard task and long ongoing work. If you want to make money with your blog there is an easier way to do it than working on traffic. Increase the value you get from every visit and every page view instead. This means to improve your conversion.
Let’s say your blog now has 5,000 visits monthly and brings you $100 in revenue. If you want to increase your revenue by 50% you have to attract another 2,500 visits. Tough! On the other hand, making 50% more of the current visitors may be much easier, especially if you have never optimized your conversions.
Here are few ways to do it:
Place less ads, but better performing ones
Throwing tons of ads on your pages will not help you earn more. It’s more likely to push some visitors away. Instead of cluttering your pages with ads figure out which ads perform best and leave only them. Very often this actually increases your revenue because the bad ads do not leak clicks and attention that can go to the better ads. Obviously this is valid only for pay per click or affiliate ads.
But even with ads that pay for impressions, your chances to attract good advertisers are better if your blog is not cluttered.
Pre-sell to your visitors long-term
If you are passionate about a product or service and you want to promote it to earn affiliate commissions, don’t place ads for it. Instead of that slowly pre-sell the product to your readers by honestly expressing your opinion about it here and there. Plug the affiliate links where appropriate instead of pushing them in front of your readers in every blog post.
Have Good related offers
Show ads that are related to the content you are writing. Google Adsense is very good for this because their ads are contextual. If you want to display affiliate offers use the Offer Match plugin for WordPress to match your ads to tags of your post. Relevant ads are very important for getting better conversion.
Every page or post needs a purpose
Mixing interesting content and trying to sell at the same time rarely works. Sometimes it makes beautiful posts but most often trying to sell will hurt your writing and trying to write interesting piece will put selling at a second place.
So it’s better to have a clear purpose for every blog post or page you create. Is it a linkbait piece? Then put no ads and no affiliate links in it at all! This improves the chances for people to link to your content. Then make the pages that must sell look like sales pages, strongly focused to the main goal – to convert the visitor into a buyer. It does not matter whether it’s your own or affiliate product.
Sell products or services.
Ads and affiliate commissions are the most common income sources for bloggers. But you can make more money if you focus on your own products/services or physical products to sell. You don’t have to manufacture everything – drop shipping is a great way to sell physical products with good profit margins.
Creating your own e-book, e-course or even offering one-to-one teaching sessions are all great ways to boost your revenue. You are the expert in your blog niche so don’t be afraid to try it.
Image: Flickr.com/Ianiv & Arieanna
The author is serial entrepreneur.
