How to Make Money From Your Blog
It just had to be the first ‘real’ post on the Blogging to the Bank blog so lets cut to the chase and talk about how to make money from your blog. Millions of people across the globe own blogs, some of them know they can make money from their blogs and some of them do not.
The humble blog started out as an online diary, a way that ordinary people could express their thoughts online and establish their web presence. Some blogs have made people famous and some blogs have gotten people arrested. The blog has evolved and developed into so much more in the last couple of years though, and now a blog can be nearly anything you want it to be; an online store, a magazine website, a salespage, a membership site or just a blog! This is largely thanks to the emergence of wordpress and the various plugins and templates that have been developed over the years. All of these improvements and new features make it easier for people like you and me to own our own blogs and profit from them, so lets look at three real down and dirty tactics that will make you money with your blog!
1. Google Adsense
This is the fastest way to generate some income from your site, but let me warn you up front, you’re not going to make a lot of money with this method. Its just a real quick way to get started.
Google adsense is a program ran by Google where you put some code on your site which allows Google to place content relevant ads on your site. Every time a visitor clicks on one of those adverts you get a few cents. There are various rules to this program and requirements that your website has to meet (having a privacy policy, not telling visitors to click adverts, placing the adverts in a certain manner) but this is a program you can sign up to very quickly at google.com. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you do or you don’t have, Google doesn’t care, as long as you have some where to put the ads, you can do Google Adsense. It won’t make you the kind of money you need to quit your job but its a start!
2. Sell Advertising Space
This is one of the simplest and easy ones to do. Now before you can sell advertising space you want your blog to be getting a bit of traffic. You don’t need thousands of visitors a day, but the more visitors you have, the more you can charge for advertising. To start off with, I’d recommend joining a couple of forums like sitepoint.com and digitalpoint.com and looking through the “advertisers” section in the market place. There you can see what kind of prices are being charged on websites with or without traffic. So for example, if a website with 20k visitors a day is selling a “text link ad” for $100 a month and your site only gets a thousand visitors a day, then for a similar ad, you should be charging less than $100 a month.
You get the idea.
Go to these marketplaces and see what advertising space is popular with people looking to advertise. Make sure you do your research and find a good price point. Once you have done that, post an offer to sell advertising space yourself. Remember to post your site’s stats up and be honest about your traffic numbers and where possible provide proof.
Make sure you don’t let advertisers pay for too many months in advance. The more traffic your site gets, the better Pagerank you receive, the more you can charge for advertising. Once you have mastered all this you can join various ad networks that can make the whole process easier, pay you on a performance basis or simply get you in front of a larger marketplace.
Some blogs make thousands of dollars a month with advertising in many different obscure niches. The best bit about this, it takes virtually no work to maintain to keep the money pouring into your Paypal and bank account!
3. Affiliate Marketing
If you’ve got a loyal readership or if your blog is getting a reasonable amount of visitors then you might want to write a few posts recommending certain services and products and then provide a link to that product’s website. Of course the link you will provide will be a cleverly disguised affiliate link which will then allow you to make a commission on any purchases made by the visitors that visited that site through your link. You don’t want to make every post an advert though encouraging people to buy products. Make sure you give honest recommendations so as to maintain your integrity with your readership ad build trust. You might also want to try and build an email list using your blog so as you can email your subscribers from time to time with updates on your blogs and affiliate promotions.
4. Write Review Posts
I personally love this idea. There are hundreds and thousands of companies out there looking for people in the “blosophere” to write about their products and websites. They are so desperate for bloggers to talk about them they have even started paying them to do it! And now there are websites that put companies and bloggers together so that bloggers can get paid for a post they make about a company.
Basically you add your blog profile to one of these sites and companies in your niche or market may contact you and ask you to write a blog post in exchange for a value of money. How much money you get paid depends on your Pagerank and how many visitors you get to your site etc etc. Some people make $40 a post while others make $6000 a post. Its easy money once you get into it. If you’re interested in getting into this then go check out reviewme.com and sign up with your blog.
Alternatively, there is another site (payperpost.com) which allows companies to state what they are looking for and what they will pay, and bloggers can take them up on their offers as long as their blog meets the criteria laid down by the company in the campaign description. In fact, there are a lot of sites around that allow for this kind of work, its just a case of using our god friend Google to find them!
Try and not over do it with review posts etc though, as again you’ll lose the trust and goodwill of your readership.
So there are four of the most popular things you can do to make money with your blog. Some you can do today and see results with today, and some that take a little longer. If you’re a smart cookie, you’ll have noticed a trend in all of the techniques I have mentioned. The more traffic your site has, the more money you can make. That really will be the key to your success. You can still make money with a little traffic, and ten invest that little bit of money into generating more traffic. Once you get that traffic you can start charging more and making more money and then suddenly you are in profit. It doesn’t happen overnight, it might take a month or two of work, but it is doable and people are doing it every day.
It doesn’t matter if your blog isn’t the best, keep it simple and get some dam content up on it! Worry about tweaking it and making it uber cool later! Just build some backlinks and get some traffic to that thing!
So I hope this article has helped you out in figuring out what you want to do to make money from your blog. There are other ways you can profit from your blog, but these are some of the quickest, easiest and most basic ways of making with a blog. I wish you all the best, and as usual, if you’ve got any questions or anything to say about my post today, feel free to reach out, get in touch and leave a comment below.
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