In the past, you had to first build an audience before you were able to monetize your blog, but with everything continually changing in the blogging world, many marketers are wondering if that is still the case.

If you are one of those who are asking which comes first between monetization and traffic for your blog, then this article will answer that question for you.

Bloggers who want to build businesses around their blogs in order to generate real income need to realize that everything has changed with regards to generating traffic these days.

You can no longer create a viable business by blogging and guest posting your face off. There’s just too much noise on the internet now – too many amazing content creators.

You could make a dent if you are willing to not only create awesome written content but also embrace podcasting, video marketing, and so on but even then you still have to leverage your personality and unique branding in order to stand out.

Today’s online marketing space is vastly different from a decade ago where things were much simpler.

It has grown and matured a lot. Some popular blogs won’t even accept guest posts, and others won’t promote products that aren’t their own.

That’s not to say that strategies like guest blogging don’t work anymore – they do, but it’s getting harder and harder to find success with those tactics.

If you want to succeed in today’s world, you have to know the rules and play the game the way other successful marketers are playing it:

Namely, you have to ‘pay to play’. And before you run off screaming – this is actually a good thing.

Why?

Because traffic is EVERYWHERE. You can send as many visitors to your blog as you want with just a few clicks. You can fuel your business from day one and start making profits immediately, as opposed to playing the ranking game which could take months (more likely, years) before you see a significant flow of traffic to your website.

Your business needs this fuel to succeed in the same way your car needs fuel to move, and your body needs fuel to survive.

Think About This:

To get the energy you need to do stuff, your body needs fuel in the form of food, right?

Well, imagine having to do all of the legwork to get the food you need on your own.

Say you wanted some vegetables for your meal:

• You would have to get a patch of land (and hope it’s fertile)
• You would then have to till that land and plant the seeds
• After that, you would have to water the garden constantly
• Then wait for the plants to grow…
• In the meantime, you hope nothing happens to them (disease, nutritional deficiencies, harsh weather, pests, and so on)

Only after all that time and hard work will you be able to reap your harvest – and even then it still might not taste as good as you hoped…

Or you could just go to the grocery store and get some fresh vegetables any time you want them.

A lot of hard work goes into growing them before they get to you.

Billions of dollars and decades of research are invested into finding new ways of growing the best crops. You get to simply walk into the store and buy what you need, any time you need to fuel your body.

Fueling your business is just as simple.

Simply go to the ‘traffic store’ and get what you need. High quality, high quantity traffic to turbocharge your business.

And where are those traffic stores?

• Google
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• And so on…

There are many more reliable places where you can get traffic for your site.

These guys have created sites that attract millions of visitors, and they are inviting you to buy some of that traffic.

So, you can be like a lot of other people who complain about prices of things (gas, food, web traffic…) or you could realize that it’s such a convenience to be able to simply buy the things we need all ready-made for us to use.

I understand why some marketers tend to avoid buying web traffic.

It’s because they’ve been sold this fairy tale that you can build a six figure business online without investing a single cent.

But the truth is that even though online businesses can be built for a mere fraction of what it would take to build a physical business, you still need to invest in them to make them work.

So if you consider all the time and effort that you’ve saved by simply buying the traffic, then the price is actually really cheap and extremely affordable.

The Relationship Between Traffic and Monetization

Unlike a few years ago, these two now go together.

This is yet another major way in which the game has totally changed. Back in the day, you had to build up traffic if you wanted to monetize your site.

You could only monetize once you had the audience and the traffic.

But not anymore. Today you’re able to monetize in order for you to enable website traffic. You pay for the traffic with the revenue that you generate.

This is how you’re able to keep buying traffic for your blog without going broke.

Your Online Business Should Be A Traffic And Conversion Funnel:

• Get the traffic
• Convert it to revenue
• Rinse and repeat

Once you have your business machine running properly, your paid traffic has no net cost and you will even be making money overall.

While it may take a bit of work to fine-tune your entire process to that point, the good news is that if you are using paid traffic, then the whole thing is significantly faster.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, you’re able to put your business’s marketing messages in front of your ideal audience on your terms.

In time, you will build up owned media assets that will allow you to generate traffic and command attention without having to pay for it.

Wondering Which Traffic Store To Start With?

There’s no question about it, Facebook should be your first stop for traffic.

It’s an absolute beast with almost 2 billion active users. It’s actually scary how much this social platform knows about us. Users are willingly TELLING them everything about themselves through their social media updates.

Facebook also buys third-party data to connect to their profile data which means they have so much more including household data and purchasing data. It’s really insane the amount of information that they have.

And all of it available to marketers who visit their traffic store! Of course, they aren’t simply going to hand over that data to you, but you can use it to create successful ads.

A huge chunk of the people you want to reach can be found on Facebook. They interact on that platform each and every day, and if you want to take advantage of that then you have to make use of Facebook Ads to reach them.

In case you’re wondering why not use Facebook pages or groups, the answer is simple:

Facebook has dropped (and intends to keep dropping) their organic reach.

This means that when you post an update on your page, you’ll be lucky if even just 10 percent of your fans see it.

You want more?

You have to pay for the eyeballs. So, if you were thinking that you can make it work with just organic social traffic, sorry to burst your bubble.

For anything else besides the usual personal things like memes and pet photos, you are going to have to pay to get it seen by enough people.

Facebook Ads work beautifully for most markets, although there are some markets in which Google Ads may be more effective since it’s intent-based.

If you’re still not convinced whether the ‘pay to play’ environment is worth it, here are some more reasons why you absolutely need to use Facebook Ads now:

7 Reasons To Use Facebook Ads In Your Business

Reason #1: Your ideal customers are already spending a lot of time on Facebook

This social media site is simply too large for any business to ignore. No matter what size your business is, you know your future customers are hanging out on Facebook.

On average, people are spending about 30% of their time on the Internet on social networks, linking content, sharing, and commenting on posts, updating their statuses and photos.

As a marketer, you need to take advantage of that massive, engaged user base.

Reason #2: Facebook has served over a billion users in a single day!

With those kinds of numbers, you can bet that Facebook can help you reach your own ideal audience.

In fact, although that ‘1-billion daily users’ milestone was impressive on its own, Facebook also has over half a billion people who only access it via mobile devices.

That is huge, and it means that there are a lot of opportunities here for savvy marketers.

Your future customers can be found inside this massive pool of users, and Facebook Ads can help you to connect with them easily and affordably.

Reason #3: Organic Reach Is Dying

To be honest, it’s pretty much already dead.

Facebook, like your own website, needs to find ways of monetizing in order to stay in business – and they are monetizing you.

Only a tiny fraction of your fans will see updates on your business page unless you pay for it.

The good news is that this doesn’t require a huge budget to get your content seen, and you can also be very picky about the people that you target to ensure that the right consumers discover your business.

Reason #4: Content promotion is highly scalable

If you create content for your site on a consistent basis, you obviously want your audience to find out about it and that’s why you take the time to share updates on all your social networks.

But in today’s world, that just isn’t enough.

Facebook Ads can help you to amplify your content’s reach, and by using them your content actually ends up generating more organic reach because when influencers share your ads (yes, people actually do that…) your content becomes exposed to even larger audiences and your engagement snowballs.

Reason #5: You can laser target your audience

Facebook’s targeting features are simply amazing.

You can target users by demographics, location, age, interests, gender, connections, and behavior.

The powerful targeting options offered by Facebook Ads help you get your message in front of super specific, highly motivated segments of your particular audience.

Some of the things you can do include:

• Tapping into recent buying behavior
• Getting creative with the life-event targeting feature
• Using custom audiences to build loyalty and nurture leads
• Creating ‘lookalike audiences’ which are similar to your own targets
• Layering options for targeting in order to get really granular targeting

Reason #6: Incredibly powerful remarketing technology

Facebook remarketing allows you to show ads to people who previously showed interest in you, your business, or your products.

These could be people who visited a page on your site, read a post on your blog, used your business’s mobile app, or opted into your email list.

Now when those people browse online, they will see your ads on other sites, mobile apps, or on social media platforms.

If your aim is to grow your business, then remarketing ads are the most effective way to do it. It not only boosts your engagement rates, but it also increases your conversion rates dramatically.

Reason #7: Convert visitors to customers

Facebook Ads will help bring lots of traffic to your site, but you obviously want more than that. You need to turn that traffic into leads and customers.

All your efforts should ultimately lead to an increase in sales, and the best way to do this is by tagging all the visitors who land on your website with a cookie.

Doing this will help you build your audience for remarketing.

Now you can use certain demographic and behavioral filters to start narrowing down your Facebook Ads targets to a group of people who not only checked out your products recently but can also afford to buy what you’re selling.

In Conclusion

As you have seen, things have changed a lot in the online space, and the good news is that now you can start monetizing your blog from day one to ensure that you start making profits immediately.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published October 20th 2018