There are hundreds of thousands of blogs popping out online everyday. One of the objectives of starting such blogs is to earn money and make a living out of it. Though establishing a blog needs long time, it is not very difficult to make money from your blog. In this article we will discuss 6 ways to make money from your blog.
- Pay Per Click Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Content Recommendation
- Product Review
- Sponsored Guest Posts
- Selling Digital Products
Pay Per Click Advertising
PPC is the most popular advertising method for monetizing your blog. The best example is Google AdSense. Nowadays you can’t find a blog without AdSense advertisements. From popular news sites to newbie blogs, every site shows pay per click advertisements. PPC advertisement generally works in two modes – CPC and CPM. Cost per click or CPC is a method in which advertisers pay to the publishers for each click. And cost per mille (CPM) is a method of earning revenue for every thousand impressions of an ad.
There are lot of varieties of PPC as shown in the below picture which you can use for monetizing your blog.
Popular programs like AdSense needs a blog with decent traffic, hence you may need to wait till the time your blog gets good traffic. There are also other programs like Buysellads and Infolinks you can apply for monetizing your blog.
The earnings from PPC advertisements depend on the age of your site, niche and the placement ads on your site. You can use Google AdWords keyword planner tool to find the number of searches and estimated CPC for any keywords. But it is recommended to focus on the area of your blog rather than start writing with high paying keywords.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the age-old concept of referring people to buy someone’s product and earns a percentage of commission from the product owner. You can use PPC advertising and affiliate marketing together to make huge money from your blog.
Assume you are using WordPress and host your site on Bluehost hosting. You can become an affiliate of Bluehost and get the banner and affiliate links to be showcased on your site. You can recommend Bluehost to your users based on your good experience with them. Below is what Bluehost affiliate programs says:
By driving customers to sign up at Bluehost, you will receive $65.00 per referral. What could be better than offering a great service to those that visit your web site, and making a healthy sum on the side for doing so? You send them our way, we’ll do the rest.
This method seems to work much better for triggering real purchases, as people believe the word of mouth from those really used the products. Amazon affiliate program is another popular one helps bloggers to make huge money by promoting Amazon products through affiliate links.
Unlike PPC advertisements in which you will get few cents to dollars for a click, affiliate marketing pays you heavily. For example, in the above Bluehost case you will get $65 for each purchase made through your affiliate link.
Content Recommendation
Suggesting related content is a relatively new method of monetizing your blog. It is also called content discovery and works similar to PPC advertising. Even Google offers matched content ads through AdSense program and helps publishers to showcase ads in-between the related posts. There are also popular third party services like Taboola and Outbrain offers content recommendation.
You will be paid for clicks on the recommended ads and the rates are similar to PPC advertisement.
Product Review
You can start writing review of the products you use and want to recommend to users. Over the period of time product owners will approach you to write about their products and different offerings. Let us take an example – when you start writing few articles about VPN, many VPN companies will approach you to write about their products. Generally they offer free service for a year and allow you to create custom affiliate link which earns more commission for you.
Also you can dedicatedly offer product review as a service on your site for fixed amount per review.
Sponsored Guest Posts
Similar to paid product review, sponsored guest post is another way to earn money from your blog. Ensure to have precise guidelines for accepting sponsored posts and review the articles thoroughly before publishing it on your site.
Create a menu and site wide notification in an attractive manner that you are accepting sponsored guest posts.
Selling Digital Products
Every site building platform offers ecommerce feature and building an online store is easier than ever. You can easily sell digital products like eBooks, widgets, plugins and themes through your blog. One successful WordPress plugin or a theme can make you millionaire and take your life into a different direction.
Ensure your digital product offerings are inline with your blog’s niche. Otherwise writing about cats and selling dogs will not make sense.
Conclusion
Running an established blog needs huge money starting from hosting to maintenance of the entire site. Take you favorite blog and check how they earn money to run the blog. You will definitely find they earn money through one of the above explained monetization methods.
So plan your activities in long run and start building your blog in that direction. Initially the earnings will be in pennies but later you will see the magic once the blog is established.
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