- Everything thinks that monetizing your blog, making money from it, monetizing your site, just reduces your user experience. It crushes it. So much so that they're like, "oh no, no one's going to come back to my site." That's not true. Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel. And today I'm going to teach you how to monetize your blog without destroying your user experience. (soft electronic music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel. If you're on YouTube, click the alert notification because I'm going to be continually releasing more videos like this to help you not only grow your traffic but generate more revenue as well. The first tip I have for you is to avoid having too many banner ads. Look, if you have one or two banner ads, and they're relevant, that's not an issue. Limit the banner experience to one or two per page. Don't do more than that, because then it just becomes a site full of ads instead of text.And if you have one or two, and the ads are relevant, people will still click on them. The reason most people have banner blindness is that all the ads they see are irrelevant. It's like, I don't want an ad for football when I'm on a page about marketing. The ads need to be relevant. So, if you want to do really well, make sure your ads are relevant. Only have a few per page and not many more than that. If you have too many ads on a page, it may not only just irritate your users, but it's going to slow down your site time which does ruin your experience as well.
The second tip I have for you is pop-ups don't convert well for sales, but they can work well for emails. So if you're trying to monetize your site, a lot of people are like, "oh let me just do pop-ups and get people to buy my product or service right then and there in the pop-up." It's very rare that pop-ups generate a lot of sales directly. Indirectly, though, they generate a lot of emails. So one of the best things you can do in your pop-ups is offering a free resource in exchange for an email, such as an e-book, a landing page tool, quiz, whatever it may be. Any sort of resource, whether it's a tool, whether it's an e-book, whether it's a cheat sheet, doesn't matter what it is, just some sort of resource that allows people to put in their email and be like, "wow, if I put in my email, what I'm getting is extremely valuable." Then from there, you can continually sell those people through email drip sequences, and any email provider has that feature. By doing that, indirectly you'll get sales, which allows you to monetize.The moment you have an exit pop-up that just asks people to buy something, it's just not going to work. You need something that is user-friendly, people love, and they want to put in their information. Because it's so valuable, they're like, "wow, I'm happy I saw this exit pop-up, because if I didn't, I would have never got this free resource." And when you're creating this exit pop-up, you can use tools like Hello Bar to do so, and I would recommend that you put the pop-up on the exit intent, which means when someone's leaving your website, not when they first enter your website. The third tip I have for you retarget your users with relevant based offers. What you'll find is a lot of companies will pay you money, not only to put their ad on your site but to show your users their products and services. So you can remarket.
You can do a deal with these companies. Now, there is a caveat with this. You want to make sure your privacy policy and terms of service, I know a lot of countries don't care, but I recommend that you be very transparent and you let people know in your privacy policy and your terms of service what you're doing and that you're also monetizing by remarketing to those people, other people's products and services within your space. A great way for you to earn income. You can also do this with your own products and services as well. So that way you don't have to blanket your own site with tons of ads for your own products or services.But I do recommend that you put that in your privacy policy and terms of service. That way people know what you're doing. And then once you're getting sales from that, you should consider creating custom audiences. You could do this on tools like Facebook. Google has something similar as well. And this allows them to show you other relevant users who are very similar to the ones that already bought and converted from you. The fourth tip I have is only present really highly relevant offers. The moment you just go out there with all the ad networks, and you put these irrelevant offers and services and ads in front of your audience, you're going to lose their trust.
If you don't believe in something, don't show it to them. If you think that someone's product or service sucks, don't push it to your audience. If you think an ad is irrelevant, don't push it to your audience. If you do what's best for them in the long run, you will do better. A good alternative to those spammy ad networks is using solo ads. It's a great alternative, and you'll also find that the bigger ad networks like Google, of course, they're going to be much more relevant in their listings than the smaller ad networks. Last but not least, before I wrap over this video, I want to go over some unique monetization methods that you're probably not leveraging that work well, that isn't spammy, and they tend to make way more money than just putting ads on your site. First, create an info product. An example of this is Pat Flynn's Power-Up Podcasting course. It's a great way to learn to podcast. His audience loves it, and he can sell it and make good money. A second monetization offer that works very well is coaching offers.
You see a ton of examples from, Mike Matthews, from Legion Athletics, all the way to the Rush Raffinose. They all do coaching. It works extremely well. The third thing you could do is gate content. You go to TechCrunch.com, you'll notice that they have exclusive content. You've got to pay money for that. Whether it's a monthly fee ora yearly fee, it works well. The fourth example, build a freemium tool. If you're in the weight loss category, you can do a daily calorie consumption calculator, and then upsell them into a diet app.I can do a free SEO audit tool and then upsell them into, "Hey, you want to check more than 50 or 100 pages? Pay me money." If I have a finance site, and I have a grocery budget calculator, I can upsell them into a whole app that solves their budgeting problems. Last but not least, speaking gigs. I got to a conference, you see me on stage. Sometimes I do speak for free. That's actually very, very rare. In almost all cases, I can get 25 grand on the low end to 50 grand in most cases just for an hour speech. I rarely ever speak for under25 grand or even 25 grand. That's how powerful speaking is. When I started, I was only charging a few grand to five grand. Work your way up. Over time people will pay you. And that's an easy way to make money. You don't have to market to your audience or anything like that. You just show up.
You get to travel, experience the world, and you're getting paid. So that's it. Thank you for watching it. If you need help monetizing your site, getting more traffic, check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital. If you enjoyed the video, like it, share it, comment. Let other people know about it. Thank you for watching it.