While browsing the articles on my blog, I noticed that most of them don’t appear to be very friendly toward 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 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, suppose you are relatively new to blogging or Internet marketing. In that case, you may not know that the advertisement industry is a market that 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 their blog in many different ways, no matter their skill or experience level. I will now introduce you to the most common means by which bloggers make the most money…
Pay Per Click Ads
Pay Per Click ads are everywhere you look on the Internet and are probably the most popular and 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 come across an AdSense ad, if not even clicked on one before. These are the self and the same ads you can publish on your 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 on its actual content. Since the ads are relative to the content, this increases the chances of someone visiting your site clicking the ad since it is more likely to display something interesting. For example, if you have a blog about football and run context-based ads on your site, the ads will be related to football. At the same time, this works mostly; in some situations, the ads served on your page may not seem relevant to the content. A few things can cause this, but two main causes are the poor use of keywords in your content and the lack of advertisers in your niche if it is tiny.
Widgets
Widgets are viral and usually reside in a blogger’s sidebar. New services are constantly popping out from the virtual woodwork and throwing new devices at people. Quite a new entry to the advertising widget playing field is Widgetbucks. They are called Widgetbucks simply because they serve their ads on a machine. Other than this, they are essentially the same as most other PPC programs. If you search for other devices, 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 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 purchasing them digitally. If you can of digital development, be it a video game, music tracks, sound effects, or screen savers, then you have the opportucanough your blog or website.
When it comes to selling digital products, one place I highly recommend is Clickbank. If you want to sell a digital product, you can allow Clickbank to handle it for you for a small commission. Clickbank not only allows you to sell your 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 much 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 she had already registered. After looking through the 3-inch thick folder and reading a few poems, I realized this could be a valuable skill for 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 how she could roll poetry off her tongue like….something that moves a lot I also suggested writing custom verses for people for special occasions. We are now discussing various ways 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 designs, such as mugs and shirts, and even print books with your 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. Cafepress offers products sold at a standard price, which you can 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 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 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 blog.
Affiliate Marketing
It isn’t easy to succeed in affiliate marketing as it requires much general marketing knowledge. Affiliate marketing is the closest thing to selling your 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, the rewards can be huge if you keep at it and become successful. Running affiliate ads on your blog is easy, and you could probably expect to make a few dollars here and there, but making big money will take a lot 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 you can promote through your blog. Amazon currently provides 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 income, then look into affiliate marketing. However, you should be prepared for some hard work 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 do so shortly after art to offer free wordpress plugins and templates. Donations tend to bring in more on blogs and sites that provide 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. Free services tend to work best because, often, someone may be looking for a plugin or a script to gain certain functionality from their website but can’t afford to hire a professional. 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. Many 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, you can always take it down and try something else. Experimenting with different ways to monetize your blog can be quite fun, and seeing the other results from each method is interesting.
