12 Ways To Monetize Your Blog & Make Money Blogging!
There are many different ways to generate money with your website online. Unfortunately, too many people often give up because at that present time they aren’t making any money at all. My advice is not to give up! It takes time to build a site that will make you money, though with the right direction, planning and hard work this can be achieved quicker. It all depends on how you monetize your blog!
12 Ways To Monetize Your Blog
1. Pay Per Click Advertising
You can probably guess from the name how you monetize your blog from this method. You get paid for every click a visitor makes on these ads. You sign up to a provider and they give you a code for you to place on your site. The provider will then send contextual ads to your site (either image or text based) that are relevant to the content of your website. Google AdSense is the most widely used provider of this service, but there are many others out there.
Pay Per Click (PPC) ads vary in profitability depending on the amount of traffic your website gets. Only a small percentage of people will click on these ads, so to earn a lot of money from them you will need a lot of traffic.
The click-through rate (CTR) of your visitors depends on the design of your website. Certain parts of your website pages are more valuable than others, so to increase your CTR these PPC ads can be placed there. For example, space at the beginning and end of articles/blog posts are highly visible, so by putting a PPC in these positions may increase the chances of someone clicking on one. If on the other hand you place these ads at the bottom of the page where nobody can see them, then nobody will click on them.
The cost per click (CPC) can also determine how much you are likely to earn from this type of ad. Adverts that display financial products or mortgages will generate you more income due to the higher price of the actual product, compared with perhaps children’s toys. The former may pay you as much as $1+ for every click through by one of your visitors, whereas a click on toys may pay you only a few cents.
Which ads shows up on your site is dependant on the content of your website. After all, it would be daft showing financial products on a website that talks about children’s toys and vice versa.
PPC ads are a good way to easily monetize your blog. However, to make serious money from them you will need lots of traffic.
You can find PPC adverts for your website at these popular sites
2. Cost Per Mile Advertising
Cost per Mile advertising (CPM) is similar to PPC advertising, however instead of getting paid on a per-click basis, you get paid according to the number of impressions (page views) you get. This is worked out for every 1000 impressions that it has. For example, a website that gets 200,000 page views per month that displays a $1 CPM ad will generate you $200 a month!
There are a number of different CPM providers out there that you can get ads from. Each varies on how much they will pay you, generally the better the provider the higher rate you will be paid. This is because the best providers have access to more and better quality advertisers that are willing to pay you more.
Just like PPC, CPM adverts can pay you more depending on where the advert is placed on your website. The higher the ad is placed and the bigger the ad is, will generally make you more money.
CPM adverts are beneficial for websites that have lots of traffic and a high page view per visitor ratio, but it is still a good option to consider when looking to monetize your blog.
3. Text Link Ads
This type of advertising allows you to place text based ads within the text of your articles. For example, if you are writing an article about a certain software, you can place text-link ads within your posts that would refer your viewers to that particular product.
You can’t just link to anything though, you need to sign up to that specific product affiliate advertising scheme (see ‘10. Affiliate Marketing‘ below) or you can sign up to a specialised provider who will automate the service.
Text-Link-Ads are quite good as it offers a non-intrusive way to monetize your blog that won’t put off your readers.
4. In-text Ads
Very similar to the above text link ads, ‘In-text ads’ are adverts that are placed inside your text content such as articles or blog posts. You can sign up to an In-text advertising provider that will place sponsored links within your text. These are double underlined to make them stand out from other links, so that when a user moves the mouse over one of them a small advertising pop-up will appear. The user can then decide if they want to click on it, which will make you a small amount of money.
These types of ads are a bit more obvious than the previous type, which can put some people off. If used properly, they can be a good way to monetize your blog.
5. Advertising Widgets
This method is relatively new on the scene. An increasing amount of people are using widgets on their websites to generate some money. These widgets are designed so that they can be easily placed onto a website without any hassle, which display a mixture of PPC, text link ads and affiliate programs.
6. Advertising Space
You can monetize your blog by selling space on your website for advertisers to display a banner. This can be a very lucrative method as it allows you to cut out the middleman and charge what you want for other people to advertise on your site.
Generally these deals are worked out so that you display an ad for a fixed amount of time for an agreed fee with the advertiser. The downside of this method is that you need to commit time to manage the whole process with the advertiser and that your site needs to have a lot of traffic to be considered by advertisers.
As you can see, I offer advertising space on my website in numerous different forms of banner ads that appear on all of my pages.
7. Pop-ups/Lightboxes
No doubt that you have heard of these! Pop-ups are very common online, but they are also very annoying. Many people hate pop-ups and have pop-up blockers installed to stop them. However, if executed in the right way, they can work. Having a single pop-up on your website that only appears to new visitors may work. They grab the attention of the visitor on their first visit and after that they won’t be bothered again by them.
Pop-ups don’t necessarily need to sell products directly. You can use them indirectly to promote aspects of your website, for example PopUp Domination can be used to encourage people to sign up to your email list of tutorial course, or alternatively you can create a lightbox with AWeber.
Pop-ups can work if you make them less annoying to people. The more frequently they appear, the less traffic you will get coming back!
8. Create & Sell Your Own Product
We are a society of consumers! If you have a product that you have made, then why not sell it on your website. Perhaps you are a software programmer and have designed an app to help people track stocks on their mobile phone. You could let people download it from your website for a small fee. Maybe your hobby is pottery and you want to sell off some of your work, then sell it on a website. If they are popular, there might be a full-time business for them!
The good thing about this is that compared with selling a product in a shop that has a small customer basis, online you have the world to sell your product to..
9. Write an eBook
Everybody seems to be writing an eBook these days, so why don’t you give it a try. These have become very popular in the last few years with the introduction of commercial eReaders such as the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle.
You could write an eBook about almost anything. Maybe you are good at DIY, you could write a book about renovating your house that people might find useful. You can then sell it through the Apple iStore or on Amazon.
You can sell it directly on your website as well! This way you get 100% of the sale price and you get traffic to your website. Selling your own eBook can be an excellent way to monetize your blog!
10. Teaching Program
The next step from writing tutorials would be to create an online teaching course. You could charge people a membership fee (see #22) or a fixed amount for joining a course that you have set up.
These courses could be about anything and could include podcasts, videos, tutorials, etc.
For example, you may be an expert photographer. You could set up a 2 week online training course detailing how to be a better photographer. You could make videos describing all of the different equipment that you might need, techniques that help achieve excellent quality photos, how to develop photos in a dark room, etc.
You need to make sure that the information that you offer to your paying customers is different to any free content that you offer on your site. You will receive a lot of complaints if you just charged people $100 for information that they just read in your free blog! You can only charge people premium prices for premium content.
11. Email Marketing
Email marketing can generate you lots of money. The key is to build a large email list of your customers/visitors. When people register to become a member, you get their email address. When people sign up to your weekly newsletter, you get their email address. The more ways there are to get someone’s email address the better.
With an email list, you can build a brand, recommend products, promote any events/workshops that you may be holding and more importantly to can encourage people to keep returning to your website.
Email marketing isn’t a direct way of making money, but it is a powerful way of increasing your income from your other methods by driving traffic back to your site. Just don’t go overboard with emails so that they are viewed as spam! Nobody likes spam!
12. Surveys & Polls
You can place surveys and polls from certain companies on your website that will pay you for the privilege. You can sign up to these sites and choose a particular survey/poll that will fit in with the content on your website. Visitors of your site can participate in voting, whilst you get paid for displaying it. Most of these polls operate on a Cost per Mile basis.
