How To Make Money With A Blog

Starting a blog is the one of the easiest ways let the world see what you want to share. Most bloggers don’t know any programming languages, so writing posts and submitting them by using blogging platforms is pretty easy to understand. It first started as an online diary, where posts were arranged in a reversed chronological order, for it to become one of the most popular ways to express your ideas online.
I myself wouldn’t have guessed that blogs might be as popular as they are today. More than that, I wouldn’t have guessed that one can make money with a blog, especially if the blog is about something he/she likes. Choosing a pleasant way to make money is always a good thing to do – it brings you happiness and in the end that’s what everyone is looking for, isn’t it?
Let’s say you have a blog, you have a decent number of visitors and you decide to monetize it. There are several things you should take into consideration and be really perseverant and patient in the first place. Monetizing a blog is a challenging task so you have to make up your mind if you want to succeed. Your ambition will help a lot and not losing it by the time you start getting the money is a must from the beginning. You have to understand that it might not be a source of existence right away, and you might want to keep your job first until your blog starts generating success. The percentage of bloggers that fail from monetizing their blog is much bigger than the ones that succeed, but I don’t want to scare you of. You will probably be one of those that succeed if you are really determined to do that. Determination brings success. It is going to be hard work, but you’ll definitely like it if you love what you are blogging about, especially when you will see money coming out of it.

PPC Ad Networks

Like you’ve already heard, there are different Ad networks that help you make money with your blog or website. One method is “pay-per-click” ad networks. You can choose from a variety of networks available on the web (Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher, Clicksor, Kontera, Bidvertiser…). I will further talk about Google’s AdSense program that is one of the best choices to far, but you can as well try the others out there.
What they do is read your article and then find ads that are relevant to the content of your post next to it. One good thing about relevant ads is that they might offer more information about the subject of your post to your visitors so that they might be interested to read it; hence they click on the ad and that’s how you get paid. Once you optimize it correctly, Adsense can really work, although you might feel skeptical about it at first. In order to use Google AdSense you have to know that you should have certain traffic on your website, otherwise it will be useless.

CPM Ad Networks

CPM Ad Networks act just like PPC Ad Networks, the only difference being that they pay you for the number of impressions. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, referring to the cost for 1 000 impressions.
For example if your blog generates 100 000 page views per month, and you have an advertising banner with a CPM equal to 1 $, then you will get 100 $ per month for only one banner. The rates in a CPM vary with the network, the format of the ad and its location on the blog. If for example you place a bigger ad, closer to the top of your page then you can get a higher CPM rate. The rate varies between 0.10 $ and 10 $ (but it can also be bigger in some cases). We recommend – BuySellAds.

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is one of the most popular methods so far. There are different services like BuySellAds that might help you sell advertising space on your blog and they will take care of all the process for 25 % from the earnings you get from it. However if you don’t want to give up 25 % of your earnings you can go solo and sell advertising space to advertisers directly, but keep in mind that you will have to take up all the process by yourself and it might get complicated at some point. For both of these options you will need a certain number of visitors; otherwise you will not qualify for it.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a really popular practice on the Internet and many bloggers and website owners choose it. Affiliate marketing lets merchants that would like to promote and sell their products advertise them on a certain blog/website in exchange for a commission.
As an affiliate you can redirect potential customers to the merchant by using different tools like banners,  text links or even product reviews. It really depends on you whether you choose this method or not. There are people that would be willing to promote anything that will pay them and others that refuse to do it out of principle. There are some popular affiliate marketplaces and networks you can choose from like: Azoogle Ads, Link Share, Clickbank, etc or you can also go directly to individual companies and publishers like SEObook, Dreamhost, Envato and many others.
These are just some of the most popular methods that can help you monetize your blog. There are still many other things you can do, with a little bit of a research and maybe other less popular methods will work for you better.
However you cannot think about success unless you have enough people to read your blog. This is the most important thing so far, other than offering good content. The question is how do you attract people to read your blog? You will need traffic in order to monetize your blog that is a fact. I will further refer to some tips on how to get traffic to your blog:

1. Guest posting

Guest posting is definitely one of the fastest ways to get traffic to your blog. All you have to do is provide good content in a good article and go for guest posting. Newbie bloggers can get lots of visitors due to guest posting and their blogs can get pretty popular if the content is good enough. Remember to post only unpublished content as a guest post, because the blog that is allowing you to post your article won’t get any search engine traffic for that article.

2. Blogcarnivals

Blogcarnivals is a great method for beginner bloggers to be noticed on the web and when I say noticed – I am talking about the possibility to get thousands of visitors per month. All you have to do is have good content and a cool title to go with that and you can get really god traffic from blogcarnivals. To get a better understanding about them, check out their website where you can sign up and start posting for no charge at all.

3. Blog community websites

Another way to get noticed is signing up for certain blog community websites where your blog will be visible; thus it might attract some traffic. Networking is the key to success when we talk about blogging so don’t be shy to sign up for more blog community sites and get to know your fellow bloggers.

4. Comment on other blogs and forums

As the blogging community is very social – it is a great way to promote your blog. Once you are active on other blogs or forums, then you can definitely attract their visitors your way. Don’t forget to sign up for forums related to your area and be active there. By inserting the link of your blog in your signature, you can as well get some attention. Just try not to be too annoying about promoting your blog on forums as people usually don’t really dig that.

5. Link to other blogs

Once you link to other blogs, you can be sure that the person who you linked with, will link back to you. People usually like to check out who is interested in them, so this is also a pretty good way to attract some new visitors and build relationships with other bloggers.
Remember that for promoting and monetizing your blog it takes time and patience. If you don’t have any earnings in the first year, or they are really small, being persistent will definitely help you get some money the next year. If you don’t make any efforts, there is no way people can find your blog on the Internet – as this is a huge web with plenty of other good blogs.