How To Turn A Profit With Your Editorial Site

Table Of Contents
Introduction
Advertisements
Sponsorships
Affiliate Marketing
Offer Coaching
Merchandising

Introduction

Welcome back to our multi-part series on launching your editorial site! In Part 1, we discussed how to generate a following for your site to attract regular readers. While some would be happy with just a loyal readership that enjoys the content, running any website isn’t free.

An important aspect of any blog is monetization and most bloggers eventually turn their site into a great passive income generator. 

It’s also incredibly important to ensure that monetization isn’t intrusive to your readers.

Intrusive marketing turns readers away. As a content curator, you should look at each method critically before deciding which method best suits your site’s brand and viewer’s tastes. In this list, we’re going to elaborate on the top five methods of earning income from your site to break even and grow a profit.

Put Up Some Ads In Your Spare Space

TV, magazines, YouTube videos, street signs, facebook posts: Advertising is everywhere.

Just like a city street is walked by hundreds of people each day, your site is visited by hundreds of people daily. This presents a unique opportunity for companies to get their products in front of people already interested in similar offers. 

Ads and advertising often get a bad rap among the internet as a highly intrusive method of marketing. However, this comes down to implementation.

A blog should effectively manage what advertisements they show and keep a high standard on the ads posted. While Google ads exist, many blog operators will instead create an advertisement policy and then pitch that space to companies themselves. 

Adopting this method allows you to carefully curate the ads, just like your content, with companies who offer products relevant to users and enhance their experience rather than detract from it.

If ad curation seems complex for you, you can also reach out to an ad curation network. Curation networks like the fittingly named Complex are a company on two fronts. They locate potential editorial sites relevant to their collective viewer interests and connect them both on their own platform and with advertisers. This forms a group of aggregate sites with an overall theme catering to a specific demographic where each member benefits from already installed advertiser partnerships.

Landing Sponsorships

Next on the list is a sponsored post. For an editorial site, this could mean a review of a product or service while being directly compensated by the company in question. These tend to come with more stringent talking points that the company would like addressed about certain product features, or content that aligns with their brand’s image.

It is incredibly important that you label any sponsored posts as sponsored. They do fall under the FTC’s rulings on endorsement deals.

The FTC has strict guidelines applied to endorsed content. If you do choose to take a sponsorship deal to promote a company or product, follow all laws as closely as you can. 

Affiliate Marketing: Marketing Without Marketing

A cousin of the sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, is the practice of assigning a specific link to a writer. If a reader of an article clicks onto the link and buys something, the writer is then paid a small percent as a commission for the sale. This is a fairly common tactic for revenue generation as it is fairly nonintrusive and doesn’t typically cost anything. 

Writing about products you love to use and services that make your life easier are prime candidates for affiliate marketing. That personal touch is what makes articles associated with affiliate marketing so appealing.

 It should simply feel like a friend sharing their excitement over something they recently bought!

On the reverse side, some blogs tend to overuse this monetization method.

They will create long lists of items with brief descriptions and an affiliate link hoping you click on it and make them a bit of money. This not only hampers a user experience with the need to click off-site for more information but it also negatively impacts reader retention and site rankings with search engines.

A few relevant products with a detailed review and new insights will always outperform a list whose only purpose is to try and sell your items. 

Offer Coaching With Your Expertise

Are you a pro in your subject? Do you know the ins and outs of what others see as a difficult procedure? Offering one-on-one coaching or tutoring is a great way to earn money. People exchange your expert knowledge for cash and you get to put your honed talents to use.

Pricing these services can be fairly difficult if you’re new to coaching services. An important metric is what you’re willing to work for per hour. Once you set that bar, you can then begin to understand how much coaching and advising on certain aspects may cost.

Open A Merchandise Store

Last, but definitely not least, of the monetization methods on this list is the time-honored tradition of merchandising.

Who doesn’t love a bit of swag featuring their interests and favorite sites?

Merchandise can vary from t-shirts to coffee tumblers to even relevant accessories for your site’s content. Designing these products can be just as fun as buying them.

A very popular piece of merchandise is an ebook written by a popular blogger. Ebooks are easy to produce, incredibly marketable, and are very popular with longtime readers. While writing one may take a short amount of time, keeping it as a relevant topic to your blog helps build a reputation. With tools like Amazon’s kindle publishing, your book also reaches a wider audience creating potential new viewers funnel. 

These top five methods for making money on an editorial website are great starting points for any writer looking to take their blog and turn it into a passive income source.  This is the starting point for many online magazines and editorial sites today.

Now that we have both the means to attract viewers to our site and the knowledge on how to monetize our site traffic, you have all the building blocks for starting a profitable editorial site. 

Still trying to build an audience? Click Here to learn how to grow your website reader base!

Looking for help getting your editorial site running with the best? We’ve helped hundreds of customers make their technology work for them and not the other way around. Get in touch with us today, and learn how our experts can get you the advantage you need.  Whether you’re searching for the smartest business startup tips to customized expert advice and assistance getting your business on the cutting edge in technology, we here at Dunford Enterprises have you covered.