Ready to Make Money from your Blog?

Of course you are, that’s why you’re here reading this…

Now that you’ve got your blog up and running, established your social network and bringing in traffic, you’re ready to make money with your blog.

There are a couple of different thoughts about when you should start monetizing your blog. I think you can start as soon as you are up and running. So long as you focus on creating good content, it won’t hurt to have some ads or affiliate recommendations on your blog.

But what are some of the ways that you can monetize your blog without going overboard?

Here are a few of the ways that you can make money with your blog. I recommend a mixture of these so that you are diversifying your income streams:

Pay Per Post

This is a good way to make money from your blog when your other income streams are a little slow. There are a few sites out there that will pay you for a review of a product or review of their website. You can find these projects through networks like blogsvertise. The pay for each review can be anywhere between $5 to upwards of $20 per post. While you won’t make it rich doing this, it can be some steady money from your blog when you need it.

Advertising

This is one of the most straightforward ways to make money from your blog. Many people like to use google’s adsense. Google adsense is contextual advertising. You can set up an advertising with their code, which automatically pulls ads that are related to the content on your page. Google will then pay you a certain amount whenever someone clicks on the ad. Many people find this to be a good source of income, and I do generate some money on niche sites with Google Adsense, although it is not my preferred method of advertising. You will find that Google can be restrictive with their terms, requiring a blog to be 6 months old and their payout threshold is $100, which can take some time to hit if your traffic is average.

A good alternative to google adsense is Chitika, which also pays out on a clickthrough basis. Chitika is also a contextual advertising network as well, but they display their ads a differently than google. Chitika bases their relevance on search terms. They only display their ads when someone comes to your blog through a search engine. Other visitors don’t see their ads at all. The ads they do display are specifically designed for the search term of the visitor. As such, they are extremely targeted. Chitika ads are particularly good for niche sites that are search engine optimized. If you’ve done proper SEO and researched your keyword phrases well, Chitika can have quite a high clickthrough rate. For many, this is a great program to make money from a blog.

The third method of advertising is to work with advertisers directly or through a network and charge them directly just for ad placement. This way you can set a specific rate for the advertisement to be placed on your site and not have to worry about clickthrough rate. You’ll get the best rates with this method by working with advertisers directly. A good way to manage these is through a plugin called oio publisher direct. This plugin allows you to automate the process of selling advertising space on your blog. The plugin costs $47 to purchase, however you can use our coupon “WINDFALL-JOURNEY” for a $10 discount.

Affiliate Marketing

This is the process of promoting a product for someone else and you will earn a commission if someone makes a purchase through your link. There are several major affiliate marketing networks that basically provide a marketplace of products to promote.

Two popular networks are Clickbank and Commission Junction. These are both good places to start your affiliate marketing career.

You’ll find that virtual products generally give more commission for a sale than material products. On either Clickbank or Commission Junction, which both carry a variety of virtual products, you can find good products that will give you up to 90% in commission. I recommend though that you stick to promoting the familiar products, preferably ones that you already use.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention Amazon’s affiliate program. You can round out the products that your promote by joining Amazon.com’s affiliate program. While their commissions are on the low end, they make up for it with their name branding.

Services

These are programs that offer a recurring service to their customer. There are a variety of these programs available. Many of them come with a free trial. These programs provide value above and beyond a simple single purchase product. Again, I recommend sticking with the programs that you already use, so that you can speak to and demonstrate the value that they provide to others.

A couple of programs that I like are the Free Traffic System and Socialoomph. The Free Traffic System is an article distribution network that allows you to publish your article, with your backlinks to a number of different blogs, while Socialoomph is a service that helps you increase your social networking presence. Both of these programs have a completely free membership that I would recommend trying out.

Twitter

While this isn’t technically making money from your blog, twitter is a rapidly growing resource. If you followed my tips on gaining twitter followers, you will have several thousand followers by now. While, I’d be careful not to spam your followers, you can certainly leverage your large following into generating some extra income.

There have been a number of twitter ad networks on the rise. These work much the same way that advertising on your blog. These networks will pay you, generally on a pay per click basis, to tweet out their ads.

There are several networks available. I use two programs: Sponsored Tweets and Mylikes. Sponsoredtweets allows you to set a price for your tweets as well as get paid on a pay per click model. So far, I’ve been using Sponsored tweets for a couple of weeks and have already made money from tweeting their ads. However, I believe the best use of sponsored tweets is to use them to advertise, since you can set your own price per clicks to as low as $0.02. This allows you to get relatively inexpensive pay per click advertising for your product or website.

For making real money on twitter, I prefer Mylikes. Mylikes doesn’t simply connect to your twitter account, but also allows you to set up your ads on your other social networks such as facebook. Secondly they have a good supply of advertisers and they pay out well. I get up to $0.44 per click for their ads. Finally, they pay out every week at a threshold of $2.00. This low threshold rate make Mylikes one of my steadiest paychecks.

You can read my detailed guide on making money with Mylikes here.

Have you started making money from your blog?

These are just a few of the ways that I’ve used to make money blogging. I’d recommend using a mixture of these methods to get started with your money making methods. If you have any other ideas that you’ve been using to make money with your blog, please share them with a comment!