Easy starting point.

Run Adsense on your site for a month.

After a month, find top 3 pages (most traffic + on page time).

For each page, visit the page + hit reload 10 times, recording the Ad Google runs on these pages.

Then once you have the most prevalent Ad for each page, trace the Ad back to the originating site. The replace Adsense on each page with the native Ad, which will pay you far more than Adsense.

Check your numbers for a month + if your numbers (income/Ad) begins to drop, this means the Ad has saturated. At this point, turn on Adsense again + let it run for 30 days, then repeat the process.

This is a dirt simple way to monetize your content at optimal levels.

Be sure not to click on the Ad on your site, as this breaks the Adsense TOS + will get you banned from Google's Ad networks.

There are MANY ways you can monetize a column blog. I've created a few in the past and was quite successful. The most basic is ads, but that's probably not what you want to do because it's the lowest monetization. I would reach out to sponsors, sell premium content, courses, books etc.

Great question! It's awesome that you already have some "customers" and validation on the type of content that will work well.

My advice is to form a Customer Advisory Board with a few of the members. Do some exploratory research with them to find out how they'd like to see the community evolve. Do they have unmet needs that you could be serving?

I put this in another question but "Find products for your customers, not customers for your product." (Seth Godin)

There are so many options available to you! You could keep the community as-is, on Facebook, and start recruiting new members for a monthly fee. You could also move to an email list & charge partners for sponsored-content. And, you can also build out the website and try to push traffic to the site, making money off of Ad-Words.

It really depends on what you feel comfortable doing AND what your customers want from you, how you can continue to build value for them.

My philosophy is that you can take the guesswork out of building a business by doing research & asking your customers.

You can monetize your blog for sure. Today however you can start, maintain, and monetize a blog on WordPress with just a few hundred dollars. But just because it is easier to make money with your blog today, does not mean that most bloggers do. This is terrible, especially when you consider that most bloggers start a blog so they can be their own boss and quit their dull 8-to-5 job. Now these two things matter, but primarily, monetizing your blog efficiently is all about the numbers. Rather it means that you should choose a monetization strategy that aligns with where your blog is right now or where you want it to be in the future. One of the easiest ways to make money from your blog is to become a freelance writer for more prominent blogs in your niche.
You can read more here: https://kinsta.com/blog/how-to-monetize-a-blog/
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath