How to make money with your blog

This post is dedicated to the guys and girls at BlogCatalog - which is nice change as they seem to be bloggers with good blogs making bad money, rather than bloggers with bad blogs making good money.

Do you want to make money from your blog?

Well most bloggers wouldn’t mind but what you need to be careful about is how and when you start. I would suggest that new bloggers or new blogs refrain from any monetizing for at least 2 months of solid posting.

The traffic that your new blog gets in those months doesn’t make it worthwhile and more importantly you want your visitors to stay and read your posts rather than send them away or cause distraction to your blog’s mission.

Once you have traffic and subscribers to your blog, you need to consider how you will make money from it. Every method to monetize from your blog has its advantages and disadvantages so I’ll try to cover some of the most common ones in this post.

Google Adsense
If you haven’t heard of Adsense then you really need to do more reading first… click here. It’s the most common method for webmasters and bloggers to make money mainly because it’s so easy to set up. You’ll need to apply for an account and once approved, you just put the code on your blog and Adsense does the rest.

How much you will earn depends on a few things like your traffic, the placement of the ads on your blog and the niche of your blog. For the sake of this post, I would say for an average niche at 0.15USD per click at say 5% click through rate - you are looking at 7.5USD per 1000 impressions.

Advantages
• Easy to set-up
• Reliable income from Google - Payment at end of month after reaching USD100 threshold.
• Links shown are usually related to your blog’s content
• Good CPC(Cost per Click) in certain niches - Loans will be high, Celebrities will be low.

Disadvantages
• Some bloggers have difficulties in getting approved (hint: Blogspot blogs are easier.)
• Links will send readers away.
• Google are not reluctant to ban webmasters breaking their TOS and once banned its hard to get back in.

TextLinkAds
Basically TextLinkAds helps you to get money by selling text links for you on your blog. Again the approval process is quite hard and you probably need a blog with PageRank of 4 or above. However, once approved and the code set up, its all hands off again waiting for people to buy links off you from the TextLinkAds marketplace.

They also have a new product out allowing buyers to purchase words from your blog if you are using Wordpress.

How much you will earn will depend mainly on the PageRank of your blog and traffic. On average I would say a PR4 blog selling 10 links would earn around USD80 a month if all links are sold.

Advantages
• Easy to set up
• Hand off money earning after setting up code

Disadvantages
• You will increase the outbound links on your blog
• TLAs takes 50% of the amount the buyer pays!
• Quite hard to get approved initially

For more info – Click here
For application – Click here Use this link to get USD100 into your account to buy links.

Affiliate marketing
The methods of affiliate marketing are discussed in more detail in our Affiliate Marketing Journal. Bloggers usually earn money from affiliate marketing by joining affiliate programs and recommending products to their readers. The blogger earns a commission from the merchant usually around 10-20% for the transaction of the referred client.

How much you will earn will depend mainly your traffic, your niche, how well your sales copy is written and which affiliate program you have joined. For bloggers looking into trying out affiliate marketing you should start by joining affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and LinkShare and try to promote some products that would be right for your readers.

Advantages
• Some affiliate programs have high commissions
• Hand off money earning after setting up code
• Can benefit readers if done correctly

Disadvantages
• Requires effort in research and promoting - The more your work, the greater chance you earn.

Note: This is the method I am using on this post.

PayperPost
PayPerPost is a paid posting service where advertisers will pay you to write a post or review on your blog. usually, they will specify what links are required on the post. Some may deem this unethical though but each to his own. Other services have sprung up with the same concept such as TextLinkAds’ ReviewMe so you can check that one out too if this is your kind of game.

Personally, i haven’t tried this method but many bloggers use it to make more income from their blogs. Actually I can’t even get the site to send me my validation email.

How much you will earn will depend on the popularity of your blog and how much time you devote to writing for paid postings.

Go PayPerPost Home

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There are other methods to make money from your blog such as subscriptions, selling links and posts yourself on Internet marketing forums and such. However, I hope the above four methods serves as an introduction for bloggers to start getting some money from their hobby.

No doubt I will go into various methods in more detail in future posts so stay tuned.