How Do I Make Money with My Blog?
As long as you have a blog up and running, you might as well make another stream of income with it…
If you have people coming to your blog on a regular basis, you could make a pretty penny with the following:
AdSense
With one snippet of code you can place Google ads on your blog. It’s simple to set up and is the most basic way to pull in some revenue from your visitors. Learn more on Google’s AdSense page.
Other ad systems
Some ad placement services have special features and advertising methods that help increase clicks like Chitika.com, PayPerPost.com/.
Sell products
You can join relevant affiliate programs and link to their products.
If you’re popular enough, you’ll find that businesses will give you free products and services in exchange for a blog post reviewing what they offer. Then you can place an affiliate link in your own review.
If you like something enough, you can create a product page and sell that specific item however you like. Create your own ads that direct visitors to your own product page!
Sponsorships
If you have a proven traffic record, you can find companies that will “sponsor” your blog and pay you an arranged amount of money each month just to place their ad in a prominent position on your site.
Write a book
If you have enough good content on your blog, take the “best of” your blog posts and turn it into a book. Sell your book on your site (see books and blogs by Seth Godin and Steve Pavlina, two prolific bloggers.
Membership site
If people are willing to pay for your content, turn it into a “members access only” membership web site (like this one).
Watch the professionals
Places like EZineArticles.com make their living off of ads on their site. Do you imagine they have tested (and continue to test) a lot of different ways to make money? You bet!
You can bet that whatever you see on the top blogs doing is working. Look at the “What’s Popular” blogs at Technorati.com and see how these blogs are placing ads around their site.
The drawbacks
There are a couple of things to understand when it comes to advertising on your blog.
Too much “noise”
Try to keep it down a bit, will ya? Too many ads make it hard to concentrate and find the content that your visitors are there for in the first place.
If the ads on your site are too invasive, people might get tired of it and leave for good.
Exits
Whenever you make money on your site, it’s usually because someone clicked on a link and left your site. It’s kind of a catch 22–the more money you make with ads, the more traffic you lose to those advertisers.
You’re a victim of your own popularity, I guess.