It happened almost without my noticing it. Suddenly, last spring, I realized that my book blog was turning a profit. Barely much of a profit, but a profit all the same. And it’s only grown since then. As most book bloggers know, learning how to monetize a book blog can be tricky. That’s why I want to help you, dear book blogger, achieve the dream: running a profitable book blog. In other words, how to make money with books.
In this new series on the blog, I’ll offer you my best tips for monetizing a book blog so you can learn all about how to make a successful book blog. So if you’ve ever wondered how to grow your book blog and monetize, get ready to learn. In this first post, we’ll work on getting you in the right frame of mind to make money book blogging from home. Then, in further posts of this free series, I’ll dissect my traffic, my most successful posts, and help you generate profitable ideas so you can do what you love—read—and earn some money from it.
The goal of this first post
This post is a little different from some of the book blog monetization posts you might have read. I’m not going to just recite a few ways to monetize your blog (affiliate links, sponsored posts, etc.). That information is out there. What I want to do is cause a monumental shift in the way you think about book blogging, so you erase any blocks that make you think you can’t monetize a book blog and you start to think in terms of book blogging for a profit.
This isn’t a post about how to make a sale off of one affiliate link. This is a guide to cognitively restructuring your blogging mindset so you begin to think big-picture about book blogging for a profit—for all your links, for all your posts, and beyond.
Broke by Books
The goal is to launch you from this post into the mindset and equipped with the tools you need to blog about books and make some money doing it.
In this guide, I’ll go over how to monetize a book blog by breaking up the information into what I intend to be three separate posts:
Part 1: Professionalize – You are here!
Part 2: Endorse – Find all you need to know about this second Pillar here
Part 3: Create
I’ll hope to get this series out there in the next month. But, as usual, I’m battling chronic illness, and frankly, these posts take a lot of time and energy to do. Fortunately I look forward to them more than anything… I love connecting with other book bloggers and helping them go pro.
And with that cleared out of the way, let’s get started!
Pillar 1 of Book Blog Monetization: Professionalize
Appearance matters.
Having a book blog that looks professional is the first step towards earning money from book blogging.
Chances are, if you’ve found your way to this article, you already have ambitious plans for your blog. Maybe you want to bring in more traffic or expand your monetization profits. I suspect that you also want to emulate successfully monetized book blogs (or other blogs or other bookish websites). Before I started writing for Book Riot, I knew that was the kind of book content I wanted to write. It was a model for me and helped me professionalize into a site that could turn a profit.
So think about websites you admire, write down their qualities that you want in your own blog, and begin to think about how to get there from here.
Not sure where to start? Go through the 20 different book websites I feature in my post on “20 Great Book Websites for Finding What to Read Next”:
By looking through the list, you’ll see what kind of content, social media, and visuals these professional bookish sites have.
Although, yes, our lists might look different, there are certain things you’ll find universally across the board for professionalized blogs. In this section we’ll talk about three of these essential qualities for monetized book blogs:
- First, a self-hosted blog with a domain you own and an SSL certificate.
- Second, a cohesive visual look with attractive, shareable images.
- Third, a monetized content strategy that broadens readership
All right… let’s get to it!
Professionalize — Step 1: Upgrade Your Tech Specs
It all starts with the URL…
If you want to monetize your book blog, you need to professionalize your site. This means owning your domain (e.g. www.brokebybooks.com on WordPress.org vs. www.brokebybooks.wordpress.com on free WordPres.com).
Once you register and own your domain, you have many advantages, like creating custom email addresses, if that’s something you’re interested in. You’ll also want to get an SSL certificate, which tells visitors that your site is secure.
WordPress.org is unquestionably the way to go. Blogging on WordPress.org means you can equip your site to have its best chance of success. For instance, with WordPress.org, you can:
- Pick out any theme you want from marketplaces like ThemeForest (my exclusive WordPress theme source since 2015) or one made just for you by a web designer
- Do endless customization on your site with plugins that help configure your blog to be more profitable, like Yoast SEO
- Get Google Analytics for free (vs. paying with a WordPress.com upgrade to have that data)
- Set up a shop on your site through WooCommerce
And so many more reasons!
So, how to do this? It all sounded so overwhelming to me at first. But eventually I got the hand of it.
Fortunately, I’ve created two guides on 1) Why I recommend using Bluehost for WordPress.org blogging, and 2) How to quickly set up a WordPress.org book blog on Bluehost and get a free SSL certificate. An SSL certificate sits right up next to your URL and is an essential feature of any site and builds trust with your reader.
Check out these articles and you’ll be up to speed in no time.
Professionalize — Step 2: Level up your graphics game with shareable, Pin-able images
Appearance is everything when it comes to earning the trust of your readers. We’ve all seen cringeworthy blog images before—I definitely made them early on. A visually attractive blog tells readers you care about your content so much that you wrap it in pretty, click-worthy graphics that they’ll want to share… therefore bringing in new traffic to your monetized posts.
I cringe when I think back to my early blog images. I really had no idea what I was doing. Over the years, though, I’ve practiced my graphic design skills on sites like Canva and PicMonkey. And I’ve seen so much more traffic, especially from Pinterest, thanks to upgrading my blog image skills.
And when I say “blog images,” I mean:
- Featured images for individual posts.
- Images within posts, like section dividers.
- Shareable graphics customized for Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and wherever you tell others about your blog.
- Book covers for the products you make.
- A logo for your blog.
- And so much more
Now, I’m guessing that you don’t have a graphic designer on staff for your book blog. Not many bloggers do. The good news is in today’s world, you don’t need one; image editing sites like PicMonkey and Canva come pre-loaded with templates that anyone can use to create visually engaging and shareable blog images that fit your blog’s cohesive look.
It’s so important to make sure your blog looks uniform visually, which is exactly what you’d expect from a professional website. When you design images for your blog, be sure to keep things looking consistent and “on brand” just like your favorite websites and blogs you hope to emulate.
I’m also a fan of PicMonkey, which has a ton of templates ready to go for social media and blog featured images. In fact, a lot of the featured images I use are variations on the same Pinterest template, with the text, color, and photos tweaked so it’s individualized but looks cohesive.
Here are a few examples of blog graphics I’ve made with PicMonkey. I know, one of these days I’ll have to devote a post to PicMonkey. But for now, here are a few of my favorite blog images I’ve made with PicMonkey:
My featured image for my list of the 15 best new books for nature lovers:
This featured image for my Goldfinch quotes post… this social-ready image brings me a ton of traffic from Pinterest and went viral when The Goldfinch movie adaptation was in the theatres.
And one more great PicMonkey made picture, a Pinterest graphic I made for my post with book quotes. This one really found a home on Pinterest and has steadily brought traffic to this blog.
Plan on advertising to bring in traffic? I’ll tell you why I do later in this book blogging monetization series. You’ll learn why having attractive, on-brand blog graphics is a must.
If you want to start professionalizing your blog, sign up for Canva or PicMonkey and then go back and add in new featured images to older sites, resizing them with one click to give you graphics ready to go for social media.
And if you’re serious about mastering Pinterest for your blog, be sure to check out Pinterest Traffic Avalanche, an amazing class from the awesome team at Create and Go courses, which I’ll be reviewing in an upcoming post.
Since enrolling, I’ve really level up my Pinterest game. This is really the most comprehensive class to teach you how to maximize your blog’s Pinterest strategy, covering everything from creating Pin-worthy visually striking images, to SEO optimization, leveraging analytics, promoting a Pin, and much, much more.
Professionalize — Step 3: Strategize to Monetize
In this step, we’ll talk a little more about how to craft an engaging, evergreen-heavy content strategy that maximizes your book blog monetization. In the next article in this series, Pillar 2: Endorse with Trust, we will go over affiliate marketing for book blogging in far more detail. For this step, however, we’ll concentrate on getting you in a monetization mindset for when you plan your content strategy.
And by content strategy I mean your strategic blueprint to create purposeful, quality, and monetized content for your book blog.
Whether you have an existing content strategy or are looking to start one, this section is a must-read.
Ready for some truth talk?
Many book blogs feature similar types of staple series and content: book blog tours, book reviews, book blog memes, weekly lists or prompts, and super-personal content like “What I’m reading right now.” That content definitely serves a purpose:
First, by developing your voice and therefore your brand and style, and
Second, by fostering community.
These are all positives and will help you level up your blog because you’ve already done the hardest work of all: creating a community around a bookish brand with your essential, unique voice. If you have this in place, you already have a leg up, and monetization should be easier.
However, what I often see on book blogs is a kind of echo chamber effect. Sometimes book blogs will unintentionally limit their audience because their primary readership are other book bloggers, who are in turn making content intended to be read by other book bloggers. And on and on it goes.
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with that content strategy.
But it’s very hard to monetize your blog that way. After all, if everyone is reviewing the same ARCs, hosting the same book blog tours, and so on, you’re competing with your friends and peers to come up with unique monetize-ready content. If your monetization strategy so far has been including Amazon Associates links in your book reviews, you’re going head-to-head with any other blogger with the same ARC.
One link does not an empire build.
No, if you want to convert readers to sales, you need to be thinking about creating quality, SEO-optimized content that will consistently bring you visitors who want to make a consumer choice.
Essentially, get this question in your head:
“Will this content help a consumer make a purchasing choice?”
In other words… does your content help consumers decide to buy something you endorse?
We will get into more detail about a monetized content strategy in the next Pillar, so here I’ll leave you. Between now and the next installment of this series, really think about that question when you write new content.
To prep for the next pillar, I’d ask you to:
- Continue to explore different bookish websites you’d love to emulate. Analyze the content on their sites. Take note of their monetization strategy… for instance, do they have advertising, sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, are they selling products?
- Do a monetization audit of your content. What posts are bringing in the most money?
- Keep track of when you are on a website and decide to click on a link to a product. Pay attention to why you chose to do that. Was it the opinion of the writer? Was it objective information?
- Brainstorm, draft, and publish an article that includes at least five unique affiliate product links.
Looking for more book blog content ideas? Be sure to check out my blog post with “An Epic List of 52 Book Blogging Ideas”.
Take it further with my book, Book Blogging Hacks, which contains not only a list of 365 book blogging prompts but also valuable information about book blogging strategies.
Curious? Learn more on Goodreads.
If you’re interested in purchasing it, you can find Book Blogging Hacks on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback.
Okay, folks! Go on to the second Pillar (“Endorse”) to learn more about how to make money as a book blogger.
We’ll go over affiliate marketing for book blogs in much more detail so you’ll leave the article with plenty of ideas on how to start or improve monetization strategies for your book blog.
See you then!
