How to make money blogging

In one of my previous posts, I had talked about importance of selling on your blog early on in order to make money blogging. We all are here to make money. No matter if you have a blog set up in a niche segment where you provide advice based on your subject matter expertise or to showcase you learning, one of the aim (if not the ultimate aim) is to make some money out of it. Even if you are not looking to take home a million bucks, you would never dislike to have you hosting and domain charges paid off by your blog itself. If you do not consider the time you invest in writing posts for your blog and you do not have other blog related expenses such as premium themes, plugins or email services, you still need to shell out something around a 100 bucks a year. While these 10 bucks a month come no way near the value of time that you spend on writing for your blog, it is nonetheless heartening to see your efforts being recognized.

In my opinion, if your blog has potential to earn a buck or 10 bucks a month, it definitely has the potential to earn a hundred or a grand, if monetized properly. If you look at it objectively, these 10 bucks are not only the result of your writing, but also the result of hard work that you have put up in setting up the blog, customizing it according to how you think it would complement your writing, attaching it with your social profiles and trying to make it popular through your word of mouth marketing. If might even be possible that you have your family members and friends helping you with your marketing efforts.

So without wasting a lot of time, let us look at some of the top ways that bloggers around the world use to make money blogging.

Online Ads – the #1 choice

These come mostly in the form of Text and Banners. They are the oldest form of advertising on the websites and there are different models in place. The two most popular being Pay Per Click (PPC) {popularly known as Cost Per Click (CPC)} and Cost Per thousand Impression (CPM). Under PPC model, a website owner is paid every time a visitor clicks on the advertisement on their blog. In CPM model, the website owner is paid every time a advertisement viewed a thousand times. There are other models that have evolved around this concept but these are still the most popular with those starting with trying online advertisements.

Google AdSense – One of the oldest and popular advertisement networks that works on CPC model. They are backed by one of the most respected companies around. Most of the websites and blog use Google Ad sense for generating income. Click here to sign-up with Google AdSense.

Technorati – A very popular player in CPM market. They offer high payouts and do not have any minimum traffic requirements. Although CPM does not make sense for those bloggers who have less than a thousand hits a day but there is no harm is getting to understand how this models work. Click here to sign-up with Technorati.

Click here for an explanation of the CPM formula.

Click here for CPM calculator, that calculates your campaign budget/online impressions/CPM price.

Affiliates – pay better

Affiliates is a way of making money when you refer your visitors to a business and your visitors make a purchase from that business. A lot of eCommerce websites pay affiliate commission. Not just the eCommerce sites, but almost all those site that sell (soft or hard) products or in few cases, services, consider affiliates as their sales strategy.

Amazon – One of the biggest names in the eCommerce industry, Amazon pays its affiliates. There are a lot websites that make money from referring users to Amazon. It specially make sense for you to become an Amazon affiliate if you write about products that are sold on Amazon. Click here to sigh-up as Amazon affiliate.

Chitika – Unlike eCommerce sites such as Amazon, there are a lot of companies that act as affiliate brokers. Like in the case of advertisements, these companies act as a middleman between the website (blog) and the website selling the product. Chitika is one of the most popular ones.

Content selling – this is the ultimate target

This is one form of sales that is easy to being with. You generate content every time you write. You can either compile your old writings into an eBook or you could create podcast that you could sell. There is no dearth of content strategies that you could engage.

Ebooks – Free eBooks help you in building traffic on your blog. Paid eBooks help you making cash. Not just on your blog, you can even sell eBooks by publishing them for Kindle. Click here for starting with Kindle publishing.

Podcast – Pod-casts are audio commentaries or lectures. You can record them and upload on your blog/website where visitors could listen to them. You can host premium podcast on your blog if you see popularity and demand for them increasing on your blog. Click here to visit website of Adobe Audition – audio recorder and editor.

Videos – Videos have greater potential to sell videos than audios. If you are able to generate views for your audio content, you most definitely should consider having video content live on your blog. There are many formats in which you could produce your videos, for example DIY courses. You can either decide on selling the video content or make money off the advertisements displayed on your videos. Click here to find out about an interesting app that let mobile users stream content from their mobile phones.