Monetizing The Gap: Four Ways to Make Money from Your Single Blog Post Pages

At the end of most blog posts you’ll often come across empty space. A gap between the last word and the opening comment. This area is often unexploited and unjustly so, because it’ll definitely help make more money from your blog.

If you want more monetary benefits from your content, you should probably spend some time optimizing what I call the Gap or the space between your blog post and the comments section.

In this article, I will outline four methods you can use to effectively monetize this untapped space, while correspondingly increasing both your profit potential and your reader base.

Introducing ‘The Gap’: Anatomy of the Single Post Page

The Gap is the empty space immediately after the end your blog post, until the start of the comments section. While some have enthusiastically filled the space with advertisements of all sorts, it is often an untouched resource for most blogs.

Here is the main reason why you should make full use of this space:

Relevancy through Association. Anything placed at the end of an article appears to be structurally connected with the content and gives the illusion of relevancy, simply because it exists on the same page as a chunk of content.

Relevant ads and links receive more clicks from visitors. If you want to promote an affiliate link for a web host, you don’t put it on a page about baby showers but on a page about web hosting or webmaster tools.

Here’s the catch. All of your written blog posts are goldmines lying untouched. Each of them are about very specific topics and are perfect specimens for targeted ads, links, recommendations and call-to-actions. To not use them in some way would be absolutely a waste.

And waste it we shall not. Here are four easy methods you can apply to make full use of the Gap.

1. Use Related Posts to Add Value and Increase PageViews

Related posts are a excellent way to introduce a reader to more material on your blog and there are three primary benefits which can result from it:

Higher pageviews. After reading an article, a reader is likely to visually scan the list of related post titles and click on the one that leads her to another post, while possibly doing the same for the next post as well.

Higher pageviews means more potential ad clicks and a higher ad impression rate. This directly impacts the monetary earnings you will see from your blog.

Increases your reader base.This is an easy way to encourage a new reader to browse through more material on your blog and can exponentially increase the potential of gaining a longterm reader or feed subscriber.

This is especially important because a large portion of most blog visitors arrive through the search engines and land on the single post pages.

Adds value for your regular readers. By adding related posts, you provide your regular readers with more relevant information which is helpful. This generally adds to their viewing experience and is a great way to develop visitor loyalty.

How do I put up Related Posts ?

If you are using Wordpress, I highly recommend using Aizatto’s Related Posts plugin, which is a improvement over the original Related Entries plugin that most bloggers are currently using.

This excellent plugin does not require you to insert any code into your blog template and automatically includes related posts at the bottom of all your single post pages. It also allows you to customize the look of the related posts section through the admin panel itself, while giving you the option to include related posts within your RSS feed as well.

I’m currently running this plugin on Dosh Dosh and you can see it in action at the end of this post. I’m sure there is a way to do it in Blogspot and other platforms as well but so far I haven’t been able to find any tutorials or instructions.

2. Display Highly Relevant Advertising

There are basically two options here: advertising networks or affiliate programs. Google Adsense is an obvious choice for most bloggers and is really a hassle-free method that’ll help you to make some extra money from your single post pages.

As I’ve written in my previous article on monetizing your archived posts, a large number of your blog posts are likely to be only viewed by search engine visitors and monetizing them with relevant advertising is an effective way to make more money from your blog.

My favorite method of monetizing single posts involves putting up a short one-line recommendation for an affiliate program that I’ve personally tried. Here are some reasons why:

Unobtrusive. Text links within a sentence do not break the flow of the entire post, nor do they stand out like contextual ads. They naturally position themselves within overall framework of the post and are unoffensive to almost every reader.

Recommendations encourage conversions. If you are a blogger who generally receives some respect or attention (however minimal) from your audience, recommendations of affiliate programs are by far the best way to monetize.

Affiliate programs differ from most advertising programs, which do not allow you directly entice the reader to click through on an ad. It’s not abnormal to receive extremely high clickthrough rates if the program promoted is legit and highly relevant to the post itself.

3. Include a Customized Call for Subscriptions

A strong feed subscriber base has two correlations to making money with any blog. Monetary benefits can be directly derived from several feed-based monetization options after you’ve gained a decent amount of feed subscribers.

The indirect benefit is that feed and newsletter subscribers help you to grow your blog in the long run. Having a larger subscriber base means that you’ll have more people reading your every post, which increases your blog’s potential linkability and hence your referral traffic.

You can insert a simple one-liner asking for more feed subscribers if they’ve enjoyed the post. I would personally take it one step further by making the call to action more relevant to the post.

For example I have an article on how to make money from myspace, which receives a decent amount of search visitors everyday. A call for subscription could read like this: “Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to my blog feed for more future posts on how to make money with myspace”

Relevancy and appealing to the reader’s already piqued interest is a very important point that is often overlooked.

4. Sell Ads and Links after each Blog Post

As I’ve mentioned in my post on direct advertising methods, you can sell links or banner space to interested advertisers using the space under specific post pages.

Text Link Ads (aff) is an ad network which allows you to sell post-level ads but I personally do not fancy using them.

I believe that if you have a strong webpage with regular search traffic, it would be disadvantageous to go through an ad broker and therefore lose out in terms of commission.

You’ve spent all the time and effort in writing and promoting that great post, which is heavily linked and ranks well on the search engines. Do you really need to share the money you earn with middlemen who have done absolutely nothing for your blog?

The only advantage of using Text Link Ads or other advertising networks is convenience and if you want that more than anything else, by all means go through an ad broker.

There are many ways to find advertisers and direct ad sales is an easy and flexible way to make money from any post on your blog.

And that concludes the post..

Feel free to experiment with your single post pages by switching ad options and measuring their performance over a similar time frame. If you don’t know where to start, I would suggest tweaking your archived posts as they are largely invisible to your regular audience.

Don’t forget to target the popular blog posts which attract the most daily search traffic. These are the ones you’ll want to optimize first because they offer the biggest returns on investment.

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