Hi there, folks! Bjork here. 👋
I’m hopping on the Food Blogger Pro blog to share some thoughts around a few updates we made recently over on Pinch of Yum that have helped increase earnings.
As you know, our mission at Food Blogger Pro is to help you get a tiny bit better, every day, forever. My hope is that this blog post does exactly that.
But first, a concept I’d like to share:
As a food blogger, ads can be a great way to diversify your blogging income. Your site will earn revenue simply when readers visit a page on your site that has an ad — hello, passive income! 👋
However, you don’t necessarily want to be the person working directly with advertisers to get ads enabled on your site, and that’s where ad networks come in. Ad networks make it incredibly simple for website owners to add, track, monitor, and tweak website ads.
In this post, we’re going to dive deep into the wonderful world of ads, as well as some of the most popular ad networks for food bloggers. Let’s get into it!
We have a short & sweet concept to share with you today.
And while the post is going to be short, the concept has the potential to have a long-term impact on the revenue that you create from your blog. My hope is that, after reading this short post, you’ll feel empowered to take action and create (and sell) your own eBook. 😊
The concept I’d like to share with you is called, Expert Enough.
We recently received an email from long-time FBP members Dustin and Lacey Baier with a PDF blog post draft that Dustin wanted to share with us. In the email, he said,
"I was starting to write a post for A Sweet Pea Chef that was based off Food Blogger Pro – kind of a success story post. In part, because of the recent success we have seen and, in part, to be a good affiliate piece for Food Blogger Pro. Then I realized that, if I was in your shoes, I might want to use something like this as a case study on Food Blogger Pro or Pinch Of Yum."
Welp, we were definitely interested. We love to think that we help people here at Food Blogger Pro, but there’s nothing like hearing from bloggers who have found success through hard work, determination, and a tiny bit of help from FBP.
From a business perspective, one of the things that Lindsay and I have really come to believe in is the power of passive income.
Passive income, specifically passive income through affiliate marketing, has really helped us take our monetization game to the next level. For example, with Pinch of Yum, when we recommend products that we love and link to those products as an affiliate, we are able to earn passive income from the referral sales.
This monetization strategy is different than advertising and sponsorships, which can fluctuate from quarter to quarter, month to month, and even week to week. The passive income we earn as affiliates for our favorite products and services can be more consistent and predictable.
One of the things we love about Food Blogger Pro is the fact that we’re able to offer the benefits of passive income to our members through the FBP affiliate program (more on that in a bit!), but we noticed that oftentimes affiliates would sign up for the program and not really know the most effective way to promote FBP to their readers.
Have you ever wondered how food bloggers make money? Well, you’re not alone!
We are going to breakdown the best monetization strategy to focus on for creating an income from your food blog.
Both ads and products are useful when you’re trying to create an income from your food blog, but you need to make sure that you’re not using both at the same time.
That last part is important: make sure that you’re not using both at the same time.
What are you giving away for free on your blog?
It’s an important question, because giving things away for free is one the best ways to increase the income you’re earning from your blog.
Giving things away for free in order to increase your income?
Seems a bit backwards, doesn’t it?
Let me explain.
Three months ago I wrote a post called How to Increase Your Conversion Rates with A/B Testing. In the post I promised to put together quarterly updates to let everyone know how the A/B testing is going.
My hope with these quarterly updates is to:
You can take the things we’ve learned about increasing conversions and apply them to your sales pages without having to do any A/B testing on your own (but I still think you should do A/B testing if you have the time).
I always get giddy when I talk about affiliate marketing.
It’s just so darn cool.
You know what I mean?
You don’t?
Okay…fine then. I guess I'll have to convince you.
And I'll do so by telling you about how the best type of affiliate marketing can help you increase the income you’re earning from your food blog (and I know you think that is pretty darn cool).
I want to make sure we’re all on the same page before we jump into my main point for this post, so I’d like to take a moment to share a thrilling short story entitled “A Very Basic Example of Affiliate Marketing.”
There are four ways to increase income from your blog.
Increase traffic.
Increase advertisements.
Increase prices.
Increase conversion rates.
We’re going to be discussing #4 today.