While browsing through the articles over on my blog, I have noticed that most of them don’t appear to be very friendly towards new bloggers.
You often find that the more experienced you become in a subject, the more difficult it is to write helpful articles for new people.
This is my first article to be aimed at people new to blogging and concentrates on the most popular methods to make an income from their blog.
I’m sure you know that the web is crawling with advertisements. Still, if you are relatively new to blogging or Internet marketing, in general, you may not know that the advertisement industry is a market that literally anyone can tap into and take a share of the profits.
Due to the sheer size of the web and the opportunities available, a blogger can make money from his or her blog in many different ways, no matter their skill or experience level. I am now going to introduce you to the most common means by which bloggers are currently making the most money…
Pay Per Click Ads
Pay Per Click ads are literally everywhere you look on the Internet and probably the most popular and most effective way a blogger can cash in from their blog. As a PPC publisher, by publishing the ads on your pages, you gain the opportunity of earning revenue every time someone clicks one of your ads.
Google currently offers the largest, most successful Pay Per Click ad service. Unless this is the first time you have used the Internet, I can say that you have at least came across an AdSense ad if not even clicked on one before. These are the self and same ads you can publish on your own website or blog to make money.
There is one major factor in making money from PPC, and that is targeted traffic. The big thing with current Pay Per Click ad programs is that the ads are contextually relevant to your website’s content. Contextual ads are ads that are served to your website or page based upon its actual content. Since the ads are relative to the content, this increases the chances of someone visiting your site actually clicking the ad since it is more likely to be displaying something interesting to them. For example, if you have a blog about football and are running context-based ads on your site, the ads will be related to football. While this works most of the time, some situations in which the ads served on your page may not seem relevant to the content. A few things can cause this, but two of the main causes are a poor use of keywords in your content and the lack of advertisers in your niche if it is a tiny one.
Widgets
Widgets are viral and usually reside in a blogger’s sidebar. There are constantly new services popping out from the virtual woodwork and throwing new widgets at people. Quite a new entry to the advertising widget playing field is Widgetbucks. They are called Widgetbucks simply because they serve their ads in a widget. Other than this, they are essentially the same thing as most other PPC programs. If you search around for other widgets, you can monetize your blog; you should have no problems finding some interesting ones.
Selling Services
If you can offer any form of service online, then this can potentially hold massive profits. Maybe you are a professional writer or designer. Services like these can be incredibly profitable, and your blog is a great place to advertise and sell them.
Selling Digital Products
Anything that you can offer through online distribution methods can be sold as a digital product. Fewer people are buying music, video games, and software and are now opting to purchase them digitally. If you have the ability to create any form of digital product, be it a video game, music tracks, sound effects, screen savers, then you have the opportunity to market them through your blog or website.
When it comes to selling digital products, one place I highly recommend is Clickbank. If you have a digital product you would like to sell, you can allow Clickbank to handle it all for you for a small commission. Clickbank not only allows you to sell your own products, but you can also sell other people’s products too. They allow you to sell other people’s products via a specially formatted link on your website or blog, and you will receive a commission on every sale you generate.
Merchandise
With so much competition online for physical product sales, this is probably the hardest revenue stream to break into. However, selling physical products can still make you a lot of money if you do it properly.
I don’t mean widescreen TVs, furniture, video games, movies, or anything like that by-merchandise. Recently a family member mentioned how she likes to write poetry, and she showed me some that she had already written. After looking through the 3-inch thick folder and reading a few poems, it dawned on me that this could be a valuable skill to her. The cherry on the cake was when she said that she had previously had two of her poems published in a poetry book, so I suggested selling them online as framed pictures with the poems as an overlay and seeing as how she can roll poetry off her tongue like….something that rolls a lot I also suggested writing custom verses for people for special occasions. We are now discussing various ways in which her poetry could be integrated into different products and have plans to build a blog where she can market them.
For those who do not have the means to create a physical product, you can always use a Cafepress service. Cafepress allows you to run a store full of products with your own designs such as mugs and shirts and will even print books with your own content, which you can then sell for a profit. All you need to do is create a design, and you can upload it to the website and preview it on your products. The products that Cafepress offers are sold at a standard price, which you can then add to. Whatever the difference in price after adding to it will be your profit.
Paid Reviews
A paid review is where you may get contacted by another blogger or website owner with a request for you to write a review and post it on your blog for a one-time payment. This income stream relies quite a lot on the status of the blogger. If you are a new blogger, then you shouldn’t expect to get results like this until further down the line when you have established yourself better.
Paid Writing
This wouldn’t be a direct revenue stream from your blog, but it would more than likely be your blog that would get you noticed for your writing skills. A skilled writer may find the content on their blog enticing other bloggers to request a paid post for their own blog.
Affiliate Marketing
It isn’t easy to succeed in affiliate marketing as it requires quite a bit of general marketing knowledge to do well. Affiliate marketing is the closest thing to selling your own products and is very different from other ways of making money online, making it quite difficult. While being one of the hardest ways to generate a return, if you keep at it and become successful, the rewards can be huge. Running affiliate ads on your blog is easy, and you could probably expect to make a few dollars here and there, but to make big money will take quite a bit of time, research, and experience. As an affiliate, you will be promoting another person’s product.
When you generate a sale, you will receive a commission for it. The biggest affiliate program to date is probably the one that Amazon runs, but there are so many companies now that offer affiliate programs that you can be sure to find a product that you can promote through your blog. Amazon currently offers a commission of around 4% on most products, but the more expensive products such as electronics tend to have a set commission. If your main purpose of blogging is to generate an income, then be sure to look into affiliate marketing. However, you should be prepared for some hard work if you want to make a decent, reliable profit from it.
Donations
One of my favorites. I haven’t placed a donation link on my primary blog yet, but I will be doing so shortly as so after art to offer free wordpress plugins and templates. Donations tend to bring in more on blogs and sites that offer free services such as website templates, blog themes, WordPress plugins, scripts, free graphics, sounds – anything that you would expect to cost a fair amount of money that is offered for free has a greater chance of generating a donation from a happy customer. The reason free services tend to work the best is that a lot of the time, someone may be looking for a plugin or a script to gain certain functionality from their own website but can’t afford to hire a professional for them. If they find what they are looking for free on your website, they may feel inclined to send you a donation as a thank you!
Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket and NEVER give up if something isn’t working out as you’d hoped it would. A lot of blogs fail simply because the blogger has become disheartened by their results.
I urge you to experiment with any form of potential income stream you can lay your hands on. If something doesn’t perform well, then you can always take it down and try out something else in its place. Experimenting with different ways to monetize your blog can be quite fun, and it is interesting to see the different results from each method.
