Blog Tips pt 2. – Monitizing your blog

Jul-2007

There has been quite a bit written on this and so I won’t pretend that this is a comprehensive list, just a profile of the methods which I have been using. The revenue which you can gain from these methods obviously depends on the amount of traffic which you can generate.

Advertising

Google Adwords

Google offer an easy to implement advertising program called Google Adsense. Simply sign up to the program and insert the ad generation code into your blog template (there are plugins to help do this). Google will then serve ads to your website, relevant to the text on your pages.

These ads are pay per click, meaning that you only get paid when someone clicks on the ad.

Text links

Companies such as text link ads sell links will sell links in the text of your posts to advertisers. This obviously advertises their products as well as building their pagerank.

I have found this to be the most effective way method of producting advertising revenue.

Direct Advertising

If you start to get enough traffic to your site you can start to sell advertising directly. Create a page on your blog which offers this as an option to businesses and state your rates.

Pay Per Post

Businesses are starting to wake up to the fact that bloggers have influence. Subsequently there are now several services which enable bloggers to write reviews for cash. This is quite a lot of work and nowhere near to a residual income, but money nevertheless.

Donations

One way which many resource sites make money is through asking for donations. I am undecided about the ethics of this, but I suppose that it allows readers to show their appreciation. PayPal offers service for people to pay donations which can be linked to from the site

Affiliate Program

Many online services and products offer an affiliate program. This is where the link to an external website which offer a product and if the visitor makes a purchase you get a percentage of the proceeds. Many major advertisers have affiliate programs e.g. Amazon (called the associates program) and eBay.

Here is an example of how you could use an affiliate program to make money from your blog. Write a review for a book and then link to the book on Amazon so that it can be purchased. If a purchase is made, Amazon will pay you a commission. Here is an example of a review which I have written.

Sell your services

Many bloggers use their blogs as a springboard to sell their services. Yaro Starak for example uses his blog to sell his blogging masterclass services