How Can You Make Money With Your Blog?
A guide to monetizing your blog.
So you fancy yourself a writer? You think you have value to give your fellow man, and you can't wait to share it, but you've realized that blogging and being a popular blog can cost you a little cash and take over your time, so you want to know how can you make money while doing what you love? Well here are a few ways you can go about making blogging profitable!
There are 3 main ways to make money with your blog, sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, and going out and grabbing your own sponsors. For any of these to actually make any money you will need a steady flow of traffic to your website/blog. No one wants to pay you for dead space. (What your blog is if you're the only one reading it!)
Sponsored posts. What is a sponsored post? A sponsored post is a post that you are paid to write usually about a company or product on your blog. These companies are paying for your positive review of their services, site, or product to get your readers attention. Please keep in mind that if you write about world hunger and you suddenly post a review for a designer shoe company this will confuse your readers and probably not be profitable for the company. You are providing a service so make sure your posts are inline with your audience, to keep both your readers and your client happy. Sponsored posts can be obtained through a couple of different places.
Those are the blogger to company programs I currently am enlisted with most have communities as well as their own blogs attatched to their businesses... I prefer the people at mom dot but maybe that's because they are just getting started trying to hook up their blogging community with sponsors.
Getting your own sponsors. If you intend on going after your own sponsors let me suggest that you know what you want, and start small. Don't jump on your dream sponsorship and mess it up right away. Start with the mom and pop company work out the kinks in your pitch and then grow from their until you are very comfortable and know what to expect companies to ask about your blog and what you have to offer. Know what you want. Don't under sell yourself but don't promise things you can't produce. If your blog gets 100 unique views a month you can't produce 1,000 hits on their page/website/sells ect. within a month. Make sense? You will get more personal attention from the mom and pop small business owners, but they will also expect more value for their dollars so just be aware of that when you get started.
Affiliate Marketing. There are many ways to go about marketing for affiliate marketing companies. You can use google adsense to try and drive traffic to your sponsors, you can use email marketing, facebook ads, posting ads/banners on your own site, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), misspelling name registrations, and other black hat spammy type methods, and finally article posts. In blogging you will be dealing MOSTLY with article posts which may include product reviews. With my freebie blog if there is a company that is offering some sort of giveaway this fits in VERY well and with a high traffic following this would pay for the blog and my time easily. Finding those magical companies, that fit right in with your niche is hard! There is something that would make your life much easier however, having a good and responsive account manager assigned by the affiliate programs. Unfortunately, most of the programs I've been involved with this far only want to assign account managers to companies that are consistently producing $10,000 a month in commissions (if I were producing that kind of cash I don't know that I'd need their account manager any longer!) BUT, I haven't given up on finding a company that will fit my blog like a glove and be so easy to use and understand that I won't need help, or will have that affiliate manager available to me while I grow. These are a few of the companies I currently use.
That being said Ebay, Google, & Amazon all have their own affiliate networks that pay you for product referal sales on their websites. I was unable to secure approval from Ebay, I am a part of google adsense and use several google webmaster type products, and Amazon I am a part of but it hasn't converted well at all for me but that might be user error and not their fault!
There are a few things that don't exactly fall into the above categories, that involve selling ad space one way or another on your blog.
Adsense, Adsense is run by google it was mentioned earlier but I want to clarify that this is text based advertisement. It usually works best when you try to intergrate it into your website to look like links for reference and part of the content. I personally find adsense annoying because I don't know how many times I've been tricked into exiting what I was looking at thinking I was clicking a link to the same site about what I was researching. Generally I'm not an online "buyer" I do shop online but I'm usually broke :p Adsense is easy to implement and blogger just asks for your ID and pops ads into your blog at appropriate spots. Adsense
Vig Link, I find viglink to be an INCREDIBLY neat and very profitable idea for the creator. Viglink makes all the links on your site affiliate links, once you install their script to your sites main page. Viglink takes a percentage of the profit and puts in, their pockets and gives you a percentage of links that you weren't able to make affiliate links or forgot or didn't know there was an affiliate program for at all. Like I said it's easy to see how a script that is able to do this for your site and keeps a share of the profit of your site and every other site that installs it can be easily extremely profitable for the creator. But like I said, links you didn't affiliate anyway it's no skin off your nose to run this program on your blog. Make SURE you don't turn on it's affiliate over-ride feature UNLESS you plan on using it as your only way to monetize your site. (Which could work well if you don't want to make a lot with your site and don't want the hassel of looking for affiliates to promote. This is the microwave of affiliate marketing :p) Vig Link
There are other services that I have heard about and used through hubpages that make keywords in the text of your content links to related sites, automatically. This kinda falls into the same category as adsense I hate being tricked and am usually very annoyed when I click a link only to find that the link I clicked took me away from the website and not to the users intended content. I have also found these types of links to link to competitors websites and things not always relevant to the content that I meant to portray... there isn't enough control for this type of content and for that reason I will not be promoting those types of programs.
Those are the main ways up until this point that I have found for monetizing blogs. There are surely other ways out there there are probably hundreds of companies I have left off that promote blogging and business direct partnerships, and 100's of other affiliate marketing companies, this is NOT meant to be a complete liste by far the internet is a big wide place and I could open an entire new blog just to talk about my experiences with the affiliate marketing companies and other ways of personal monetization.
A side note on affiliate marketing; I'd also like to mention that every affiliate, partnership, and individual company has acceptable use policies and you MUST be sure you are in compliance with their terms before promoting for them. There's NOTHING more frustrating than finding out you're getting charge-backs because the company realized you promoted their products in a way that they disapproved of. When you're in doubt about anything it is best to ask questions rather than be sorry later. Affiliate managers are there to answer queries and when there isn't one available there is a help section available!
Thanks for taking the time to get to the end of all of this and absorb my knowledge!
-Heather
PS:
If you are or know of another outstanding company that deserves to be listed in this entry please feel free to contact me! I will gladly edit this post to add your company or organization, or write a separate review for the right terms.
If I have missed opportunities for monetization entirely please feel free to contact me also I will gladly look into those ways as well, may even give you a chance to guest post, or again edit this article and credit you with the appropriate submission if you wish.
If you are or know of another outstanding company that deserves to be listed in this entry please feel free to contact me! I will gladly edit this post to add your company or organization, or write a separate review for the right terms.
If I have missed opportunities for monetization entirely please feel free to contact me also I will gladly look into those ways as well, may even give you a chance to guest post, or again edit this article and credit you with the appropriate submission if you wish.
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