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.
Sep 6, 2007
10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog
Promote Your Blog with Blogg-Buzz
A funny thing happened the other day. When I was checking my website statistics for Monetize Your Blog, I noticed a heap of traffic from a referrer called Blogg-Buzz. Now I had not heard of Blogg-Buzz before then, but I headed over pretty quickly to find out what it was.
The following is the blurb from the Blogg-Buzz front page.
Blogg-Buzz is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting!
After looking into it further, it seems that you can use Blogg-Buzz to submit Blog Posts that you think are worthwhile sharing. Once you have registered with Blogg-Buzz, you canA submit blog posts, buzz (vote for) blog posts and make comments on blog posts. The idea is that the better posts will get a better ranking and bring them to the attention of other readers.
Upon reading the Blogg-Buzz FAQ, I found out that as well as submitting posts from other blogs, you can also submit your own posts. They stipulate (among other things) that you should only submit good quality posts, and this makes sense otherwise you might get yourself a reputation and no-one will read anything you buzz. But if you have a post which you think would be of interest to others, you could submit it and see if anyone else likes it.
Anyway, I found out on Blogg-Buzz that Chris from blog-op had buzzed my post on Adsense Section Targeting and it seems a number of other Blogg-Buzz readers liked it as well. My post was displayed in top spot on the main page. That explained all of the traffic.
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Sep 5, 2007
Make Money with money4blogs
money4blogs offers bloggers a chance to make money by adding a link from your blog to a web page belonging to one of their financial companies. You get paid just for the link, not for the number of times the link is clicked.
To find out how much you can get by placing a link on your blog, go to http://money4blogs.com/ and fill in the form on the main page. You will need to provide the following details:
- Your name
- Your email address
- Your blog's url
- The page rank of your blog
Payments are made via Paypal. The amount of the money you will be paid seems to vary according to the page rank of your blog. If your blog is still fairly new, it may pay to wait until your blog has a higher page rank as money4blogs is purchasing the link for one year.
http://monetize-your-blog.blogspot.com/2007/02/make-money-with-money4blogs.html
Sep 4, 2007
Blog Tips for Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization for a blog is similar to optimizing a website but since they are updated frequently and use very little html search engine results are much higher than static website pages.
Keyword(s) In Your Domain
When ever possible you should try and purchase a domain for you blog that uses a primary keyword you want to become optimize for. This is something that I did not give any thought too but have noticed that others that have used this method are more successful for being optimized for a particular keyword.
Primary Key Phrases
Primary key phrases such as “make money online” a key phrase that took the bloggingworld like the black plague. Insure your phrase is included in the title of your blog your phrase and it should also be included in post titles though out your site. Keep in mind though if you are optimizing for a key phrase such as the one above you will have steep competition - maybe consider using a different variation of it for better results.
Keywords In Your Post
Use keywords sporadically in your posts; body text, links to posts (deep linking), images, and outbound links. Now identify a keyword(s) that you hope to get indexed by Google. Keyword(s) should be used though out your article and insure that you use it in the title of the post and it’s within your first two sentences. Remember do not spam your articles with your keywords because it’s off putting to readers.
Get Backlinks
I been successful for get getting backlinks with the following methods; review blogs for link back, commenting dofollow sites, blog networks, free directories, good content and speed linking. Read more about these methods of getting backlinks for search engine optimization.
Update Regularly
Using the rules outlined above update your site daily with quality content. This principle is thoroughly taught by SEOs and they establish principles as to why this is beneficial to search engine optimization. My opinion on updating; it takes good content to keep you readers coming back, linking to your articles. Then eventually search engines will take a hint and index your article to the top by the amount of interest it has.
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Top Blogging Is Not For Everyone
Top Blogging is not for everyone! Starting a new top blog site has to be one of the hardest things that I can think of that someone can attempt to do in life. After you have the site completed and you think that all the bugs are worked out there are most times always extra things that have to be done. Such as with a Wordpress blog, I started this blog 10 February 2007 and I have been installing and tweaking almost everyday it seems.
Anyway so finally you think you are out of update hell and your site is ready to show the world but wait a minute there are 11.5 billion or more other websites on the net. Now being faced with that it is time to give up right, no this is where the hard work comes in and never stops it’s constant!
Take it harsh/blunt or however you like if you can not communicate/write then you should delete your blog now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again content is key and with out it you will fail regardless if you want to make money or give advice/stories away free. If you have not deleted you blog just yet then I would suggest asking yourself a few questions such as:
Can I communicate well?
Can I write effectively?
How computer savvy am I?
How determined am I?
What is my blogs short & long term goals?
Answering questions on paper (or in word) is quite easy. Now all you have to do is come up with the content! The most important aspect of your site, original content that people want to read and then tell others about. The thing that makes a personal blog superior to other websites is that it’s a personal site that allows interaction and bond forming with readers.
Top Blogging is not for everyone and that’s why only a mere 1% out of 100% succeeds. Any Thoughts?
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Blogging and the Reality Time Management
When I decided to address time management I did some research and thought about the courses I have taken in the past in my university studies. This subject can be long and discussed forever but that is not truly necessary in my opinion. Personally I think when it comes right down to it everyone knows what it takes in order to effectively manage time but only a small percent of people actually take those steps. The number one reason in my opinion is laziness and the unwillingness to except change and work hard towards that specific path!
When it comes to blogging time management becomes something that you are hit with right in the face! My personal situation is I’m married with two children and work a full time job so time management plays a big part in making or breaking my continued rising success.
Blogging from looking from the outside may seem very easy to the untrained eye but to actually maintain a family, job and write one article daily can deem to be impossible sometimes with out the discipline of following a success plan.
What is my plan? Simple, kick myself in the a** and then an article takes me about an hour to write and at least thirty minutes to gather my thoughts before hand. When am I able to write my article? The average time that I am able to do this is between 7:30 p.m. & 9:00 p.m. Then any time I have free for; commenting, emails, tweaking, optimizing, researching and reading I take it.
Manage your time by making decisions and acting on them.
Establish a plan for success.
Decide what your priorities are and then concentrate on them.
Apply all to 80/20 Principle of Pareto / Juran.
Time Management Education:
Time management defined is simple just the management of your time into the most productive path for successful outcomes. As simply as it sounds it seems that so many people out there are lacking in this area to an instant that they reach the end of their lives without actually ever succeeding in this area. The time is now to take action and start making decisions that produce results.
There are many time management systems out there that try and entice you into paying money for what ever their given system may be at that time. The reality here is that these plans take your money and distract you from actually accomplishing what it is that you set out to do in the first place. The fact is until you establish a plan that you are willing to go forth with you will never successfully manage your time effectively. Start by finding out what you feel is your blogs purpose and use that reason to coerce yourself into making those needed improvements. Now decide what your blogging priorities are and then start concentrating on them.
Apply the 80/20 Rule by Pareto he established that 20 percent of people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran’s work he identified that 20 percent of defects caused 80 percent of the problems. Ok so given this the 80/20 basically means that 20 percent is essential and 80 percent is inconsequential.
Using this method what you should do is remind yourself daily what 20 percent of blogging is important for success and begin focusing on it first. What are your thoughts on time management and blogging?
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5 Tips How to Find Advertisers
How do you find advertisers for your blog? This is the second most difficult problem you will be faced with in the blogging world if your goal is to become a top blogger! Original content is the most difficult in case you were wondering. There are two methods of finding advertisers; find them yourself and using ad networks. Below are some simple methods of finding advertisers yourself.
Premium Ad Locations
First you must determine the number of advertising spots that will available in your inventory. Then place an advertising page that is easily found on your site with clear instructions of what advertisements you offer. Key: people never liked to be first insure that you have added a few links or ads to sites of your choice to feel the emptiness of the ad location. It’s even possible to make money from blog posts!
Commentators
Most of the time readers that are commenting have a strong interest and a site that is related. Contact them and ask if they would be interested in advertising with your site.
Sites that link
When a company/site has already linked to your site or one of your articles the chances of discussing advertisement on your site has increased significantly. Always take the time to check out sites that link to you and then contact the related sites.
Sites That Advertise
Most companies use some form of advertisement and are already aware of SEO advantages. The key here is to pay close attention when surfing the net and start tracking these sites & related companies that are already advertising with companies such as; AdWords, BlogAds, ClickBank Ads, Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe, Azoogle Ads and then contact them.
Search Niche Sites
This has been the most successful method for Ja Kel Daily. Simple & straight forward open up Google start your start with keywords that are related to your niche. When the search results return the key is to email every site that comes up in relation to your site and eventually you will get a sell – persistence pays off. On this method set up a goal of emailing 5 sites daily!
Stop paying ad networks to sell all of your advertisement and increase site profits by utilizing the simple methods above and start taking responsibility for selling a percentage of ads on your site. A healthy mix of you marketing your site and the ad networks will pay off in the long run - just stay persistence.
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