A recently coined term, blogs have become the order of the day. Blogs actually mean Web logs, which can be explained as periodicals on the internet that depict the personal views or perception of an individual on a particular subject or topic. The blogs are regularly updated by the blogger and often, popular blogs have huge fan following. Although blogs are mainly written to express one’s views on certain topics or subjects, they are also seen as a potential money making venues.Business minded bloggers have come up with many ideas that make them earn money through their blogs. Some of these ideas have been discussed as follows:
Display Ads from Advertising Networks
This is probably the simplest, easiest and the most popular method of making money from your blog. Often you might have seen contextual ads from Google displayed on the blog or website you are surfing. All these are Google AdSense ads, which displays advertisements related to the topic, on the blog. While going through a blog, if a reader clicks this ad to gain more information, the blog owner is paid a small sum. Thus, more the number of readers clicking on these ads from Google more will be the income for the blog owner. A very big advantage of displaying advertisements of Google AdSense is that it is free. Moreover, since ads from Google are generally unobtrusive, the readers do not get irked by them or cause them to leave the blog for another website or blog.
Google AdSense is the biggest advertising networks on the Internet. Other close alternatives of Adsense are Yahoo Publisher Network and Bidvertiser. If for any reason you can’t use AdSense on your blog, these alternatives are your best solution.
Sell Ad Space
This is where you sell ad space directly to your prospective advertisers without involving any third party advertising network. You will need to write an advertising page to describe the type of ads you are offering with price details included if possible. You’ll place an ‘advertise here’ link to the advertising page on your blog top navigation menu or sidebar. The prospective advertisers who are interested on adveritising on your blog will click on your ‘advertise here’ link to read what you are offering. If an advertiser order an ad spot, you’ll insert their ad code into your blog theme to have their ad live on your blog.
Bloggers generally sell banner and text link ad space on their blog. But if you have some creative ideas of selling ad space on your blog, you can always implement your ideas to see if they works.
Note:
Remember to you use the ‘nofollow’ feature if you are selling text links on your blog to avoid any possible penalization by Google.
In-Text Advertising
The ad network called Kontera has created a unique way for bloggers to monetize their content. It is the in-text advertising. Bloggers who join Kontera can implement the Kontera In-Text ads on their blogs right away by installing and configuring the special plugin provided by Kontera. Once the Kontera set up has completed, the Kontera system will double-underline most of the keywords in your content pages. If a visitor points his/her mouse on a double-underlined keyword, an ad will pop up. If the visitor become interested on the ad, he/she can click the double-unerlined keyword link to check more about the ad. You’ll get 70% of revenue share each time somebody click your Kontera in-text link.
The great thing about Kontera is that it can be used in conjunction with other ad network like Google AdSense. So, on a same page you can have both the AdSense ads and Kontera in-text links showing at the same time. This certainly can help increase your blog revenue.
Affiliate Marketing
Another popular form of making money through a blog is by promoting other people products. Affiliate marketing is the lifeline of internet marketing. Therefore, product owners are always on the look out for people that are interested in pursuing affiliate marketing. Blogs that have a very good amount of subscribers and followers can make money by offering their readers products related to the topic or any other product. The blog here is like a conduit between the online website owner and the readers. It is a win-win situation for both the parties involved as the readers get related product there and then without having to scour the internet and the product owners get a ready-made targeted audience to which their products can be offered for sale.
Offer Services
Although blogs are meant to just vent out one’s feelings towards a particular subject or issue, they also become potential money earners as they help in deepening the bond between the blogger and the reader. These readers are potential customers, which can be ushered to make them aware of the blogger’s special skills, if any. Moreover the blogger can provide consulting services to other people citing his own example. He may offer other services or his own products to his readers. With a constant one-to-one connection, the bond does strike. Even if there are not repeated customers, there always are references that are passed on, if services offered for the first time were satisfactory.
Write Sponsored Reviews
This is where the online companies or marketers pay the bloggers to write about their products or services. There are several marketplaces on the Internet allowing you to find companies and advertisers that are willing to pay you for writing sponsored reviews. If you get into these marketplaces, you may get some sponsored review orders constantly. However, you should avoid doing too much of sponsored reviews. Posting sponsored reviews frequently on your blog will annoy your visitors and readers which will then hurt your reputation. Moreover, the search engines especially Google will penalize blogs that post sponsored reviews regularly.
So if you are writing sponsored reviews for some quick bucks, make sure you keep a limit on it. Perhaps posting one or two sponsored reviews monthly wouldn’t affect anything.
But for the bloggers who want to make sure their blog wouldn’t get any kind of penazation by the search engines, they choose to not writing a single sponsored review on their blog.
Ask for Donation
Some reputed bloggers are doing quite well with it. You can follow them by Adding a ‘PayPal Donate’ button or a text link like ‘donate to us’ or ‘support us’ on your blog sidebar. This might become one of your blog revenue sources.