If you have a popular blog, you know that there are many effective ways to monetize it. But monetizing a blog shouldn’t be your only income-generating investment strategy. If you want to maximize your total returns and stabilize your income-generating potential, it’s important to develop a more robust investment portfolio. So how do you do it?
Improving Blog Monetization
Your first step is improving your blog monetization strategy. Your goals here are to increase the amount of income you can generate with your blogging strategy and to increase the consistency of your income generation over the long term.
These are some of the best ways you can do this:
• Diversify your sources. All investment portfolios require at least some degree of diversification, and your blog monetization strategies should be treated in a similar way. Some bloggers only generate income through one channel, such as advertising or affiliate linking. This can work fine on a small scale, but if you’re planning on investing for the future, it’s better to diversify these sources and minimize your risk. Use a variety of different monetization strategies so you’re better protected against unforeseen events. In addition to advertising and affiliate linking, you can try premium content subscriptions, instructional courses, brand merchandise, and countless other possibilities.
• Have a plan to scale. The bigger your blog is, the more money is going to generate. For that reason, it’s a good idea to have a plan to scale. How can you reach more people with your content? How can you grow your audience further? Be willing to invest in your own growth.
• Be prepared to stay relevant. Just because your blog is relevant to your readers today doesn’t mean it’s going to stay relevant forever. You may have to make adjustments to keep up with the latest trends and ward off potential competition. Make sure you have safeguards in place to monitor your traffic and reader interest and adapt when necessary.
• Consider expanding to other domains. You’ve already proven that you can make one blog popular and begin monetizing it, so why not expand your portfolio by investing in new domains? Instead of just depending on one source of blog income, you could be depending on multiple strong sources.
The Rest of Your Investment Portfolio
Blog monetization may be able to sustain you indefinitely, but that’s far from a guarantee. Accordingly, you should set aside a significant portion of your income to invest in other assets, such as:
• Stocks. One of the most popular choices for investors is the stock market. Buying stocks is a way of acquiring partial ownership of major companies, entitling you to a portion of their profits and allowing you to grow with them over time. There’s some risk involved, naturally, but you can mitigate your risk by investing in a wide range of different companies of different sizes and from different industries.
• Bonds. Bonds are a staple alternative to stocks, because they bear significantly less risk but they also offer a significantly lower return. Again, you can invest in a mix of different bonds to mitigate your risk and keep your portfolio diversified.
• Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. These days, it’s easy to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies have a mixed reputation among serious investors, and they present a unique mix of risks, including volatility and illiquidity. However, there’s a growing number of people who believe that cryptocurrencies are the future and that their decentralized nature makes them impervious to certain types of economic disasters. For this reason, they can be an effective way to balance the risk of your portfolio.
• Real estate. You can also invest in real estate, generating rental income from your real properties or investing in REITs to get exposure to the real estate market without buying any real property. Either way, real estate can help to balance the risks of your other investments.
• Alternative investments. A combination of the above assets is often enough for a portfolio to be sufficiently diversified, but you may also want to consider even more investment options. For example, you could invest in gold or silver (or other precious metals), or try your hand in the commodities market.
Rebalancing Over Time
Balancing your investment portfolio isn’t something that should happen only once. Instead, it’s something you’ll need to rebalance and readdress many times over the course of the rest of your life. Gradually, as you get older, you’ll become less risk tolerant and more interested in consistent income; when this happens, it’s up to you to shift your capital away from risky assets and toward more stable, reliable ones.
In the meantime, you can maintain your focus on making your blog as successful as possible.
