Ways to Monetize Your Blog
In the early stages you shouldn’t really be thinking about monetizing your blog and instead you should be more focused on providing good content so that you can build a readership. Once the foundation is laid and you have a steady stream of traffic then you can begin to play with the many different monetization options. I feel some bloggers will put ads on their blogs way to early and most readers get turned off from this. If you’re planning on having a long-term successful blog then you shouldn’t even consider using ads on your blog until you’re well into being established in your niche. Once you have a certain trust factor secured with your readers then adding monetization methods can pay off greatly.
The first type of ad many people start with is cost per click ads and the most popular network for this is of course Google Adsense which I highly recommend joining. If you haven’t already registered with Google Adsense then this should be the first thing that you do before anything else. Adsense is very slow in the beginning but if you have traffic then eventually your earnings will go up. You’ll need to play with ad placement on your blog to ensure that you’re optimizing your ad space to the best of your abilities, but you shouldn’t be posed with much hassle doing this. Adsense pays millions of people every month and have a very good reputation which is why so many people use them to make money from their blogs.
Another method commonly used to monetize your blog is through affiliate offers and sales. You can either get leads and receive a set fee or a commission for products you sell. Selling products is far more profitable then getting leads but in the beginning we all need to start somewhere and often time’s leads are easier then selling products. There are countless numbers of affiliates for you to choose from and you should try sticking with only one or two until you reach minimum payment.
Finally you could choose to sell your own advertisements on the blog, usually you’d post on a webmaster forum in a Link Sales section and try selling links or banners. This can be really profitable if you can manage to keep a high page rank and decent alexa rating. Many people buy links on blogs so you can ensure residual income through link sales by maintaining a blog.
There are still other ways for bloggers to monetize their efforts but that’s the main three ways you should use to monetize, although selling links you need to be careful and make sure they don’t appear as paid links. Google frowns upon paid links and for this reason you should be really careful when thinking about selling links on your blogs. Selling links in the content is a lot risky and safer for you to do then offering sitewide blogroll links so you need to make the decision on how you’ll sell links if in fact you even choose to. Monetizing your blog gives you the chance to earn a nice income off of your hard work and you should make sure to capitalize on the chances. Once the readership is high then you should implement ads and affiliate offers that pertain to the topic of your blog.