When should I monetize my blog or website?

A really common question is when should I monetize my blog? Do I need a certain amount of followers or page views before I can start making money?

The truth is, you should have started monetizing your website yesterday, here’s why and my favorite two ways to easily start out monetizing your website.

Ad Networks 

You might feel like you’ll be scaring people away, but in this day and age no one is going to leave your website because you have a couple ads in the sidebar. Can you think of a single website that you visited today that doesn’t have an ad somewhere on the page? I certainly can’t. Paid advertisements have become the norm, we either ignore them or click them, and you don’t want to miss out on money for those times that people will be clicking them.

As far as advertisements when you’re just starting out, my best advice would be to sign up for Google AdSense and once you know it’s up and running just ignore that it’s there. If you check that dashboard it’ll be pretty agonizing. AdSense has a $100 threshold, so you won’t get paid until you hit that mark. I’m going to be extremely honest, and it’s a bummer, but It took almost 2 years for me to make that first $100.

 After reading that, you might be feeling pretty discouraged. Let’s give a different scenario a shot, let’s say I had been blogging for a year and only making pennies on AdSense, then overnight a famous website shared my link and I had a post go viral. Let’s say I had 250,000 page views overnight and not a single way to make money off of that post. That scenario in my mind is so much more discouraging than having ads set up and only making pocket change each month.

As far as ad networks, I would recommend AdSense at first, they’ll approve you as long as you’re over the age of 18 and you’ve owned your website for 6 months (the official requirements and the application can be found here.)

Some other alternatives would be BlogHer publishing network if you’re a woman blogger, they’re pretty specific in who they’ll accept (I myself was rejected,) but it’s worth applying! Another network that I hope to work with is The Blogger Network,  they do require 80,000 page views a month, but they’ll also curate all of your ads for you, you’ll never have to do any work.

Affiliate Marketing

When you’re starting out there’s more than ad networks for monetizing your blog. I strongly recommend affiliates. Affiliate links are links that are added to posts. A great part of almost every affiliate program is that you just need to get your readers to your affiliate partners website, then you’ll make a commission on anything that they buy off of that website (even if it’s not the product you linked to.)

It’s important that you make sure to include proper disclosure, to let your audience know those links are making you money! That’s a whole different topic, just a quick (affiliate) before your link will work great.

I have two favorite affiliate programs, first off, I also absolutely love working with CJ.com (Affiliate by Conversant.) They have a ton of great retailers to work with (like my favorite ThinkGeek, psst, that is an affiliate link.) CJ.com is also extremely user friendly, the staff is seriously excellent, and they have great tools to use like collages, slideshow, and grid widgets that you can make with your favorite products. I promise anyone can understand and use CJ affiliates to benefit their blog.

If I can’t find it on CJ I use Amazon, because…well, Amazon is a huge search engine in itself and you can buy almost anything from Amazon. Often times I’ll direct my readers to Amazon and they’ll buy items that are completely unrelated, and I still make money off the sale.

While it’s fun to put together gift guides and other posts that focus solely on affiliate links, I also love adding affiliate links to organic posts and even old posts that generate a lot of traffic. There’s a misconception that affiliate links are “spammy,” but I completely disagree. I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on affiliate links on other websites because I wanted to know where to buy that pretty pan they used or what that item from that craft project is, I’m not crafty so it’s nice to have visuals and the option to buy it right away. Affiliate links are great for everyone.

I hope that helps you understand how to start monetizing your website or blog! If you have any questions leave a comment below and I will respond as quickly as I can!

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