I’d like to share with you a strategy you can use to monetize your blog. This strategy, in my opinion is a very smart and secure way to monetize your blog. I’ll explain the strategy in a nutshell. Basically, you’re going to use affiliate links within your blog posts to sell products and/or services. Once those affiliate links are generating sales, consistently, you’re going to swap out the affiliate links with a link to your own product. This strategy is simple yet powerful. Read on for more details.

The Strategy Explained With Some More Detail

Over time, as your blog starts to gain visitors, you will, most likely, find out that 20% or less of your blog posts drive the most traffic to your website. Naturally, if you have affiliate links in these posts, you will, most likely, be earning income from your visitors clicking on those links and purchasing the product/service it leads them to. Let’s say, for example, the affiliate link you’re sending lots of sales to is a product on Amazon. You’re probably earning around 4% commission on that product. Not much.

So you have all this traffic you’re earning commissions from via your affiliate product that you’re advertising. Now why not substitute the affiliate link with your own product? Instead of earning 4% commission for selling another company’s product, you earn way more selling your own similar product.

Picture the Beauty Of This Strategy

To paint a picture in your mind of the beauty of this approach, think about this. Many business owners have a great idea for a product. So they pay to have the product built and then they pay to “launch” the product. To do this, a lot risk is taken in having the product made. Lots of money is also spent on advertising. Even with all the advertising they do, there’s no guarantee that their product is going to sell. This is why starting a business is risky. Now let’s say you, on the other hand, are already sending people to a product you are affiliated with that sells. You swap out that product with your own product and, viola! Instant sales! Guess what that means? No product launch needed. You just avoided spending thousands of dollars in advertising with no guarantee that people are even going to buy your product.

Think about it this way as well. You own this valuable piece of property on the Internet. The “property” I’m referring to is that blog post that thousands of unique visitors are looking at each month. So you are capitalizing on that property. Similar to a house that you buy for pennies on the dollar, flip it, and sell it for way more money.

There Are Rules To This Strategy

Sounds great. But I do believe there are some rules for implementing this strategy.

The first rule is to pick products/services to promote that you could feasibly create yourself under your own company name. For example, if your sending lots of people to iPads and they’re purchasing them, that’s great! But, let’s face it, you’re probably not going to create the next iPad or anything comparable to it. As another example, let’s say a big reason people purchase the product you’re sending them to is the name behind the product (ex, Nike, Coach, Lucky, etc..). Well, in that case scenario, your product may not sell so well since people don’t want to buy the similar product under your name brand.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re sending people to a kitchen product. The product your sending people to is a knife made to cut pies. This is a pretty niche product. Now imagine you had your own pie cutter that you had manufactured or drop shipped from a different company on Amazon. You swap out the current affiliate link with a link to your pie cutter. This is where the magic happens. Instead of receiving a small 4% affiliate commission, you receive the net profit from selling your pie cutters. Ideally, your net profit will be much more than the 4% commission you were receiving from the affiliate link.

I Absolutely Love This Strategy for a Couple Big Reasons:

  1. You pretty much know the product is going to sell. This takes away a lot of the stress of not knowing whether or not its worth investing in creating this product. Again, there are some caveats to this as I just explained. But if you do your research and you know the people aren’t after the brand name, then you maybe fine.
  2. No need for a product launch. People who make products go to great lengths to “launch” the product. You don’t need to this.

This same concept goes for anything you have that has high traffic. It could be a Youtube video with lots of views, a Podcast with lots of subscribers, an Email list with lots of subscribers (that actually open their emails you send them), etc… Don’t ignore these high-traffic posts, letting them earn you a small affiliate commission when you could be earning a large income.

Finally, I’ll mention this. Hopefully you have Google Analytics set up for your website. If you do then it will be very easy to log in there to see those top performing pages. What are you waiting for? Go look for those pages that are doing the most traffic, and monetize on them!