How to Monetize Your Blog

moneyIf you want to monetize your blog, you have to ask yourself a series of questions, starting with what kind of blog is it, and do you have any readers? If you’re not getting readers at your blog, you might as well put all your money-making plans on hold. Even if you got the greatest pay-per-click program in existence with the highest rates (which won’t happen if you don’t have readers) you can’t make money because there’s no one there to click the ads. Generate traffic first, and then worry about monetizing your blog.

If you have a steady stream of traffic, then the best ways to make money from your blog depend on the type of blog you have. If your blog is a general interest blog, it’s probably harder to make money from that than a specialized niche blog. Of course, if you have thousands and thousands of readers, you can run general advertising for things people typically need like credit cards, mortgages, insurance and very general basic things.

If your blog is general interest, though, no one is coming to your blog searching for cheap insurance, the best way to refinance a mortgage, or a better rate on a credit card. They’re coming to read how you burned the cookies, your thoughts on today’s politics, and the latest celebrity gossip, or whatever you’re blogging about.

But if you pull in thousands of unique visitors over a month, you could still make some money from these kinds of advertisers because a certain percentage of them will click the ads, and a certain small percentage of them might buy. This is a hard way to monetize that requires thousands and thousands of readers.

If your blog is smaller and more of a niche blog, you have many more options. Lots of people use Café Press or other sites that will print custom t-shirts, mugs and items for you. You could have some principle of your blog, your logo, or some great concepts you created printed on these items and link to them from your blog.

You can use the mother of blog money-makers, pay-per-click ads like those through Google and Yahoo. Don’t just sign up and assume it’s all automated, though. You have to watch the ads that show up, the click-through rates, and your pricing. If the ads that are showing up aren’t targeted closely enough and aren’t getting good click-through rates, you’ll get less per click than otherwise .So watch your statistics and make adjustments as needed. These pull off your keywords, so be keyword focused when you write posts.

Affiliate marketing is a top way to monetize a blog, too. If your blog is about how to lose weight, for instance, you can promote a weight loss product or information that has an affiliate program. When people follow your link to that product and buy it, you get a commission. The more narrow your niche, the easier it is to monetize your blog because the people coming there are looking for specific information and products.

Photo Credits: borman818

Originally posted 2009-06-10 05:06:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Blog Traffic Exchange Related Posts
  • advertiseHow to Get Advertisers for Your Blog If you've got a blog with enough traffic, you might want to monetize the space by drawing in advertisers. If your blog is new, it's going to be a hard sell to get people to want to advertise on your blog but you can do it. Whether your blog is......
  • gadgetGo Go Google Gadgets If you use Blogger in order to manage your blog then you have available to you hundreds of gadgets that Google has released; all of which can add features to your blog. A gadget is a widget that adds small programs to a blog, adding features that show off lists......
  • plugsBest Wordpress Plug-Ins Blogging with Wordpress offers users so many choices, including a variety of plug-ins that meet different needs. Some are for fun and others are very functional and useful for a variety of purposes. No one would want all these plug-ins in their blog, though, and some are more well-suited to......
  • typeReasons to Start Blogging In the 1990's people started to set up websites know as web logs, a term which has been colloquially evolved into the term blog. A blog is a internet website where users post regular article, providing commentary, information, news, and various other forms of posts. Why do individuals start blogging?......
  • bloggingHow to Get Blog Traffic in Five Steps Every blogger is looking to achieve the exact same thing: They are hoping to be read. There are millions of bloggers that give the idea a shot but then eventually give up because they feel like nobody is reading them. They feel like if they are unable to get blog......
Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • blog traffic exchangeStrategic How To Make Money Online– Internet Business Making Money Easy Article Make Money tips make money online StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to......
  • camelHow to Gauge Web Traffic to Your Corporate Blog There are actually a couple of different ways that you can effectively gauge traffic to your corporate blog, each giving different answers and filling in a slightly larger piece of the puzzle. If you are writing in a corporate blog and you want to get a good feel for how......
  • blog traffic exchangeHow to Come Up With Lots of Blog Post Ideas If you want to find blogging success, you need to do more than just think up and launch your blog, the other parts of blogging need your attention too if you want to make sure that your project grows. A very important thing that you need to work on is......
  • blog traffic exchangeHow To Profit From Smart Banner Advertising So you want to drive traffic using banner advertising? Banner advertising is well worth any serious online business' attention as a way to experience lots of high quality traffic. It's just not true at all that you need a large budget to get started and begin seeing profits with this......
  • blog traffic exchangePost SEO Not everyone knows what "SEO" is. It stands for "Search Engine Optimization", and refers to techniques to have your website rise to be the first website listed for a search engine search for a given 'key word'. For example if you were selling 'snow boards', you might want to be......
Online Stores