The BEST Ways to Monetize a Blog
This topic alone could be written into a 300 page book. However, we have to make it into an article so we are just going to get straight to the point, here are some of the best ways to make money using a blog:
CPC
1. AdSense – Most of you should know what AdSense is. If you don’t, read up here. To maximize your earnings, blend the ads in with your site design and instead of just placing ads in your sidebar, put them in posts themselves by wrapping text around ad units. Also, don’t just use AdSense since there are many other effective ways to monetize a blog.
2. Yahoo Publisher Network – Works like AdSense, but it is from Yahoo!, not Google. I recommend running AdSense and Yahoo! at different times (you cannot use them at the same time on the same site) to test them. See which one makes you more money and lean towards that network. You can get more information at YPN. Testing income sources is the single most important thing you can do to make money with a blog or any other website.
3. Chitika E-MiniMalls – These Minimalls are CPC programs that feature products related to what you are blogging about and information about these products. It pays on a CPC model and some people love them, but others hate it. They have over 12,000 members. It goes back to point I made earlier – experiment!
4. Clicksor and Bidvertiser are two other popular options. They are not as popular as AdSense or YPN, but are still commonly used. Clicksor has a number of different monetization options available besides CPC ads.
5. BlogAds is a network that very popular bloggers such as PerezHilton use, and ads are recatngle boxes with pictures and text that appear in your blog’s sidebar, but to use the service, you must be invited my a member. BlogAds only keeps 30% of each ad sale.
Text Links
Text-Link-Ads/AdBrite/Text Links – Selling links is a great way to monetize a blog. Links have traffic and SEO value and links from popular pages can be worth thousands of dollars. You can sell text links yourself, or use brokers like Text-Link-Ads or AdBrite to sell links. If you want to sell links yourself, say you are selling links on your blogs “Advertise Page” and see the “Marketplace” sections at webmaster foums such as Digital Point.
Paid Blog Posts
There is a lot of controversy around this revenue method. You either feel one way or another about putting sponsored posts on your blog, it hurts your credibility or its not a big deal. If you want to put paid blog posts on your website, PayPerPost and ReviewMe are the two best ways to do so. PayPerPost is great for small bloggers since there are a lot of $10 offers that almost any blog can participate in. There are also some $100+ offers for larger blogs, but for these large blogs ReviewMe is the way to go. They have a minimum price of $30 and take 50% of what you make. If you have a big blog with a high Alexa and Technorati ranking, you can sell posts for as much as $400 or more.
Affilaite Marketing
Blogs that get large amounts of traffic and can move large amounts of products can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. It seems as if every business, whether it be Circuit City, eBay, or an eBook writer, has an affiliate program. You can go to a site related to your blog’s niche and see if they have an affiliate program. If they do and it pays well, sign up. Often times, you will have to create an account with sites like Commission Junction that run affiliate programs for hundreds of clients. Commission Junction runs the affiliate programs of some of the best known retailers in the world. There is also ClickBank.com where you can promote smaller less well known products like eBooks, but get paid 50% or more of the sale price, compared to 4% at some Commission Junction affiliates. Azoogle Ads is another very popular network with a lot of “big name” clients and a great deal of offers to promote. There are hundreds of options with affilaite marketing, so you need to find the offers that work best with your niche and that your readers will be interested in.
The two best independent affiliate programs in my opinion are Amazon and eBay. Amazon is very well known and people feel very comfortable buying from them. Bloggers make 5% or more on each product sold if they can sell a decent number of products each month. eBay is also very lucrative and pays as high as $35 per new member and 70% of its earnings on each transaction. However, it can be very difficult to move enough products to get to that level (30,000 new members and $3 million in winning auction sales a month), so AuctionAds, a company that acts as one “superaffiliate” and thus gets all its members to this level (even if they only recruit one new member) is a great way to use eBay’s Affiliate program. Auction Ads has over 15,000 members and it is rapidly growing. Using AuctionAds is also very easy, you just need to create an account and copy code to your website.
See our session on affiliate marketing to monetize a blog here.
“InText” Ads
Kontera is a company that specializes in “in-text” ads. These ads are in the posts of your blog and are underlined twice. When a reader scrolls over them a “hover box” with more information appears and if the reader clicks, you get paid on a CPC basis. Kontera requires 500,000 page views a month to join the program. IntelliTxt is a similar program.
CPM Ads/Direct Sales
In many instances, this is the most lucrative way to monetize your blog. With direct sale advertisements, you find companies that you feel would be interested in reaching your readers and see if they are interested in advertising on your blog. An effective way to do this is to see what companies are advertising on other blogs and websites in your niche. Set your prices low to start and increase them as your blog grows. With direct sales, you eliminate the middleman. CPM ads refers to ads that pay you a set amount for each 1000 pageviews your blog recieves. This number can range from less than a $1 to as much as $20 per ad spot with some network. The easiest way to get involved with CPM ads is to sign up with an advertising network like TribalFusion, FederatedMedia, or Gorilla Nation. Unfortunately, these networks have high entrance fees so you may have to wait until you have a strong readerbase before you are accepted.
Monetize Your Feed
1. Put affiliate links in posts. Interested readers will click on the affiliate links and you can earn a commission without having them ever visit your blog. In an effort to maintain credibility, I always recommend pointing out affiliate links / commercial interests in posts.
2. Use Text-Link-Ads’ Feedvertising to run text link ads on the bottom of posts in RSS feeds. All you have to do is create an account with Text-Link-Ads and sign up for the Feedvertising program. It currently works with Wordpress 2.0+ . Sign up here. You get paid on a flat fee per link.
3. Pheedo is another great way to monetize RSS feeds. Phhedo pays on a CPC basis and delivers text and banner advertisements to feeds. The advbertisements are updated frequently so the same ads won’t run repeatedly. You can get more information here.
4. Yahoo Publisher Network is great for sites in English with a US reader base. You will need a US Social Security number to sign up. With YPN you can display text links in your feeds and get paid on a PPC basis.
5. Kanoodle is another option for monetizing RSS feeds using text links on a CPC basis. Related links will be placed below posts in RSS feeds and when a user clicks on an ad, you earn money.
Unique Methods
1. Ask for Donations – You would be surprised to see what some people would give.
2. Make a Product related to your niche and sell it. You can get a decent amount of sales if you are reputable and well-known.
3. Create exclusive “members only” parts of the blog with more content and charge $x a month.
4. Sell Merchandise/Host Events – If you run a fairy popular blog, see if people will buy T-Shirts, caps, mugs, etc. related to your blog. Also try to sell tickets to an event/blog party and see if people will pay to come.
In this article, we have mentioned only the best and most well known programs. For a complete list of networks, see this article BlogOnExpo Speaker John Chow put together.
