I’ll start my first entry about 3 ways you can turn you blog like an ATM machine that just churn out lots of money. Sure, some people do this for nothing but poops and giggles, but for the enterprising individual that I am sure you are, we must look at ways to add revenue to our blogs to actually turn blogging into a successful business. Before we do, it’s important to realize that there’s nothing ethically or morally wrong with monetizing your blog. After all, the products you sell or ads you run from your blog will be aimed to help your readers, and it’s their decision to engage in them at the end of the day. So, let’s look at the various ways to extract some easy money from your blog:
1. Adsense – This is the old classic that still holds true for many bloggers. Because Adsense is so easy to implement into your site, and because the quality of the ads (and relevance) is so high, there’s a lot of potential to get lots of clicks from running this simple script on your site. However, this might not exactly allow you to quit your day job just yet, unless you have a serious amount of traffic coming in to your blog daily.
2. Affiliate programs There’s no end of products you can promote as an affiliate and in many cases (particularly with digital download sales) you can earn a significant share of the revenue, sometimes up to 100% in a few cases. It’s really just a case of finding a good affiliate network, signing up and picking products to promote that tie in with your blog content. The more you hand pick individual products to promote based on individual posts, the higher your revenue will be. Don’t just slap one product on the sidebar; you need to actively presell the product by talking about it, and the problems it solves.
3. Selling advertising space Just like making money from Adsense ads on your blog, there needs to be substantial (and targeted) traffic to your blog in order for you to attract media buyers (the people who buy the ad space from your site). Furthermore, advertisers will want to know precise demographics of your average blog readers, such as their age, location and reading habits (how long they stay on your site and what they respond to in terms of your content and other ads). You can get this information by visiting Quantcast.com and using their scripts to gather all of this data from your blog, which you can then present to interested buyers of ad space on your blog.
These are just some of the ways to attract revenue from your site. Each of the above methods does of course require more training in order for you to reach your maximum profit potential and beyond. Over the following months I will post more entries about the make money online journey.
