Making money from your blog usually comes down to 4 main monetization methods. That’s ad revenue, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and selling your own products.
However, each of these can look different for you depending on your niche and audience, skills and the tools you use.
Using the right tools can help you double your blog income and earn more strategically from your platforms. Below, you’ll see 5 such little helpers (software tools or services) that can help you monetize your current traffic without even having to grow your audience.
1. Grow your email list with ConvertKit
Do you have an email list? Are you emailing your subscribers every week and providing value? What email marketing tool provider are you using?
You’d want to make sure you choose a tool that’s made specifically for bloggers and which allows the features necessary to create great optin forms, welcome subscribers with an automated email series, have segmentation and tagging and make sure everyone on your list is given the information they came for and the attention they deserve.
I use and recommend ConvertKit – one of the best email marketing tools on the market. It’s subscriber-centric, which means that it’s all about your subscribers and that model has proven to be many times more powerful than the list-centric model other services offer.
I was using MailChimp (the free version) during the first years of my blog, but all I did was simply email the people on my list every now and then. I didn’t take email marketing seriously, wasn’t using automation and didn’t nurture these relationships or sell to my list.
I was missing out on so much! It wasn’t until I took courses on email marketing that I heard once again that ConvertKit (even though it’s more expensive) allows you to do email marketing like a pro.
Ever since I signed up with it, I’ve been getting more subscribers on a monthly basis (500+ per month now), I set up an automated email series that welcomes people, establishes a relationship, and even pitches my main product.
I created better lead magnets, have more optin forms on my blog, and invest a lot of time in coming up with valuable content for my weekly newsletter.
I’m not saying you can’t do all that with other email marketing tools. I’m just saying I realize now why ConvertKit does it differently.
Once you set up an email list and grow it, you can monetize in multiple ways.
Your subscribers can be the first ones to hear about your new product. You can share affiliate offers with them or create more lead magnets with affiliate links inside recommending the tools you use. You can also send them to your latest articles or older content and thus get blog traffic and increase ad revenue.
If you have an engaged email list, you can try working with sponsors and getting paid for ads in your newsletter.
2. Create an eBook with Publishing Parrot
Maybe you haven’t created a digital product yet because you don’t have the time, don’t know where to start or are scared of selling something to your audience.
Any blogger should experiment with digital products and getting started is as easy as gathering some of the content on your blog and turning it into a book.
That’s right. With a tool like Publishing Parrot you can do that. Each blog post you choose can become a chapter in the book, and once you organize them in the right order and add/remove some content, you’ll have your manuscript.
The guys over at Publishing Parrot can help with the next steps too – editing the book, formatting it for Kindle or print, designing the cover, turning it into an audiobook, and more.
This can add a new passive income stream to your online business and you can sell many copies of your book with the right promo techniques.
3. Improve your rankings with Ahrefs
How much time are you investing in SEO? As a blogger, you should be doing a lot to rank your articles well in search engines. That’s a long process though and doesn’t happen overnight.
In the meantime, you can focus on something like Pinterest and get visitors to your blog posts. At the same time, however, you must be utilizing search engine optimization.
You can do it on your own and use Google Keyword Tool for keyword research, Google Analytics for audience and traffic reports and Google Search Console to monitor crawling and indexing issues. There are many opportunities for better rankings that these free tools offer if you take the time to learn how to use them correctly.
But if you want to understand more about how your competitors are doing, what keywords you have the potential to rank higher for, who’s outperforming you in Google and why, and so much more, you can try a tool like Ahrefs.
There’s a 7-day trial that costs $7, which is the option I signed up for some time ago.
With some video tutorials from a course I was taking, I managed to see who my direct competitors are as well as what their top pages and the keywords they rank for are. For each of these, I have the chance to outperform them if I create a better article on the topic.
Also, I extracted valuable data on all my organic keywords, top pages, dofollow backlinks, and so much more. I then used this when updating old blog posts with the goal of ranking them higher.
There’s also site audit, rank tracker, broken URL checker, backlink checker, YouTube and Amazon keyword tools, Alerts to get new link opportunties, guest blogging opportunities, and much more.
Using Ahrefs and all its features allows you to improve your rankings, increase your domain authority, get more traffic, and – ultimately – grow your blogging business.
Read also: How I Got 103,231 Page Views and Made $4,305 from My Blog Last Month
4. 10x your traffic with Pinterest
With so many social media channels available, why do I include Pinterest as one of the powerful tools that can help you scale your blogging business fast? Because it’s the ideal place for bloggers to promote their blog posts, lead magnets, affiliate offers and products and get a lot of attention.
It’s as easy as joining Pinterest, creating a business account, optimizing your profile, and creating great Pins for your content.
Share them once (with the right description and hashtags and to the most relevant board of yours) and let Pinterest’s search engine do the rest. Your Pins can get in front of a lot of people who are ready to visit your site, sign up to your email list and even make a purchase.
If you need some help and want to master Pinterest for bloggers, check out the best courses I recommend from experts such as 6-figure bloggers.
5. Enhance your blog and brand with Canva
How seriously are you taking blog design? Are you creating graphics for every blog post, promo visual content for each social media channel, logo for your blog, well-designed presentations for your courses, or a high-quality media kit and newsletter?
You might say that you don’t have the budget to work with a graphic designer and aren’t skilled enough to do it on your own.
That’s what I thought in the beginning too. Then, I found out about Canva – the free graphic design platform that allows you to create all sorts of visual content without any graphic design skills.
It’s easy to use and even offers countless templates that you can use and personalize, download and add anywhere you want online.
I use Canva for my blog logo, Pinterest images, printables, course presentations, promo graphics, and more.
How is that helping you earn from your blog? For a start, your platform looks more professional, your social media graphics will get the attention they deserve if they are designed well, and all that leads to working with brands that take you seriously and building a reputation in your niche.
In addition, you can create all sorts of printables and templates using Canva and offer them as lead magnets so you can grow your email list or even sell them as a lower-priced digital product.
What other tools do you know of or have you used that are directly related to growing your blog and earning more from your platform?
