If you want to make a little extra money or be paid for your blogging time, there are numerous ways that you can monetize your blog. Of course, not all blogs have monetization potential.
For instance, personal blogs that just discuss one’s daily life aren’t suitable for monetization in most cases. Blogs that don’t cover topics of great interest are also hard to monetize.
But for those blogs that cover popular topics and build a following of readers, monetization is very possible and even recommended.
Here are some ways that you can start earning revenue from your blog:
Affiliate Products: Promote affiliate products in your blog entries. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but make sure that you are recommending quality products.
And if possible, try the products out for yourself before you recommend them to others. You can find affiliate products to promote that relate to just about any imaginable topic.
Sell Advertising Space: If you have a large number of blog readers, you can easily sell ad space on your blog.
Contact companies that have products or services that relate to your topic and let them know that you have advertising space available.
Be prepared to give them numbers regarding the number of readers you have daily, monthly, and weekly, as well as demographical information if you have or can get that.
Use Contextual Advertising: There are many companies that will allow you to sign up for a free publishers account.
One such company is Google, which has the AdSense advertising program. You simply sign up for an account, then copy and paste the code that the company provides you into the HTML code of your blog entries, or into your blog template.
Accept Donations: If you are providing valuable content, it’s perfectly acceptable to put a Donate Now button on your blog.
You can set this up easily if you have a Paypal account. People will often give you donations if the content is of real value and they want you to keep providing it.
Sell Subscriptions: Set up a portion of your blog that is only accessible to paying members. You will need a way to process payments, but you can easily use Paypal for this.
You will still need to provide some free content so that potential paid subscribers can see the quality that you are offering.
Become a Consultant: By publishing a blog on a specific topic, you are proving that you know quite about that topic. This allows you to offer consultation services.
You can charge flat rates or hourly rates. You can advertise your consulting services on your blog, and you can accept payments via Paypal.
Don’t expect to start seeing a fulltime income from your blog at least not right away.
It takes time to build a readership, and the amount of money your blog generates will depend almost entirely on how many readers you have and how well you’ve built your relationship with them. Of course, there are other factors as well, such as how well you write sales copy!
