Three Ways to Make Money from Your Blog

Three Ways to Make Money from Your Blog Making money from your blog is the in thing to do these days. And why not? It's a way to earn a little extra income every month, and--if you're lucky--you might even be able to turn it into a full-time job. You know, the kind of job where you sleep in every day and go to "work" in your pajamas. It's a dream of many. Let's look at some ways you can achieve that dream with your blog.

There are three big ways you can make money if you have a blog. Oh, there are lots of others, as well (anything you can dream up could possibly bring in income), but these are techniques that I, and many others, have used in order to make money.

1. Sell advertising

This is perhaps the easiest to implement, and programs such as Google Adsense make it painless. You never have to interact with merchants, and you don't even need to have any programming skills. Google supplies you with a snippet of code, which you copy and paste into your blog template. Then when visitors visit your site, they'll not only see your content, but they'll see the advertisements. If they click on them, you get paid.

You can place the ads anywhere on your site, but try to place them as close to the content as you can in order to get them noticed. Also put them "above the fold" (this means they should show up as soon as people load the page, before they have to scroll down) for maximum exposure. It goes without saying that you'll make more money if people notice your ads.

If you don't want to work with a program such as Adsense, there's nothing stopping you from working independently with merchants. If you have a blog with a lot of traffic, especially if it focuses on a certain industry or "niche," you can sell text links or banner links.

You can go out and ask companies if they'd like to advertise, but sometimes just putting up a link on your blog with information on your rates is enough to get people asking you to advertise.

With both Adsense and the independent selling of ads, your mileage will depend a lot on the topic you blog about and how much traffic you get. More traffic will always earn you more money.

2. Affiliate programs

Another way to make money from your blog is to sign up for affiliate programs with merchants. This is the Internet version of working on commission. You sign up for a program, use special links to promote the company on your blog, and then you get paid if someone clicks through from your site and buys something from the merchant.

There are many, many affiliate programs out there, so you can probably find something appropriate to promote in just about any niche. Simply go to one of your favorite online stores and look around to see if they have an affiliate program. If they do, you can often find the link, which will say something like "affiliates" or "associates," down in the footer of the site. You can also join a big affiliate site like Commission Junction or LinkShare.

These guys act as middlemen. From their sites you can browse through hundreds or even thousands of merchants with affiliate programs. You're sure to find something that matches your blog and may be of interest to your readers.

3. Write sponsored posts

This is a relatively new way to make money from your blog, but it's quickly catching on in popularity. It's a form of advertising where the promotion meshes with the content you write. Basically you write paid posts for companies. They pay you $10 or $25 or some such (a lot of what you get depends on how heavily trafficked your blog is), and you write a post that mentions their company, reviews one of their products, or some such.

How do you find companies that are willing? You can join a program, such as Pay Per Post, which acts as the middle man and hooks you up with companies who are willing to pay for posts in your blog (with this program, a price is set by the company). You can also go to webmaster forums, such as the Digital Point Forums, and start a thread that says you're willing to post about companies on your blog for money. This way you get to set the price, and advertisers come to you.

Now that we've looked at three big ways to make money from your blog, hopefully you have some ideas and are looking forward to getting started. Remember, the key to doing well is to get traffic, so don't forget to promote your own blog while you're working on making money from it.

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