One of the most common things we’re asked is how to make money from great content. We’ve been blogging about city breaks since 2007 and we’ve learnt a lot along the way. Here are out top-tips for starting to make money from your blog.
How Good Is Your Content?
- It sounds obvious, but this is really important – make sure you have unique content. You’ll need to be providing useful information that readers will enjoy. If your content is generic or poor, you won’t make money from the various monetising options on the market right now.
- Once you’re sure your content is good, you need to generate lots of it. We only started to see a financial return on Free-City-Guides.com when we had more than 200 pages.
Income Sources For Your Blog
Now it’s time to think about where your income will come from! We have three main sources of income and they all complement each other.
- We’ll start with the newest source of income. They’re a company we’ve been really impressed with and they offer simple integrations that don’t require lots of effort from us. For many years we sold occasional hotel bookings through affiliate links. To be honest, we struggled and always felt we should be making more money from these bookings. When the affiliate company changed the format for links – meaning we had to change every link on our site – with no notice, that was the final straw! We then discovered Stay22 and they’ve been incredible. You simply add a bit of code to your site and it automatically does everything. You’ll find occasional links in your content, but it also replaces any old hotel links with theirs and there’s a non intrusive pop-up too. In our first month using Stay22 we had 7 hotel bookings, about the same as we had for the entire year before. Use this link to sign up and you’ll get an extra $100 when you have 100 bookings!
- Our biggest income source is also the most obvious. We signed up for Google Adsense right at the start of our blogging journey. Google then display ads on your blog where they think they will work best. You can control the number of ads displayed and veto ad locations you dont like. It’s a challenge to get the balance right between displaying a good number of ads, but not affecting the ‘readability’ and enjoyment of your site. We regularly tinker with the number of ads displayed. Adsense is our most consistent income.
- The final income source we have comes from selling tours and activities. We tried Viator for many years, but things really took off when we switched to GetYourGuide. They offer simple to use integration widgets for your content and offered us a better rate of commission. We now receive income from selling tours every month.
Conclusion
If you use the same companies we have used, then monetising your blog should be a simple thing to do. Some blogs make a LOT of money. Personally, we have never tried to make a fortune, because for us the content is the most important thing on our site. We deliberately don’t make a profit and we spend every penny we make on expanding our content with new travel trips.