5 Best Ways To Monetize Your Low Traffic Blog

What’s more painful than your blog receiving low traffic? Not earning a dime. Running a blog is either someone’s hobby, or a way to make money. Most people make a blog to do the latter. Their main motive is to make money as quick as possible. Unfortunately, they forget one thing: Blogging is a business, and businesses need hard work and time to grow.

If you one of them who don’t mind working extra hard to make money faster, this post if for you. In this post I’ll list the 5 way to monetize your low traffic blog. I’m personally used these methods to make few dollars as a start. I hope these methods will help you too!

Ready? Let’s get started!!


(1) Ads

As you might have already guessed, Google Ads is the primary source of income for most beginner blogs. The only reason is that it’s easy to get accepted if your site has enough traffic and stands good with Google Search. But there’s a huge drawback of using ads in your site. Your site’s user experience and speed goes down. Nobody likes seeing ads, especially if there are too many of them.

You challenge then would be to create a balance between user experience and earning. You cannot hamper any one of them because both of them are equally important. Also, I’ve heard many newbie bloggers complaining about abysmal income from ads. They are partially true because Google ads are pathetic. The RPM (Revenue Per Mill) is so low and the payout trigger is high. In short Google ads is only good for new blogs.

But you’ll feel the real change when you move to Mediavine. Blogs earn at least 2X more when they switch to Mediavine from any other network. Since Mediavine needs at least 50K high quality Sessions, Ezoic is the closest best alternative to Google Ads.

My first blog (entertainment niche) made $100+ on Ezoic (first month) while it was making $5 on Google Ads. So, you can already feel the difference.

(2) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the star of the “make money” niche. Even one affiliate sale a month can make you $100 easily. No, I’m not talking about Amazon affiliates, there are other high paying affiliates as well. Though I personally haven’t focused a lot into affiliate marketing, some of the well-known bloggers solely depend on affiliate income.

Yes, the pay is great, and there’s literally no income limit, but the biggest drawback is that it’s completely consumer centric and unpredictable. Your site’s income is fully dependent on people clicking and buying from the affiliate link.

But everything also depends on your site’s niche. If your niche sits perfectly with Amazon’s affiliates, then you’re good to go. Amazon affiliates can make you rich pretty soon.

(3) Sponsorships

Sponsorships can come in various shapes. People can pay you to right on your site, or they can pay you to get a piece of your site’s traffic worth. Sponsorships is not common in sites, but the potential is immense. A small sponsorship image, the size of a passport photograph can fetch you $100/day in sponsorship income, even higher if you can negotiate well.

I won’t name the blog since it’s pretty famous, it charges $1K/day for sponsorships. And I have seldom seen their site no featuring any sponsorship images. They are also pretty big in affiliate sales and course sales. To sum it up, this one site is raking in some serious money. They have never revealed any income report so we won’t ever know how much they actually make.



(4) Digital Products

The sheer amount of money a digital product can make you is way more than an ad network can make you in year. Most, if not all, site owners make the real money from digital products. Selling courses is one way. Adam Enfroy is one of the very few site owners who make 8-figures yearly from one freaking course. He updated his income report in 2021 where he reveal a total income of $200K+ income. And that was when his course wasn’t even that famous.

Anastasia Blogger is another example. She is a Pinterest expert and this one skill makes her at least $40K every month from her courses. I can show you many other examples who are raking in insane money only from one course.

Now, there are two ways you sell a course:

(1) Udemy, Skillshare
(2) Directly from your site

Selling your course on Udemy and Skillshare will take off all the burden off your chest, but the profits will abysmal, On the other hand, if you sell you course directly from your site, all the profits is going to be yours. And that’s what most site owners do.

Selling digital products works even better if you’re in the programming, or art niche. Skillshare is the best platform to sell your course if you’re an artist.

(5) Donation

Platforms like Patreon have made it possible for content creators to provide free services. Through Patreon you can support your favorite content creator by donating a sum set by them. Most artists set $1 as the minimum amount, but it depends. I have seen creators having $10 as the minimum donation option.

There are other services like Patreon as well, but Patreon is the best and the most used. What makes Patreon better than other donation platform is that you can access special contents if you donate to your favorite artist.

Patreon is pretty famous among YouTubers who usually don’t earn from Google ads due to some copyright issues. If your blog has loyal readers who won’t mind paying you to access special contents, then Patreon is going to make you rich.

Popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell has close to 32K paid members on Patreon. Their minimum plan is $2. You can do the math of their monthly income only from Patreon. Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell is only one example. There are many others who earn 6-figures a month only from donation.

How Long Does It Take To Monetize A Blog

Usually a blog can only make money when it has regular flow of visitors. In my experience a blog will need at least 1K monthly visitors to make any money. Initially most blogs resort to making money from ads, but later they branch out to other income sources as well.

Usually, it take at least 6 months for a blog to attract substantial traffic. Traffic that has money making potential. My first blog hit 10K visitors milestone within 2 months, but it might not be the same with your blog. Some blogs even take more than year to breakeven. A 6 month old blog is still a new blog, and getting traffic within 6 months will need some serious work.

Unfortunately, there’s no exact answer to how long does it usually take to monetize a blog. Everything depends on your work. If you crank out contents like crazy and follow Google’s SEO guidelines, maybe you can start making 5-figures within 6 months. Adam Enfroy proved this in 2019 when his new blog adamenfroy.com hit the 5-figure monthly income milestone within 6 months.

He says that he hustled like crazy in the beginning, and that helped him take the initial lead. Today, the dude is making millions every year from just one blog.

Blog Monetization Restrictions

Now that you know how to monetize your blog, it’s also important to know the restrictions. Google has banned certain niches where you cannot use Google ads. This is the list:

  • Po*n sites
  • Piracy sites
  • Counterfeit sites

These 3 niches cover almost the entire internet. Hence, if you blog cover any of the above niche, then you have to switch to some other ad networks. If your site break laws (piracy, counterfeit) then Google won’t even rank your site.

Of course, you can use other monetization options like affiliate, but there’s very low chance that people will trust such sites and input their personal information.

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