I know why are you here to read this post. You are a hard working blogger who tried every single blogging tip online to increase your blog traffic and finally so that you could make money out of it. Right? Making money with your blog is one of the biggest aims of any blogger apart from the passion to pursue this particular field.
Today, looking forward to this, i complied all the major (if not all) smart ways so that you can make money with your blog. Its pretty common to see our fellow bloggers posting day and night but still are not able to work out their earning by utilizing their blog's traffic.
Before we start off, i guess it would be a wise approach to mention few great posts that refer to increase your blog's traffic so that you could later make huge sums of money and proving your social circle wrong.
You may like to read:
Some tips to increase blog traffic:
#1 PPC Advertising Networks
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising options are pretty amazing and widely used way to monetize a blog. The whole idea basically revolves around displaying certain ads on your blog and in return you get paid each time a person clicks on the ad displayed on your blog.
Now the question arises that who actually displays ads on your blog? You in fact, as a blogger, sign ups with certain popular PPC Advertising networks like Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Networks (YPN). Once your account is created, you can then create certain Ad Units from their dashboard panels and then paste the code on your blog.
After a few minutes, once the code is processed, the ads tend to show up at the spot where you pasted the code (say sidebar). Now, the type of ads are in your control. In case of Google AdSense, you could choose between Image only ads/ Text ads or Image+text ads.
What Happens At The Back End?
Different advertisers tend to sign up with Google AdWords. A certain advertisers would submit their Ad units to Google. They would choose certain keywords to target their Ads in a certain niche. So, bidding basically takes place at back end and when a certain advertisers wins the bid for a certain ad spot on your blog, his ads would then be displayed at your sidebar.
How Much Do You Get Paid For Each Click?
Now this is a pretty common question that many newbies tend to have in their mind. There is no fixed set of rate for each click for any PPC program. The amount you get paid through the click depends upon the bid and the type of ads (text/ image etc) that get displayed on your blog.
There is a huge variation on the cost per click. Certain blog tend to get as high as 100$ per click! BUT thats too rare. Normally you would see your self getting 0.5 to 1 $ at most.
The key to make money through this factor (PPC Ads) is the amount of traffic you get and the type of niche you lie in. There are certain niche that would hardly get any clicks. The reason lies in the type of visitors that you get.
If the visitors are high tech people, who knows much about online world, then they would surely know about the actual content and the ads on your blog and thus would surely not click on them.
Popular CPC Advertising Options:
#2 Direct Banner Ads
Direct advertising methods is another one of the most popular ways to monetize your blog once it has a decent flow of traffic. Anything above 1000 visitors per day can be easily called a decent audience. Though there is no set rule obviously but i added that figure to give you a general idea (a rough one) of what one can call a decent traffic to a blog/website.
So, direct advertisement is a method where bloggers make out their own 'Advertise' page on their blog and showcase their blog's traffic, different set of metrics like Alexa etc.
The plus point with selling Ad Spots directly to the advertisement parties is the fact that you tend to cut down the middle man cost. With all those PPC of CPM networks or even BuySellAds, that is a direct advertisement company that works as a middle man to let you sell your ad spots, your overall earning get low as these companies take down their own share.
With you selling ad banners directly (through your Advertise Us page), the entire game is between you and the advertisers.
What Are The Popular Ad Banners Dimensions?
Normally, leader board AdSpot (728x90 px), Rectangle (250x250 px) or Large Rectangle (300x250 px), Small Horizontal banner (468x60 px), Square (125x125 px) works the best.
It is always a good idea to use these standard dimensions for your ad spots as that would help you attract more advertisers (as advertisers have already made up ads for those standard dimensions normally for their advertisement campaigns).
#3 CPM (Cost Per Mille) Advertisement
As the name suggest, Cost Per Mille is another advertisement option (very popular with the high traffic blogs circle), depends upon the cost that you would set per 1000 impressions (page views). Say you would set 5$ CPM.
That means that you would charge your advertiser 5$ per 1000 impressions that your AdSpot gets. Note its important to highlight here that CPM varies with the Ad positioning. The ads that appear above the fold tends to enjoy high CPM rates while the ones in the footer of below post, has pretty low CPM.
There is a huge variation between the price that you need to ask for your blog's per 1000 impressions. That totally depends upon your blog's niche, the Ad Spot size and its placement. Anything in the header would get the maximum impressions so thus you have the full right to ask for maximum CPM from the advertisers.
Popular CPM Advertising Options:
#4 Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is considered to be the king income source for bloggers in today's online arena. Most of the top blogger (probloggers) who are earning 6 figure + per year are for sure working out their ways with affiliate marketing world.
What is Affiliate Marketing In General?
Say you build a product of your own. For example an ebook. Now you wish to sell it online but you are not supported with just enough funds for advertisement to make your eBook reach out to the world. What could you possibly do?
Most of the product owners then move towards affiliate marketing. They would offer people a certain commission over the sales of the eBook. You would make couple of banners for the eBook publicity. Then your affiliates would promote your eBook over their blogs/websites and link back to the sales page (or any other sales processing system).
Once the visitor buys an eBook through your affiliates, they would get a certain percentage of commission of the total sale make. The rest goes to you :)
Thats a pretty healthy system of promoting your product and works like a charm. People even offer 70+% commission to their affiliates. Now you could imagine what sort of wonders could such product promotion could play.
How Could You Do Affiliate Marketing?
To be brief, as i am just listing general money making ways from blog here in this post, there are few different strategies when affiliate marketing is concerned.
You could either promote products from standalone companies. Like promoting a hosting service (hostgator etc) on your blog, or you could promote a certain eBook by the top bloggers.
Apart from that, you could join the affiliate market places and choose the products from there. Personally i would say this works great as these companies have build reputation for them selves over the years and have a proper system of checkout, records, stats etc and would really help you in boosting your overall sales.
Popular Affiliate Market Places:
- Clickbank (hell famous)
- Commision junction.
#5 Text Link Based Ads
Text link ads is a tricky one. The advertisers basically pay you to add certain text links within your blog post and you need to make sure that you provide them with a dofollow backlink. Obviously thats what they are paying for (traffic + some page rank flow).
How Could This Effect Your Google Rankings?
Its now a solid fact that the more you would link to low quality sites with irrelevant content to your site, it would surely effect your blog's search engine rankings. So it would work great if only you could make sure that you link to a site that is both high quality plus relevant to your niche.
Other wise its just like getting paid to destroy your own empire.
#6 Sponsored Reviews
Sponsored Reviews are pretty high paying methods to make money with your blog for sure. Though it depends upon the place where your blog stands in terms of both popularity, traffic, stats/metrics etc but you could still make few bugs in any case.
How Sponsored Reviews Works?
You basically, as a blogger, promote certain products by writing a blog post of around 200-400 words (depends upon the terms and conditions of the advertiser) and get paid in return. The advertiser in return gets dofollow backlink to their product site, plus traffic in general.
Another way to earn money through sponsored reviews is without a blog where you write direct reviews for the company as (kind of) testimonials. But as its out of topic, so i wont go in that subject. Its pretty fun though :)
Popular Sponsored Review Sites:
#7 Monetization Widgets
Monetizingg widgets are basically like those Amazon affiliate widgets where you just need to install them on your blog (say sidebar) and they would tend to you different sort of ads. There are different types of monetization widgets like the ones who would show PPC ads, Affiliate ads etc.
But the general idea remains the same that its a widget that displays ads (image or text links) within them and you get paid accordingly.
Popular Monetization Widgets Sources:
#8 Finding Sponsors For Different Sections Of Blog
This revenue stream works well on popular blogs that have huge traffic. The reason being that the advertiser tends to limit their advertising campaign to a specific portion of your blog and thus the audience likewise narrows down.
Say you ask advertisers to sponsor your interview section of your blog, or say if you run a blog based on dog's care, so you might want to ask for a sponsorship for your dog's food section. Thats the general idea.
So you would promote the advertisers site/product etc on that particular section (only on that page/label/category of your blog).
You could ask for sponsors directly through your blog's Advertise Us section as another source of advertisement apart from the generic ad banners etc.
#9 Monetize Your Blog's RSS Feed
As you apply ads on your blog, the same way you could monetize your blog's RSS feeds. The most popular combination is of applying Google AdSense on Feedburner feeds. You could also sell ad spots directly for your blog's feed in case you use a feed burning tool that lets you edit your feed in such a way.
Popular Feed/Monetization Options:
#10 Earning Via Private Forums
Another possibility for you to earn through your blog is via a private forum. Say your blog gets popular enough that gets huge traffic and you were able to build a community over a period of time. Then it would be the right time to open up a private forum with a certain member ship fee.
For the forum to get working, you obviously need to provide something unique to the members that isn't available to the generic visitors of your blog. That can be some secret techniques, you personnel experience to something that you normally don't share on blog in general or that can be anything.
A good example would be Problogger.com (forum) by Darren Rowse of Problogger.net. Its a paid forum (not sure about the membership fee though). Likewise we have SEOBlack hat who charge around 100$ per member monthly. Their forum is for sure high quality and satisfies the members.
Below are the popular forum building tools/software that you can use to start a new one for you blog.
#11 Exclusive Offers/ Content
You could start an exclusive offers on your blog where you could give a certain portion of the products for free and then charge on after a certain threshold. Say make out your own product. You can make that available for free for a certain period of time/of use age limit and then charge a certain free from the users.
#12 Introducing Job Boards
You could introduce Job boards on your blog (once it gets enough traffic, popularity). People could post jobs there and you could charge them in return for the listing. The cost totally depends upon you but in general, people ask for around 10-100 $ per listing.
Its getting pretty common to see popular bloggers to open up their own job boards. Take an example ofProblogger.net.
Depends upon the popularity of your blog.
Popular Jobboards Making Software/Programs:
#13 Paid Surveys / Polls
There are sites that would pay you to run surveys on your site/blog. That can be polls too. In general they would take use of the hard earned traffic that you have built over the years and would pay you to judge your audience on a certain scale.
These programs normally pay as per CPM (Cost per Mille) style. So the more your traffic is, the more your worth.
Below is a popular Paid to Survey/Polls program:
#14 Selling/Renting An Internal High Page Rank/ High Traffic Page
This is another interesting way to monetize (make money) with your blog. Say one of your internal blog page has a high page rank/traffic, and you wish to rent it out. So the advertiser would get benefited from either the high page rank (say >6, random).
This model is pretty well utilized by milliondollarwiki. Though, obviously this monetization model wont work for small blogs with low page ranks and traffic. You got to provide some value to the advertiser.
#15 Ask For Donation 
This is another way to make money out of your blog. But, its obviously not a big player. You could put a donation box/button beneath your each blog post and ask people to throw in some bugs . Your relation with your audience is pretty important in this regard.
. Your relation with your audience is pretty important in this regard.
Though this is a fun model for making money with a blog, i wont say that one could rely on it (obviously).
#16 Featuring Advertisers Posts
You could feature your advertisers post/articles that would link back to their sites. This would transfer a huge bunch of traffic to the advertisers site. Though this monetization model isn't quite popular, but still used on sites like Techmeme.com.
Notice their right side section that displays sponsored posts.
#17 Popup Ads
NOT a fan of them! You could implement popup ads on your blog if you're in need of some instant cash through your blog. The reason being that though popup ads have a high CTR (click through rate), thus would make quite a bit of money on short term basis, on long term, they would ruin your traffic and fan following.
We all know how irritating these popup ads are.
Below are few popular Popup Ad networks:
#18 In-Text Advertisement
In-text advertisement is basically showing up ads in the form of text-links. When you signup with certain in-text advertisement companies, you then need to place their code in your blog template.
Then certain keywords (words) get highlighted in your blog posts automatically. This in-text ads are usually double-underlined (unlike single underlined links), showing that they are ads. Though you can set them to single dotted underlined too (through the settings).
This advertisement model works on PPC (Pay Per Click), that whenever someone clicks on the those in-text ads, you get paid a certain sum of money. The draw back of such advertisement is that they are extremely low paying (wont pay you more than 0.5$, and in most case much lower than that).
The good side is that their CTR is high so the net income depends.
Popular In-text Advertisement Options:
#19 Selling Your Blog
Now, interestingly, you could sell your blog and make a chunk of money. Some people tend to be the part of such a money making model. They work on couple of blogs to a point that they start getting some traffic and earns a bit of money too.
Then they would sell the blog at a low cost (still greater than 1000$ in most cases). They keep on repeating the same. But to make sure that your blog gets sold (and with a good payback), you need to grow it up a point where it starts earning some amount per month.
Other wise its a useless tool for the buyer.
Some Popular Market Places To Sell Your Blog:
#20 Audio Advertisement (CPP)
Cost-Per-Play advertisement model was introduced by netaudioads. You basically put a certain audio ad on your blog. Each time a visitor gets to your blog, the audio ad (around 5 seconds long) would play (and would be unstoppable), and at the end, the reader would get redirected to your blog (from the audio ad).
Though this advertisement model can be high paying as it tends to provide 100% conversion, still it can be hell annoying, thus dropping your overall traffic and fan engagement.
#21 Selling An eBook
You could sell an eBook on your blog. That would not only increase your subscriber base, plus is pretty effective in terms of making big money. People often build up a blog entirely around their eBook topic and promote it every where.
The ultimate call to action that they look for is to sell the eBook on the blog. You could promote the similar topics on the blog (via blog posts) that would encourage your audience to buy the eBook at the end of the day,
#22 Sponsored Tweets
Once you have build a huge fan following on social media via your blog, specially on Twitter, you can then use that subscriber base to send sponsored tweets. Depending upon the number of twitter followers your have, you could then charge accordingly.
I have noticed people asking for 50-100$ for around 10,000 Twitter followers that they have. It can vary a lot though. You could use BuySellAds as a middle man company or directly use this money making model via your advertise us page.
#23 Sponsored Email
Same as with Twitter followers, people (bloggers) who have built huge email lists can play wonders with this model for making money with your blog. Once you have thousands of email subscribers on your behalf, you can then earn a huge sum of money for promoting certain products to the email list, or send out a advertiser specific content to your subscribers.
For that purpose, you may wish to use an auto-responder service like aWeber to make your work smooth.
#24 Blog Hard Cover
Once you are an established blogger who have earned a name for his self in the blogosphere, you could then convert your blog (blog posts) into a real life hard book. There are couple of tools available online that charge you some bucks and in return convert your blog into an awesome looking hard book featuring all of your blog posts.
Some of those tools include:
Finally?
I hope this post helped you out in making mind for your future monetization plans through your blog. You could point out some other effective ways to make money with a blog in the comments below, would love to hear them.
ALSO, kindly share this post on Facebook, Twitter. That would mean a lot to me :)
Would love to here from you...