10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog

With that out of the way, let’s get started:

1. Contextual Advertising

Surprise, surprise. Advertising is easily the most popular blog monetization tactic, mostly due to it being the easiest thing to implement. Advertising comes in many forms, and contextual advertising is the most popular due to Google Adsense and it’s general success with blogs and niche sites.

I’m going to assume everyone reading this is familiar with it, but I think it should be mentioned that too many bloggers assume that Adsense is the best solution for their blog. For some blogs and topics it works great, for others, not very well at all.

My advice is to not limit your blog to one ad network or just one form of advertising. Other contextual options include the Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, Clicksor, AdSonar, and others. It’s not easy to manually test all these though if you’re shuffling ad tags around and randomly allocating your impressions to them, using a ad network management tool like RMX Direct can help you manage, evaluate, and control your various ad networks.

2. Display Advertising

As I mentioned above, contextual networks aren’t always the best solution for blogs. In some cases there aren’t enough advertisers in niche topics, and in others the users just isn’t likely to click. In this case, you want to be working with ad networks that provide CPM display advertising. This means you get paid something for every ad viewed, opposed to only getting paid per click.

Just like with contextual networks, it’s important to use multiple display ad networks to get more variety from your ads, to not let any one network control your inventory, and to make sure you’re earning the most amount of money possible.

3. Targeted Advertising

The most desirable form of advertising is having companies that wish to pay good rates to advertise on your blog directly whether it’s text or image ads. Many bloggers feel that this is a pipe dream, but I speak from experience from running a wakeboarding blog for many years that you can make solid income from targeted advertising without having insane amounts of traffic.

There are a number of key things you have to do though in order to get this type of advertising:
Have a blog with leading content in your niche and a professional design
Create a “media kit” which is essentially a page on your blog that explains that you take targeted advertising, what your rates are, demographics of your users, your traffic levels, examples of the types of ads people can run, testimonials from any companies that have advertised with you, and a phone number and email address they can use to get more information.
Have obvious “Advertise On This Blog” links in key places on your blog.
Give a company or two in your niche free or very low-cost advertising in order to get the ball rolling. When advertisers see their competitors or companies similar to them advertising, they get the idea that it’s available. If all they ever see is Adsense ads, they might not realize it’s an option.
Be willing to be creative to help your advertisers achieve their goals, and lower your price to get the deals.
Provide statistics and results to your advertisers. Use an ad server like RMX Direct, phpAdsNew, or something similar which has the ability to create reports per advertiser.

Once you’ve set your blog up properly, start approaching companies in your niche who will want to reach your traffic. You don’t need to go after the biggest companies, there are many small companies who are looking to get better results from the web, and they might not even know about your blog. You don’t need to be an ad sales professional, you just need to present your case well on why they’re missing out if they don’t advertise on your traffic. Make it easy on them to work with you, help them create ads, help them determine what sizes to use, and work with them to make sure they get the results they need. It seems like hard work at first, but after you get a solid base of advertisers going, it’s a great source of income and it starts to streamline.

4. Text Link Advertising

Another somewhat unobtrusive form of advertising is using services like Text Link Ads or Adbrite to sell text ads directly to companies. This is pretty low effort and often doesn’t take up too much space on a site, so it’s easy to implement and try out. It should be noted though that you need significant traffic for it to be a big source of income.

5. Affiliate Links

One of the older web monetization methods is still as good today as it’s always been. If you’ve got a blog in a specific area, there’s a very large chance that there are companies out there that sell products or services your users are interested in. You can earn some nice income recommending or linking to those products.

Amazon.com is probably the most common affiliate merchant used by bloggers, but I’d advise finding other unique merchants who may pay better and be more specific to your topic. Amazon is always there as an option, but you’re more likely to get more help from the merchant if you go with a smaller company.

Another nice thing about affiliate links is that they fit well with quality content. Reviewing products and services for your users is valuable content, and if you can make money off it as well it’s a great combination. A word of warning though that you shouldn’t change your reviews or be biased due to the fact you can make money off a referral.

While traffic also helps for affiliate links, it can sometimes be an easier way to generate income without high traffic levels like advertising requires. As an example I did a review of a web analytics application a couple of years ago, and this blog had very little traffic at that point. I referred two sales through that review though that still earn me $150 a month every month two years later.

6. Selling Your Content (Ebooks, Videos, DVDs)

If you’ve got great content, another option is to package it and sell it. There are numerous bloggers who have created ebooks and even real books based on their blog content and made great income selling them. You can also expand to infoproducts like videos, DVDs, audio CDs, and printed books on demand.

This can take some significant work and it requires great content to actually sell, but it can be a nice income stream that lasts a long time.

7. Consulting

Depending on your topic and your level of expertise, you can sell consulting services. If you’re a web analytics expert, you could offer web analytics consulting services on your blog for an hourly fee. This takes very little work to setup beyond creating a page outlining your services, getting a standard contract, and having a way to take payments from companies. Again though, it just takes a little bit of effort to let people know that consulting services are available.

8. Donations

Not quite as common as it once was, it used to be fairly common for bloggers to ask for donations on their blog through Paypal or some other service. This only works if you have a dedicated userbase, and a large enough number of users that their donations add up. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re also putting a lot of advertising and other monetization methods on your blog. You’ll come off as a bit too greedy in that case.

9. Selling Products

Besides infoproducts, you can sell real products like t-shirts, bumper stickers, clothing, or whatever other kind of merchandise makes sense for your topic. Companies like Goodstorm, CafePress, Lulu, and others make it easy by creating the products based on your design and letting you set up a shop. There is no risk to bloggers, which makes it a great opportunity.

10. Selling Your Blog

Perhaps the most extreme of the blog monetization methods, but it can be lucrative! If you aren’t attached to your blog and are willing to part with it, you can usually find a buyer for it. Your blog must be pretty good, and have a level of traffic worth buying, and it really helps if you already have some income streams going for it. Blogs usually sell for 12-24 times monthly revenues, and there are numerous places you can sell them like eBay and the Sitepoint Marketplace.

Conclusion

It definitely takes some work to monetize your site well, and having good traffic really helps out. Work on building a blog with a solid userbase, and you should be on your way to generating income using any of the methods above. Good luck, and please share any blog monetization experiences you have in the comments.

How writing paid posts MAY increase Google Adsense

Many people are terribly afraid of the mention of ‘paid posts’. I have read and seen so many naysayers telling us that we are going to be struck down dead and left to rot by the Big G if they ever found us writing paid posts. A few probloggers have called us whoring for a few bucks. I don’t totally agree nor do I totally disagreed. It’s my business what I want to do with my own blog so they can jeer all they want.

I believe bloggers should have a balance number of non-paid posts and paid posts. Even a paid-post bloggers can make their blogs interesting if they have the flair for writing. And non-paid post bloggers do produce boring craps even when they are writing solely for the sake of blogging.

However, my topic today is how writing paid posts MAY increase our Google Adsense income. Note that I emphasize the MAY because it is just my own theory and based on what I noticed.

You see, if we are merely blogging about our dogs, our homes, our kids and stuffs like that, we hardly hit on any important keywords. Keywords make all the difference. There are magical keywords that will give you lots of moolah. And if you haven’t already noted, most of our paid posts have very high paying keywords. The advertisers asked us to insert those few terms like DUI, ohio lemon law, debt consolidation and etc. Do you realise that these are high paying keywords?

Let’s see what these keywords estimates are. I copy them from the Top Adsense Keywords. Pardon the wrong alignment. And don’t believe everything you see there.

Below are the top 50 highest paying keywords from our database.
Keyword Clicks / Day Average CPC

federal loan consolidation 2.2 $60.04
term life quotes 2.7 $58.40
indiana lemon law 0.9 $58.21
home equity loan rates 6.4 $57.26
equity loan rates 7.3 $56.98
mesothelioma lawyers 0.62 $56.01
life insurance quotes 22 $55.72
student loan consolidation 17 $55.15
home equity line credit 3.6 $54.90
equity line of credit 24 $54.17
term life insurance quotes 5.2 $53.39
miami dui lawyer 0.05 $53.15
donate car 45 $52.57
home equity line of credit 22 $52.30
term insurance quotes 2.3 $51.96
term life ins 3 $51.77
debt consolidation loan 15 $50.95
conference calling services 0.83 $50.51
home equity 37 $50.20
equity line 5.7 $49.79
student loan consolidations 0.76 $49.76

Now, I am sure many paid posts blogger notice these are familiar terms that we have used many times over in our paid posts. Do you see the benefits of taking the occassional paid posts on our blogs? If not for them, we probably are still writing about the foods we ate, the shoes we bought and never realised those loans and insurances keywords will make better income for us. If our post gets on the search engines and someone clicks on our adsense, we benefit. So, writing paid posts is actually a win-win situation in the long run. Just don’t over do it.

source

“I make eggs (zero income) from my Google Adsense!”

I was in a group MSN chat the other day and wasn’t really paying attention to the whole topic until I saw that someone ‘have three eggs’ per day. I was like, WOW, those cholesterol! They only realised that I thought they really mean chicken eggs.

Actually, they were lamenting that sometimes, their Google Adsense have zero income, i.e. 0.00. Well, let me share a bit about my Google Adsense ride because I just realised that I have official earned USD8K in the last two years. I joined Google Adsense in August 2005. Before that I was banned once due to fradulent clicks. Yay! I earned the ‘Bad blogger’ status before.

Here are what you should know before having ideas that Google Adsense is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Hmmm..google, goose, adsense, no cents. Nice eh?

1) If you have no traffic you can ditch your Adsense or you may end up with depression and a serious issue with your self-esteem.

2) Google Adsense is like that ‘Exit’ door to many people who are noobs. So, if you are blogging for tech geeks and those who are in the more ‘literate’ group, you can forget about it. But if you are catering to kids and grandmas, then, it is worth putting that ‘Exit’ door. In fact, I have never clicked on a single Adsense for as long as I remember. LOL.

Why Exit? Because when someone ‘fell’ into your blog, they need to get out somewhere. So, those Adsense are their way of ‘going out’ of your blog.

3) Expect zero income for months if you have no niche topic.

4) If you read about people earning big money from Adsense, I can tell you that 80% of them are lying.

5) Google Adsense is like a time bomb, about to detonate anytime. You never know when your account is going to be suspended. And income is never stable. One day you get a lot, next whole week, nothing much, then it spikes and up and down it goes.

How to earn money from Adsense then?

a) Build your blog content, focus on specific topics;

b) Build your traffic;

c) Spy around those blogs that you look up to and try to use the same format they use;

d) Forget that you have the ads there;

e) Read my blog and especially those topics under the specific category related to making money

Source

How many Inbound Links Do You Need?

http://www.blogformoney.org/

Today, I am going to focus on Page Rank again. As you may know, SEO talks about two things - On-page optimization and Off-page optimization. You can handle the on-page optimization without any problem since you can have full control on what to show or to have in your site. On the other hand, it is not under your control in case of off-page optimization which talks about the inbound links. As the title of this post implies, how many links do you need to in order to achieve certain PR of your site? First of all, let's look at the table below:



Therefore, as you can see from the above table, if you want to achieve Pagerank 6, you need at least 18.5 external Pagerank 6 links, 101 external Pagerank 5 links, or 555 external Pagerank 4 links. Of course, getting inbound links from a higher PR site will become harder. Sometimes, you may need to pay for those inbound links. It depends on you whether it is worth to buy those inbound links. This table partly relfect the truth that you should get as many links as possible. But, if you really want to get external links from other websites, make sure that those websites provide similar content as your website. Remember, we want good external links. And, bad external links will definitely hurt your website’s Pagerank.

Google PageRank(TM)

External linking is the largest factor in determining PageRank, and is the place where you have the least control. There is no way to force another web master to link to your site, especially when they already have a high PageRank. For this reason and many more, increasing your PageRank is difficult, but important nonetheless. In this section we will discuss why external linking is important to the PageRank of your web pages, what the correct way to link is, who to request links from and why these links have such importance.

The actual amount of effect that Google's PageRank has on the ranking of a website or web pages is debated, and it is probably safe to say that Google will not be letting us know anytime soon. What we do know is that a web page's PR does play a role in Google's indexing and Google's ranking. The higher a web page's PageRank, the more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed. While in most cases, a higher PR will accompany a higher-ranking site; it is not always the case. As we mentioned earlier, a high PR can sometimes be the icing on the cake, or what gives a strong hold on a good ranking.

PageRank is a pretty complex mathematical calculation, but can be broken down into a simple version. PageRank is Google's scoring of Page A. This scoring is based on the external links that point to Page A, and certain variables within the pages that the links come from. A link from Page B is held as a vote for Page A, and if Page B has a high PageRank, this will is taken into account and will have a positive effect when calculating the PR of Page A. If Page B, C, and D, all link to Page A, but Page B, C, and D all have a PR of 2, then this will be taken into account when calculating the web page's PageRank. In the second situation, the pages with low PageRank's that link to Page A will not affect Page A's PR in a negative effect, but will also not affect it in a positive way.

Another very important part of the PageRank calculation is the use of on page criteria and title tags by Google when determining PageRank. When Google is determining the PR of Page A by evaluating the votes, or links, from Page B and others, it will also take into account the on page criteria and title tags of Page B and other links that are pointing to Page A. If Page A's target keywords and theme are "widgets" then this is what Google will look for in the external links that are pointing to your site. If Page B, C, and D all have a high PR (above 6), and all have the keyword "widgets" in the on page criteria and title tag, Google will notice this and use these links when determining Page A's Page Rank. What does this mean?

This means that when contacting other websites to link to your site in the attempt to build and increase your Page Rank, these web pages that you are requesting a link from should be relevant and of the same theme and market of the page that you are requesting they link to. Perform a search for your target keyword in Google, ODP, and Yahoo to start, and check the top 40 ranking sites. Can you find a place where they would place a link to your web page? If so, contact them and request that they link to your site. Be prepared for them to ask for a reciprocal link. Dig through your category and related categories in the Google directory, and contact sites that are listed high within each category. Google's directory will show you the PageRank of each site listed in the category, which help you to determine which site's are of the highest value to contact.

Another important part of the external linking campaign is the actual links and the way that they are formatted. Following the same example that we have been using, let's assume that you are attempting to improve the ranking for a web page that targets "widgets". Still following the example above, you would contact other websites with a high PageRank that target "widgets" and ask them to link to your "widgets" page. To maximize results from these links, you would want the link text pointing to your site to read "widgets", or other link text that is keyword rich and descriptive.

To continue upon the external linking development for your website, there is another point that must be made that will be crucial to the successful building of PageRank. One common mistake when building PageRank is that webmasters or search engine optimization professionals will contact other webmasters and request that they only link to the homepage or the top level of a section. This can have two effects, which will be explained shortly, but the pages that are below these pages linked to will not encounter the full effects of being linked to.

If you request a link to a top-level page or the homepage of your site, this will have a positive effect on this page. If the PageRank of this page increases, then the page below it will increase (if the internal linking structure is correct), but it will still be one PageRank number below the page above it that was linked to. If you have quality content pages that are deep in your site structure, you will have to go further than this to increase the PageRank for those pages.

Let's follow an example. Your site's main topic is "flowers", with one of the next sub-directories being "roses". Within the sub-directory "roses", you have 4 different sub-directories: "yellow roses", "red roses", "pink roses", and "white roses". Within these 4 sub-directories, you have a number of pages dealing with each type of flower. The way that this site is set up follows the themed approach.

Now let's suppose that your site is of decent stature and Google gives the homepage a PageRank of 6. (A PageRank of 6 is good, but it is not good enough that you wouldn't want to increase it.) With the home page at 6, the second level, "roses", would have a PR of 5, each sub-category, "yellow roses" for example, would have a PR of 4, and the pages below that would have a PR of 3. These sub-categories and pages that are below are the niche keywords and the ones that are going to bring you the targeted traffic that is easily converted.

To increase the PageRank of these pages and sub-categories, first you need to follow the internal linking structure that was outlined and illustrated earlier in this tutorial. Next you need to work on the external linking, or link popularity, for each page and sub-category page. Following the example above, you should start with the homepage and work your way down. Since the theme of the homepage is "flowers", search for pages and sites with a high PR that have the same theme of "flowers" and request that they link to your homepage. The second level is "roses", so you would want to search for web pages and websites that have the theme or main topic "roses" and request that they link to your "roses" section. (If you have them link to the homepage, this will not work) See the pattern forming here?

One problem that you may encounter is finding sites or pages with a high PR that match your theme. For example, it may be difficult to find sites that are dedicated to simply "white roses", and not just "roses" or "flowers". Instead of the desired linking pages having a PR of 6 or 7, they have a mere 3 or 4. If this is the case, you should ask for the links from these pages with a mediocre PageRank, and then continue your search. Seek out more of these sites to make up for the low PageRank. Once you have contacted these sites within your theme or main topic, you should contact some of the sites from the level above and request that they link to these pages.

Your site and pages within your site must meet certain criteria for this to work, with one piece being the most important: the site and pages within your site must be quality content that people will actually want to link up to. This is one of the basic points of PageRank: Google can tell which pages and sites are authorities as they have a large number of high quality links pointing them. If your site is full of spam, or otherwise undesired content, it may be difficult to get the quality links, whether internal or external, that you need for a high PR.