Dean

Bitcoin is digital money, so it should come as no surprise to you to learn that people earn it in many of the same ways that you would earn the traditional fiat money issued by your country’s banking cartels. One of the best and most popular ways for regular people (i.e. non-technical or semi-technical people who can’t program their own apps and stuff like that) to make money online is through blogging.

Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme. In fact, becoming a successful blogger can often be a very long and slow process. You will need to put in a lot of effort to gradually increase the amount of published content you have, build up an audience, and develop relationships with advertisers. But it is very rewarding and also very flexible – you can put in just a few hours per week to earn some extra beer money, or you can work full time to earn a living as a blogger. Of course, you can also work whichever hours you like without having to be up early in the morning to commute to a dull grey office.

Earning Bitcoin by blogging is no more difficult that earning any other kind of money. There are two things that you will need – a successful blog and the right monetization strategy.One way to do that is to start a blog on a revenue sharing website – and there is one called Bitlanders which will reward you in bitcoin for your contributions on the site, in the form of written blog posts, videos and other stuff. That is probably the easiest way to start earning bitcoin by blogging, and can be great fun, but won’t earn you a fortune. The rest of this article will focus on settin gup your own blog – because that is where the real money lies.

 

The art of creating a successful blog site and driving traffic to it is a huge topic and not really something I can do justice to here, but there are some tips at the bottom of the page for complete newbies; beyond that, I suggest you take to Google and spend a few days reading up on ths subject. For now, I would like to focus on how you can use your blog to rake in the crypto coins.

Monetization Strategies: How To Earn Bitcoin From Your Blog

The most important thing to remember about creating any kind of content monetization strategy – for earning digital currency or for earning fiat – is that your strategy must fit with your content and your audience. There really isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach which would work for any website. Let me give you an example. This website is a blog that usually publishes long posts, which take a while to read. On top of that, they will often have lists of links; some visitors may want to check out more than one of the sites linked to in a post they are reading, and will leave the blog post open in their browser as they go to visit each site and perhaps even whilst they register and test it out. This all combines to mean that, although the very niche topics I write about mean that I can’t expect to get huge amounts of traffic, the average amount of time a visitor spends on the site is very high compared to most blogs. I therefore needed to devise a strategy which makes the most of this one advantage that I have. If you read through the lists below to the final example you will see how I did that.

It is also very important to remember that when it comes to monetization, less is often more. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, if you have one set of adverts on a page which makes you the equivalent of $1 per click, then adding another set of ads which make just $0.01 per click may actually reduce your earnings, because they would effectively be competing with your high paying ads. Also, there is no point wringing every last Satoshi out of every visitor who comes to your blog if it means that they never come back again. Sometimes you might see that cramming your page full or adverts increases your earnings per visitor (or per thousand visitors, called rpm, which is the measure usually used by website owners), but you might still end up making less money in the long term if the pages look so cluttered, ugly, and difficult to read that people stop visiting your blog.

A final tip for monetization is that you really need to keep all options open. It is great to earn bitcoin from blogging and there are many ways you can do that profitably, but you should not turn down $1 in fiat earnings just to make $0.10 cents worth of btc. After all, you could just earn fiat and buy bitcoin, if that’s what you want. The reason I’m emphasising that point is that Google adsense is almost always going to be amongst the most profitable monetization options for a blog. Don’t discount the money that you could make from it to work exclusively with digital currency, or you will make it much harder for yourself to earn a good profit.

Pay Per Click Bitcoin Ad Networks

The following ad networks will all give you a small snippet of code which you an paste into your blog somewhere in order to display text and image adverts. In Wordpess blogs like this one the easiest way is to paste the code into a text widget, which you can find under the ‘appearance’ tab. You will then earn a certain amount of bitcoin for each person who clicks on an advert.

  • BitClix – BitClix is my personal favourite network, which I use on several websites. They have a wide range of advertisers and pay pretty well per click. They also accept most sites, as long as you aren’t doing anything really dodgy.
  • CoinURL –  In addition to text and image banners they also offer interstitial ads and revenue generating link shortening service. They are a bit more picky about accepting sites to run their adverts than BitClix.
  • BitMedia – High quality ad network which allows you a lot of control over the style of the ads displayed on your site.
  • Anonymous Ads – This is the most interesting ad unique of the bunch, as they offer a complete anonymous service under which neither advertisers nor publishers need to sign up to create an account – all you need is a bitcoin address (and some coins, if want to run your own advertising). Compared to the other network the earnings are less reliable, as sometimes they don’t have as many advertisers – but that does mean that you can pick up a bargain deal sometimes if you want to user them to promote your blog!
Pay Per Impression and Premium Advertising Networks

Pay per click is the quick and easy way to put revenue generating advertisements on your blog – just paste the code and the ads will instantly appear. But it often isn’t the most profitable. The biggest pay checks almost always come from direct relationships with advertisers who have chosen to run their ads specifically on your blog because they think your image and audience fit well with the image they want to portray of themselves, and the potential customers they want to target. But finding advertisers like that is not easy. These ad networks help by acting as a middle man between high quality websites and deep pocketed advertisers who are willing to pay in btc:

  • Bee-Ads – This is perhaps the most popular network at the moment, with plenty of advertisers looking for quality sites.
  • The New Boston – Although I haven’t used this myself, so I can’t really comment, the website certainly looks very sleek and well designed.
Affiliate & Referral  Programs

Affiliate programs provide you with a link to their site which tracks visitors, and pay you each time a customer sent by you makes a purchase. In the case of Bitcoin faucets, most of which offer referral programs, they pay you each time one of your referrals uses the site to claim some free coins. These work best when they are very highly targetted, which often means within the post itself rather than as a banner above or beside the post. For example, if you are writing a post about bitcoin faucets, then include some referral links to the best faucets, or to give another example – some of the links in this post are affiliate links! Be careful, however, as many ‘affiliate marketers’ get tempted to recommend loads of shoddy products just because they have affiliate links for them – this is not a good way to build long term success.

There are so many different bitcoin affiliate programs out there that I can’t possibly list them all. Just keep an eye out for affiliate programs on the websites you use, and perhaps check though any relevant companies when writing each blog post to see if any of them have an affiliate program you can use.

Pay Walls and Premium Content

If you publish premium content, and have built up a certain amout of trust in your brand, then you may be able to convince visitors to pay a small fee to read your blog posts. This can be a fee per post (and can be just for specific premium posts rather than your whole site) or it can be a monthly membership fee. It is hard to convince people to pay for content online when there is so much of it available for free, but some publishers manage it and make a huge amount of money doing so. This works best if you have a specific niche which is not well served with free content, or in situations where people are willing to pay for reliable and timely content from an expert author (such as financial news, or trading tips, for example).

There are several sites which you can use for setting up a bitcoin paywall. I would like to write a proper ‘how to’ article on setting up a paywall in the future, but for now I haven’t tested any of the these services out and don’t know much about them, so I will just provide you with a raw list to check out for yourself – if you have any experience with these services please do tell us about it in the comments section (with a link to any websites you own which use them, of course!)

Ask for Tips

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are well suited to being used for sending people tips over the internet – much more than paypal or credit cards whose fees make small donations of a few pennies uneconomical. The popularity of tipping bots on social networking sites like Reddit and Twitter has also proven that many Bitcoiners are willing to give tips to content producers. You can simply include a bitcoin address at the end of each of your posts and ask for a tip, but the easier you make it for your visitors to tip you the more likely it is to happen, so you may like to check out these services:

  • ChangeTip – By far the most popular btc tipping tool, this Twitter tip bot also provides a button you can add to your website to ask for tips.
The Web Miner

So you have finally got to the part where I tell you about the novel way that this site monetizes its visitors. We use the MinerGate web miner, which uses a tiny amount of processing power from any computer which is used to view our webpages (not so much that it disturbs our readers, just the kind of amount that would be used if we had a little animation of fancy dynamic content on our pages) to mine CryptoNote coins. CryptoNote coins are CPU mined cryptocurrencies which can be mined on a regular computer much more effectively than something like Bitcoin. I can then keep the cryptocurrencies I mine or exchange them for btc.

Top Tips For Successful Blogging

 

 

Of course the amount of money you can make from blogging depends on more than just your moneziation strategy (although it is actually effective monetization which most people struggle and fail at). You will also need to produce top quality content and drive readers to your blog. So here are my top tips for creating a successful blog:

  1. Find A Niche: Writing a personal web log of random musings and sharing your personal experiences with the world can be very rewarding. But that reward is not likely to come in the form of money (or bitcoin). If you want strangers to come and read your site in large numbers then it needs to be about something they are interested in – and they aren’t interested in you or your life.
  2. Make sure it is a good niche: I once owned a financial news blog which made close to $10 per thousand visitors. I also had a humour site once, which earned less than $1. The topic you choose to write amount is the most important factor in determining how successful you are – it has to be a topic which enough people are interesting in, but ideally it should also be a topic which enough advertisers are interested in. If you want to earn bitcoin rather than fiat, then it will probably help if you choose a topic which bitcoiners are more likely to be interested in.
  3. Never sacrifice quality for quantity: There are all sorts of tricks you can use to get traffic or reveue from low quality content. If you visit all the ‘how to make money online’ type websites you will find hundreds of them. But they all share one thing in common – they work for a short while and then they stop working. People get wise to your tricks, and if you are trying to trick big multinationals like Google into sending visitors your way then believe me, they have the resources to catch you pretty damn quick. If you want to build up a sustainable long term income, then do yourself a favour and skip past all the tricks and just focus on creating high quality content. This is the slow way but the best way – if you stick to this principle then there is a very good chance that it will all come good in the end, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first. It takes tip for the cream to rise to the top, but it always happens eventually.
  4. Don’t get stuck in a rut: To be really successful you need to be constantly analysing what yo are doing and what results you are getting, and constantly looking for new ways to innovate and to increase your earnings. Don’t just get stuck in the same old habits and hope that they will work – put yourself at the cutting edge and experiment with new things.
  5. Create multiple blogs: If you stick to number one and number three – creating a niche blog and only publishing quality content – then eventually you will start running out of things to write about. That’s ok! Rather than sacrificing quality or publishing irrelevant posts on subjects your audience doesn’t care about it is much better to just scale back on your publishing frequency for the old blog, and start up a new one on a different topic.
  6. Be careful about putting too much time into social media: It is tempting to think that you can get readers for your blog by spending loads of time and effort on social media trying to build up an audience. But considering the amount of time it takes to do this well, it is rarely a good use of your resources. By all means maintain a social media account, share your latest content with fans, and field questions and comments put to your over social media – but if you focus on creating great quality content and a pleasant website which people enjoy, then your readers will do your social media marketing for you.