If you’ve got your own blog, or are thinking about starting one to potentially earn additional income from it, here are 8 different money making methods that you might like to consider. It’s also important to realize that many of these money making techniques can be used concurrently in order to dramatically increase the amount of income you can generate from your blog. You’re not just limited to one of these money making ideas!
Google AdSense
Perhaps one of the most popular and easiest ways for a blogger to earn revenue from their blog. The Google Adsense program allows bloggers to place contextually relevant text link ads throughout their blog posts and pages for third party advertisers. Every time one of your blog visitors’ clicks on one of those advertisements you’ll earn a percentage of the advertisers cost to advertise.
After installing the Google Adsense code on your blog, ad placement and display is totally automated so all you’ll need to do is focus on generating more visitors which in turn will result in more clicks on the advertisements. Ease of implementation and the fact that visitors don’t have to purchase anything in order for you to earn income is what makes Google Adsense one of the more popular ways of making money with your blog.
Promoting Affiliate Products
There are literally tens of thousands of different products and services available on the internet, and many have an affiliate program attached to them. When you sign up as an affiliate for a specific product (or network of products) you then simply recommend those products to your blog readers and visitors. If one of those visitors goes on to buy that product through your unique affiliate link, you’ll earn a percentage of the sale price. This can range from as little as 5% right the way up to as much as 75% of the total sale price.Many individual companies run their own affiliate programs but there are also networks that you can join such as ClickBank.com and Commission Junction. eBay also allows you to earn commissions for referring people to auctions and Amazon.com allows you to earn commissions by referring people to literally any product or service you can imagine. The trick to making more money here is to find affiliate products that are closely related to the topic of your blog and the interests of your audience.
Promoting CPA Offers
Very similar to promoting affiliate products, recommending and promoting CPA offers (cost per action offers) to your visitors can also be a very lucrative way to make money with your blog. The idea is the same however with CPA offers you don’t have to rely on your visitors and readers actually making a purchase in order to generate revenue. Instead you get paid every time one of your visitors takes a specific action.
For example, that might be filling out a contact information form requesting more information about insurance offers or other “free offers” companies have in order to generate leads and more customers. With CPA offers often you’ll earn less “per action completed” in comparison to an affiliate sale, however because visitors are not required to make a purchase you can often get more people to complete that action thus increasing your total money making potential.
Offering Paid Blog Posts
Once your blog has a reasonably sized audience you might consider offering paid blog posts to other webmasters, advertisers and companies that would like to gain exposure to your audience. These paid blog posts might be a review of a specific company’s product, website, or service, or they might simply be useful information that the advertiser wants to share with your audience in order to build their credibility and expand their reach online.
The price your offer for a paid blog post will largely be determined by the number of visitors your blog receives and the amount of readers it has. Obviously the more exposure you can offer an advertiser the more you can charge. You can also offer paid blog post options directly and accept payment via PayPal, or you can signup to one of the third party paid blog networks that help facilitate matching bloggers and advertisers together for a small percentage of the advertising cost. Offering paid blog posts and reviews can be an excellent way to make money blogging, not only are you getting paid but you’re also providing useful content to your blog readers at the same time.
Selling Direct Advertising
Another money making option for bloggers that have managed to attract a decent sized audience and following is to offer advertising options directly from your blog itself. This might include banner advertising, text link advertising, or as mentioned above, paid blog posts or reviews. By selling advertising directly you can often generate more advertising income as you don’t have to offer a share of that income to an ad broker who brings you the advertisers. The flip side to that coin is that it can sometimes prove to be difficult to find the advertisers yourself.
If you do offer direct advertising options, you should make it extremely clear what the advertiser will be getting, for how long, how much it will cost and make it easy for them to make payment and send their advertising details. In relation to taking payment, most advertisers will be able to pay via PayPal.com and it’s a very easy way for anyone to accept payments online.
Starting A Newsletter
Starting a newsletter to compliment your blog is not only a great way to attract loyal visitors back to your blog on a regular basis (which increases the chances of earning income through all the other money making methods discussed here), but it can also add yet another way to make money from your blog.
Every time you publish your newsletter you’ll see visitors return, and those visitors will click on your Google Adsense ads, check out the affiliate products you recommend and so on and so forth dramatically increasing your revenues. Not only that, but when you have a few hundred readers on your newsletter you then also have the option of offering “newsletter advertising” to interested companies. And once again, the bigger your newsletter becomes, the more you can charge for newsletter advertising.
Developing Your Own Product
If you think you’ve got what it takes to write a special report or even a complete book, then you might even consider developing your own product and offering it for sale to your blog visitors and readers. By developing your own product you’ll not only earn more for every sale you make (as you’re no longer earning a percentage of sales as an affiliate), but you’ll also be building a very lucrative mailing list of proven buyers which you can continue to sell to in the future.
In addition, it opens the possibilities of starting your own affiliate program and having hundreds of other bloggers promoting your product for you as affiliates which can increase sales ten fold. Obviously any product you develop will need to be closely aligned with the interests of your blogging audience.
Selling Your Blog Itself
There are many people online that make money exclusively by developing new niche blogs and then selling them on for a profit. The term is called “blog flipping”. The idea here is to simply build a small niche blog, filled with useful content for readers, build up a decent sized audience and then sell that blog to someone interested in developing it further.
A blog receiving as many as 100 visitors per day can often sell for as much as $2,000 or potentially a lot more depending on the niche. The price you’ll get can also be increased further if you receive more visitors, are making reasonable money through any of the money making methods mentioned here, if you have a decent sized newsletter and so on. The great thing about blogging is that you’re building a real asset that has real value.
Are you making money blogging? Do you have any other interesting money making ideas to help generate revenue from a blog? Be sure to share your comments below.