Content Is Number One
The first and foremost thing you need in order to convert your blog into a money making machine, is content, and although quantity is important the quality of your content is very important. Every blogger that wants to be successful, needs to focus on creating high quality content that keeps readers engaged, and more importantly the content you write must provide your readers an added value that they won’t be able to find anywhere else. If you have high quality, creative and focused content, traffic will come. Traffic is important because without traffic, and without a regular following non of the following methods I will talk about be relevant for your efforts to make money blogging.
Here is an example: Iris Shoor wrote on her blog all about the emails that got her meetings with companies such as Twitter, LinkedIn and others, what is special about this post that it has screenshots and explanations that drive people to press the share button. In-short if you content is original and your creating a lot of added value that cannot be found anywhere else on the web, then you have the basic infrastructure to make money blogging.
AdSense Is A Good Place To Start
Selling advertising space is one of the biggest and most popular forms of generating money from your blog. AdSense makes it easy to have ads placed on your blog so you can easily make money blogging without to much technical background. The content of your website is scanned, and relevant ads, both text and image, are placed on your website, either connecting to products and/or services that are related to that field. All that’s required is to paste some code within the language used to build your website, and that’s it. AdSense does the rest of the work for you. Money is generated on a per click basis; for every reader that clicks on an ad, you get a percentage of the revenue that’s created. These kinds of advertising help to generate some extra income for blogs that are commercial in nature, as well as personal blogs. The upside to using AdSense is that you are working with ads that usually fit your website visitor’s needs, the downside is that you don’t really make money blogging only using AdSense, even the largest online publishers in the world know that using AdSense needs to be the basic strategy
Joining an affiliate program is another useful method of how to generate income from blogging. A commission is provided for referring a reader to a company and ends up purchasing a service or a product from that company. Amazon is a very good example of this as they have a wide net of connections to other companies whose products are presented on Amazon’s website. More work is involved with affiliate marketing then with selling ad space, but the income can be much greater if you put in the effort to do it properly.Find Good Affiliate Programsbut not the only one.
I myself have encountered various affiliate programs, and although I don’t think there is a straight answer to which programs are better than others I do recommend visiting the post I wrote I while back with Leytal Ross on how to choose an affiliate program. Small heads up to you bloggers that like the idea of working with affiliate programs, you better focus on having a lot of traffic when you apply to some programs, I know from my personal experience that I got shot down by many affiliates that thought I was to small for them at the time.
Donations Can’t Hurt
Donations and tip jars can help you save for a rainy day, or even help you pay off the bills, depending on how popular your blog is. Many bloggers place a small PayPal button on their sidebars in order to generate income, inviting any reader to make a small donation at any point in time. You have to have a large and loyal readership to make it work, though, so it should not be relied on as the end all and be all of your money making strategy. Keep in mind that if you have a large newsletter database with many emails you can invite your readers to donate via an email message.
Donation Plugin: One of my favorite plugins is Seamless Donations, you can always use the simple PayPal button but if you are using WordPress you might want to go the extra mile.
Blogging Meets E-Commerce
Selling merchandise is yet another method, such as t-shirts, mugs, car decals, et cetera containing the logo of your blog. In order for this to convert effectively, you have to have a large following of readers who are interested in what you have to offer. They key is to make your merchandise as attractive as possible in order to generate interest. I know many successful blogs that started making money from online stores that were embedded into a section of their blog pages. Some blogs take selling merchandise to the next level by offering products through newsletters and social media pages, it is commonly known among veteran bloggers that your die-hard followers are the most valuable commodity, when you are trying to develop new strategies to make money from your blog.
Premium Content
Charging readers for exclusive content can make your readers feel extra special. They get to see content that no one else can see, and it harbors a fascination for your website. News will spread, and soon, everyone will want to see the elusive content that everyone’s been talking about. Yearly/Monthly subscriptions can be a great way to make money blogging, but it’s important that you have very exclusive and premium content that can’t be found on free websites on the Internet. I usually recommend users to create content that helps other people create a side income or to teach a skill, the premium content can be created in the form of eBooks, Private YouTube Tutorials and custom built tools.
Members Only Tool: In case you are using WordPress I recommend the WP-Members plugin that helps you manage members and assign what content is available to them without charge.
Reviews For Extra Income
If you really want your blog to create for you a significant amount of income you have to work very hard to build a great reviewing system for product and service reviews. Some of the best blog owners made a fortune only from reviewing gadgets and apps, some bloggers make money from reviewing physical products that are sent to their home, others review software and mobile apps. If you have a large following you can also increase your income with video reviews that can be sent directly to your followers, combining YouTube monetization and the money you make from your actual review pages is a powerful system to generate extra cash.
In Image Ads
Now that you know all about the classic different ways you can make money blogging, I want to introduce you to cool relatively new form of advertising called In-Image ads. This format of ads is categorized as an in-image advertising, and their are some serious benefits to take into account if you are debating whether to use In-image ads, in order to monetize your blogs content.
So what is In-image advertising? It is similar to AdSense but is gaining more popularity. Instead of banners being placed on your website, scripts are placed within the website’s coding and, when visitors hover their cursors over images on your website, an ad will be revealed for a short period of time. It’s a great way to create a website that is not littered with ad banners, making it unattractive to read. Instead, consumers can get exactly the content they want, but with the hidden bonus of ads being hidden within the images on the website. These ads are typically related to the content of the blog they’re placed on so that they are always relevant and can generate new users and readers to your website.
What makes good in-image ads are that they allow the user to close the ad if they’re not interested, instead of being constantly bombarded with products and services like ad banners do? Clicking on in-image ads will bring users to a new page, so that they can get more information about the products and services that are available. They are also customizable on the publisher’s end as he can make it as big or as small as he wants so that the content of his blog isn’t completely covered up.
In-image advertising is useful for those blogs that are very image heavy, and want a discrete way of placing ads, without distracting readers from the content that’s already on their blogs. Installing these in-image ads does not take up any additional space on the website owner’s blog either, so that there’s no slow down for users, leaving more space for the owners to use hosting his images.
In-image ads are the newest form of advertising on websites without eating up vital real estate for website content. It can monetize blogs without sacrificing the aesthetics of a website’s design, allowing the designer’s efforts to shine through. In-image ads are definitely the way to go when it comes to turning your blog into a money maker. All you have to do is place a little code on your blog’s HTML coding, and you can start generating income in no time. So what are you waiting for? Start using Image Monetizationtoday and make money blogging like never before.
What’s your story?
If you have any experience with making money blogging, in-image advertising or in-image ads, please leave as comment bellow and tell us about your story.
