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How to Make Money with No Blog Traffic

January 8, 2018 By Joseph Hogue

One of the biggest myths in blogging is that you need to build traffic before you can make money. I bought into the illusion and it took me six months before I was comfortable enough to start making any money.

The wait almost drove me to quit my blogs.

If I had, I never would have been able to grow my blogs to over $86,770 last year.

I still don’t get that much traffic, just over 50,000 monthly visitors total on five blogs. That’s led me to learn as much as I can on how to monetize a blog and make money no matter how many people click through each month.

The secret is in one of two strategies, niche targeting of your readers or reaching larger audiences on other platforms.

Here’s how you do both.

 

Table of Contents

  • Post the Right Marketing Content on Your Blog
  • Partner with the Right Affiliates
  • Look Beyond Your Blog to Make Money Online
    • Self-Publish Your Own Book
    • Teach an Online Course
    • Make a Vlog
    • Start a Podcast
  • Your Turn: Transform Small Blog Traffic into a Goldmine
    • Wait! Before You Go, Read:

Post the Right Marketing Content on Your Blog

To some extent, making money online boils down to laws of probability—the larger the audience, the more potential sale opportunities.

Large traffic numbers increase your income potential because you have more chances to make a sale but there are ways to increase your sales on lower traffic.

Regardless of your audience size, there’s one secret that can be more valuable to any internet entrepreneur.

Successful content marketing is the most crucial ecommerce concept you need to understand. If you rank for the right keywords, effectively address your audience’s needs, and partner with the right affiliates, you can earn passive income with minimal visitor traffic.

Quality content is crucial to convincing your audience to make a purchase, tell their friends, and share on social media. It doesn’t matter how you do business online; you must be able to connect with your visitors.

In addition to 1,000-word posts that rank for a specific keyword, consider adding some of the following media to your blog posts:

  • Video – connects with readers on a more personal level
  • Infographics – prove your point through numbers and hard data
  • Testimonials – help give you the social proof readers need to trust your content
  • Case Studies – give readers real-life proof that your content delivers on its promises

These four content ideas make it easier to emotionally connect and build a level of trust with your visitors. Word-of-mouth recommendation is almost always the most effective form of advertisement and implementing these interactive content ideas make it easier to interact with your visitors.

 

Partner with the Right Affiliates

You don’t have to spend months creating your own products to sell.

Showing your readers how you make money online through your daily activities by recommending the products and platforms you use on a regular basis is called affiliate marketing.

Nearly every company offers an affiliate program that rewards you for referring future customers to their website. The important thing to keep in mind is that no two affiliates have the same payout.

With a small blog, you might think that Amazon links and Google Ads are the two most effective ways to make passive income online. That’s usually not the case because the pay-per-click might only be a few pennies.

Let’s say you have affiliate links for two products that cost the same price of $9.99. Amazon only pays you 5% per referral (49 cents per sale), but you can earn 50% of the purchase amount through an affiliate network like ClickBank ($4.99 per sale). You have to make 10 Amazon sales for each ClickBank sale to earn the same amount.

Because you can only include so many affiliate links in each post, it’s so important to compare all your options to choose the right affiliates the first time.

 

Look Beyond Your Blog to Make Money Online

Blogging isn’t the only digital frontier for making money online. In fact, it’s one of many ways. In fact, your blog may just be a landing page to introduce your audience to your other online services on other platforms.

That’s okay!

You can make even more money through other online media platforms to reach a different audience that may not even know what a blog is.

 

Self-Publish Your Own Book

If you’re talented with the written word, you can self-publish an eBook on Amazon. Sure, there’s an upfront investment of time and money to write, proofread, design a cover, and advertise before your book launches, but the potential royalties from selling your product on the largest online retailer is well worth it.

Amazon sells approximately 1 million eBooks every single day! This statistic doesn’t even account for the Amazon Audible audiobook lineup.

Use your blog to drive traffic to your Amazon listings and don’t forget to optimize your eBook product category and keywords to rank within the in-house Amazon search results too.

 

Teach an Online Course

If limited traffic means you’re only able to make a few sales a month, you might as well sell high-value products and get the most out of each sale.

With a DSLR camera and some editing software, you can create your own “how-to” video courses for sites like Udemy and Teachable.

If you’re more effective at speaking than writing, video can be your most effective media.

Online video courses have exploded in popularity as people prefer to watch videos than read a book to learn new skills like massage techniques, computer coding, investing, and photography. If you’ve ever taken an online course to expand your skillset, you know how useful these online courses can be.

While you might get all of $3 a copy for each book you sell, you can easily get $150 and more for your courses.

Video will only continue to play a larger role in the online world as we become more tech-centric. If you’ve been dismissing DIY videos as something only for funny cat videos, think again.

 

Make a Vlog

Although online courses are a great passive income avenue, don’t overlook another tried-and-true income method, Vlogging.

It’s never too late to create your own YouTube channel, Twitch channel, Facebook, or a Vlog on another video platform. Between advertising revenue, affiliate links, and product sponsorships, a 30-second video could net you hundreds or thousands of dollars in passive income.

Now that videos can rank in the first page of Google and Bing search engine results, your videos can rank for keywords your written blog posts don’t.

 

Start a Podcast

Another way to promote your blog and content is with a podcast to reach an entirely different audience that enjoys listening to a weekly dialog between the host (you) and an interviewee to learn something new.

The beauty of podcasts is that they can be played on demand (even five years from now) and reach an audience that prefer audio playback because they don’t have the time to sit down and read or watch what you have to say.

Use your podcast to promote your favorite products, sponsors, and even your own courses, newsletters, and digital content.

 

Your Turn: Transform Small Blog Traffic into a Goldmine

Owning a small blog doesn’t prohibit you from making a solid online income. By partnering with the right affiliates and promoting some your other online ventures, even when you’re not physically producing a product or service to sell, a blog can boost your income when you market your content efficiently.

Reach other audiences on larger platforms or deliver a hyper-targeted product to your readers. Either way, you’ll start making money even as you wait for your traffic to increase.

Wait! Before You Go, Read:

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Filed Under: Blogging Tips & Tricks, Personal Finance Tagged With: make money blogging

Comments

  1. Robin Khokhar says

    January 8, 2018 at 8:27 am

    Hi Joseph,
    You have shared some of the things which I would never have thought. The best thing is that I was attracted towards the Title of the post read the post. And I found some good ides.
    thanks for the great share.
    Have a good week ahead.

  2. Josh says

    January 8, 2018 at 7:25 pm

    Facebook Live and YouTube have been popular for years, but I do think that 4K video and the upcoming 5G cellular data speeds will make video more popular than ever.

  3. Sunaina says

    January 9, 2018 at 12:23 pm

    Good post.
    Keep sharing with us.

  4. Kuzey says

    January 10, 2018 at 5:41 am

    Nice article joseph…
    Really helpful and worthy of praise….
    I will try to follow your steps…
    By the way keep up the good work

  5. Shantanu Sinha says

    January 13, 2018 at 7:08 am

    Hello Joseph,

    Good shout over here 🙂

    Now this is something tooled me directly to click and go through this post of yours, we all know if we want to make
    money through our blogs then we need traffic. The more the amount of traffic, the more money we would be counting.
    But I was surprise to know how one can make money without no blog traffic.

    To get to post the right content on our blogs is the main thing, we need to choose the right niche and study the market so
    that we can know, that what things would get us better results and would create a win win situation for us.

    Offering online courses is one of the great ways to make money online, attract the people who can get benefits from our writing
    and then for more offer them an online course so that they can get to know more about the things they want to.

    Facebook live and having a you tube channel is being a trend now days. People like to get going with these as, they can get
    instant solutions for their problems.

    Thanks for the share.

    Shantanu.

  6. Nirmal Kumar says

    January 15, 2018 at 9:41 am

    Vlog is getting more and more popular nowadays. Many bloggers have fed up with the results of blogging and they have started to try out vlog. According to me, blogging will still result in success, if we plan and work properly.

  7. Sahil Ahlawat says

    January 26, 2018 at 9:57 am

    I have started my youtube channel after reading this.

    Thanks for motivating.

  8. Tyler Banks says

    March 6, 2018 at 10:56 am

    Hi Joseph!

    I’m a RevGlue.com affiliate. I have to admit, I hardly make anything from content marketing off of my blog directly. I do expect this to go up over time, especially as my organic rankings increase (search engine traffic only accounts for about 1/3 of my visits) as my old review posts don’t get much traffic on their own.

    Affiliate marketing used to be my main source of income, but more than 90% of that income came from my email list itself. Of course, the posts would play a part of that as I’d schedule them to be sent out in my autoresponder but the majority came straight from the emails themselves.

    You’ve given a lot of great advice here that is bound to help me make more from the posts themselves which is something I’ve always struggled with.

    Thanks!

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