How would you like to be able to make some money from your blog? Depending on your subject matter, it is possible. Let’s look at some ways to get started.
There was a lot of hype in the last year or so about turning your blog into a cash machine. Many of the ebooks and programs promoted were pretty scammy in general and involved using blogs to generate huge amounts of replicated content and then filling the pages with contextual advertising programs. This is not what we’re going to recommend in this article.
If you’re blogging to help in promoting your business, you may already feel like you’re making money from your blog since you’re pulling in traffic and talking about your business. You could further monetize your efforts by promoting related affiliate programs or displaying contextual advertising.
Affiliate Programs
We’ll let you know right away that grabbing a banner or button from an affiliate program to post on your blog is not going to be a big cash machine for you. People visit blogs to read the blogs – not look at advertisements. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use affiliate programs to earn extra money.
What you do need to do is blog about the programs that you want to promote. Share a personal recommendation. Talk about how you use the product. And don’t just post about it once. Revisit a favorite product a few weeks down the road, and then again the next month. Don’t be spammy and hit your visitors over the head with sales messages. Just let them know how much you like it.
Contextual Advertising
In our experience, Google Adsense rarely seems to perform well on a blog. Yet, it’s the easiest to incorporate and a few have indicated that they do earn a steady if small income from their blog ad units.
There are other contextual options such as Chikita Mini Malls and ad units from Yahoo, MSN and Gazoogle. The biggest drawback in ad units is that you never know what might show up on your blog. You’ll have to decide if the profit earned is worth the space you give.
Serve Your Own Ads
If you find that serving ads for others is unprofitable, consider creating your own text ads and promote your own items and affiliate products in that space.