We reached out to our trusted audience – our previous podcast guests, our community, our mentors and our mentees – to ask them about monetizing an academic blog, research website or science communication effort. It’s one thing to preach affiliate marketing and crowdfunding and other tactics to make money with your blog. It’s another to hear directly from your peers what works. And what doesn’t.
Our monetization survey was short and sweet, taking just three minutes of our respondent’s time to complete.
We wanted to know what methods our respondents currently used. We suggested it might be products, services, affiliate marketing, brand relationships, crowdfunding, or website ads, and we left a blank for any other creative options they might offer.
We asked them which of their current tactics for monetization that they were seeing the most success with.
And we wanted to get at the genius behind the blogs – what tips would they offer someone new to monetization.
Most GradBlogs are monetizing their efforts with products or services – or a mix of both.
The whopping majority – 89% – of respondents offer related services as their main income generator. Products came in second at 55% but these numbers see overlap. 44% offer both and 56% offer just one or the other.
What products or services can you offer? Find inspiration in these podcast episodes:
- How to publish a book on Amazon with Dr. Toyin Alli | GBP025
- How to become a profitable science blogger with Leslie Samuel | GBP026
- Listener questions: hiring on Upwork, finding service clients and list unsubscribes | GBP033
- Running a Job Board as Part of Your Online Business with Dr. Dave Eng | GBP049
- Building a Career in Science Communication with Dr. Eva Amsen | GBP050
- Building a Business on the Tenured Track with Dr. Caitlin Faas | GBP056
- How to Integrate Online Entrepreneurship into your #altac Career Path with Dr. Katie Linder | GBP064
Dr. Toyin Alli, from The Academic Society, focuses on products, namely online programs and courses. Her strategy has been to “Figure out what your audience is struggling [with] and create an offer that will give them a quick win”.
Dr. Caitlin Faas focuses solely on services. She has found the most success in posting regularly to her site, which helps with SEO and ensures there is plenty of content to dive into. It hasn’t been a fast process, but as Caitlin says, “slow progress adds up faster than you think!”
Monetization tactics must align with your audience’s values.
Just one of our respondents uses affiliate marketing to secure income. And one of them will have nothing to do with it or with website ads.
“Ads or affiliate marketing on my blog would have hurt my service-based business. My audience just doesn’t really trust them and I want them to have positive feelings about their experience on my website. It’s resulted in a high-value, well-matched inbound clients. And, a greater profit than I would have made through ads/affiliate marketing.”
Jennifer van Alstyne, The Academic Designer LLC
Understanding your audience and having these customer insights available to you was a recurring theme in audience responses. What’s resonating with people? What struggles are they having? For many GradBloggers, it’s developing a hypothesis on something that might help the audience and testing it that leads to scalable and repeatable products and services.
Inbound marketing improves customer experience and builds trust.
Inbound marketing is a form of promotion that uses content, social sharing, search engine optimization and branding to attract your audience to your offers. Inbound marketing boosts awareness around problems and their solutions whereas traditional marketing tactics focus solely on the product or service.
While much of the content may be offered for ‘free’, such as blog posts, elements can be monetized as well, such as crowdfunding for podcast access or selling seats to a webinar.
“Consider the free, helpful and actionable things you can offer your audience. Once they see what you can help them do, and what you’re willing to share for free, they’re going to be much more likely to reach out to you for your services, or more willing to buy your products. Don’t give everything away for free, but don’t be afraid to be helpful, especially when it costs you very little time/effort to do so. Being helpful and building trust are perhaps the most useful tools in building an online business.”
Dr. Sara Langworthy, DeveloPlay
Content creation can also be more rewarding with a product or service behind it. As Dr. Katy Peplin pointed out, “It’s much easier to build a blog to support your products and your brand of other things you sell than it is to monetize the blog directly with no other products.” At Thrive PhD, she offers courses, coaching and community, using content marketing to introduce graduate students to her products and services.
Use social media to foster relationships.
Heidi Giusto of Career Path Writing Solutions, as her business name suggests, focuses on offering services. She finds the most success when she can secure referrals and repeat clients. And it’s her online presence that keeps her top of mind. When she shares on social media, she signals her availability as well as inspiring confidence in her potential clients: “Make sure you come across as competent and approachable.”
“Having a social media platform where you can directly interact with your audience is the quickest (and cheapest) way to build a sense of know, like, and trust. For example, you can reply to comments and private messages to engage in actual conversations. Depending on the platform’s features, you can also share content that gives value to your audience and also show the behind-the-scenes of your personal life. By sharing a mix of content that builds your authority as well as content that builds connection, you’ll eventually start to convert your followers into paying clients.”
Cheryl Lau
If writing content isn’t your forte, consider sharing other formats such as video, audio, photos, or infographics to build rapport with your audience and demonstrate authority. As Brittany Trinh says, the important thing is to “Practice showing up online every day so it feels more natural.”
An extension of that, too, is to start an email list. Social media can feel like shouting into a vacuum, especially in the early days of audience building. Dr. Dave Eng of JobHakr says, “It helps to have these contacts with you in a platform that you can control versus using just social media.”
100% of the GradBloggers who responded to our call are earning an income facilitated by their blog.
We had nine respondents willing to share their experience and advice about creating a profitable GradBlog. We’ve had more than 15 income-earning bloggers on our podcast. And we at GradBlogger earn an income from our efforts. While this doesn’t provide an exhaustive or even comprehensive look at the field, it does demonstrate the earning potential.
Monetizing your GradBlog is highly achievable. You’ll find even more inspiration when you visit the websites of our contributors. And if you still have questions, reach out to us at www.gradblogger.com/ask.
Have you used another successful monetization tactic that we didn’t touch on? Share it in the comments below to help your peers out!
