You can make money blogging. How much you make depends on how good your content is and and your ability to attract readers to your blog. Driving traffic to your site and creating quality content takes hard work, patience and consistency. The more visitors you have to your site the more you will make.
If you are interested in starting a blog I put together free posts on how to get started:
What should I blog about
How to start a blog
I recommend that you read them to help you get started. If you have questions you can contact me here. Once you have your blog setup and have at least 20 blog posts you can start looking at ways to make money. I’d recommend that you focus on your content for the first 30-60 days and start trying to make money after that time period. It’s also important to note that you will not be able to use all of the methods I listed below if you host your blog on a free blog platform like blogger. To learn how to learn how to setup a blog with your own personal domain name and hosting account visit my post how to start a blog.
5 Ways to make money from your blog:
1. Advertising:
Sell advertising on your site: You can sell ad space on your website yourself. All you need is the OIOAdmanager plugin and a paypal account. Th OIO plugin manages the ad space on your website and automates payment to your paypal account. All you do is setup the ad slots that people can buy and then approve the ads that people submit. I’ve put together a short video on how to setup the OIOpublisher plugin. Using the OIO plugin is the best way to sell ads because you get to keep 100% of the ad revenue unlike the other popular ad networks that keep a portion of the revenue you generate. You can also use this plugin to display affiliate banners.
Adsense: Adsense is Google’s advertising service. It’s very easy to setup and it’s a great way for new bloggers to get started. Once you sign up for an account you just create an ad and then copy/paste the code to your website.
Chitika: Chitika is a great alternative to Adsense, but it can also be used to supplement Adsense. Chitika is a pay per click advertising platform that uses small images next to it’s links. It can be very profitable.
Kontera: Kontera takes words in your blog posts and turns them into links. The links are ads and when people click them you get paid. Payouts are small so you will need lots of content and page views to make much money using Kontera.
2. Mailing List
You need to start a mailing list from first day you start blogging. When visitors come your blog you want to give them a chance to sign up to get your blog updates. There are two popular tools to use to do this. Feedburner and Aweber. Feedburner is free but limited. You have very little control and your updates go out as soon as they are posted to your blog. I don’t like the limitations of feedburner so I use Aweber. With Aweber I can easily setup a custom form to get people to sign up. I can send out weekly newsletters or an email to all my subscribers about anything I want at anytime. Aweber is a very powerful and profitable tool that keeps people coming back to my blog.
3. Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing is the business of being paid to promote other people’s products. You make money by referring users to another website using an affiliate link. When that visitor buys something you get paid a commission. Usually 5-50% of the sale price. Use the sites below to find products that relate well to the content on your blog.
- Tools
Ninja Affiliate – This is a great tool that I use that turn keywords in my blog posts into affiliate links
- Sites with affiliate products
Commission Junction
LinkShare
e-Junkie
Clickbank
4. Sell Links:
Selling links on your blog is another form of advertising. Instead of selling banner space you are selling link. Links can be sold for your home page, every page or from within any of your blog posts. You get paid anywhere from $3/month and higher. I currently get paid over $100/month just for link ads that most of you probably never even notice or click on. The reason advertisers buy these links is usually not to “advertise” but more to increase their rankings in Google search results.
Linkworth: Linkworth does everything. Using Linkworth you get can paid for a blog post, a link, or for ads.
: Text link Ads is easy to install. You just upload a plugin to your site and enable it. Then the staff at Text-link-ads find other website that want to buy links from you. They put the links into the text of your blog posts and pay you a recurring commission. Bloggers make more when they have high Google page rank and lots of content.
5. Paid per post:
You can get paid for each blog post when you write a post to review someone’s product or website. Register your blog at the sites below and then accept or deny offers based on the topic they want you to write on and the amount they will pay you. Expect to have to link to their product or website in your blog to get paid.
Before you start a blog you really need to consider what you are going to blog about. Most bloggers tend to burn out around the 6 month time frame. They burn out because they aren’t seeing the results that they had hoped to see. The reality is that it can take 6-12 months before you start to see a lot of traffic to your blog. And traffic is what most people are after because more traffic equals more income.
It’s not hard to figure out what to blog about. Think about what you are interested in and consider if you are interested in writing about it. There are 1.7 Billion people using the Internet as of Sept, 2009 (Internet World Stats) which means that there are plenty of people out there interested in reading what you have to say. You can blog about anything you do, hobbies or activities you enjoy or opinions you have. If you just sit around and watch TV you can blog about the TV shows you watch. There are endless topics that you have to choose from, you just need to pick something that you know you will want to write about, and want to write about often.
Once you have a few ideas start planning out your content. If you can think of 50-100 post topics off the top of your head then you have probably found your topic. If you are going to blog about your experiences with something as it happens then you don’t need to plan out your posts. If you can find something you will enjoy writing about then the blogging won’t be work. It will just be straight fun.
For some bloggers selling a product from their blog is just not an option because it messes with the integrity of their content. And for some others, even running ads feels too commercialized and fake. Good news, there are other options. Read more
