How to Make Money From Your Blog

Making a profitable blog is no mean task. If I say, less than ten percent of aspiring professional bloggers manage to earn enough to quit their day job, then some of my friends may not read this further. But you can be among those ten percent successful bloggers who are getting inflated payouts consistently. What it takes to milk your blog effectively and how to do it? Well, it is not a secret recipe but it is not a cakewalk either. Let's face it, earning good income from your blog takes hard work and time. I am talking about the case in which you are starting from scratch with no prior experience of professional blogging. Let's knit a chain of thought. How can you earn money from your blog? When loads of traffic comes to it and you build decent core audience of your blog. How can it happen? When you give something useful to your readers. So in a nutshell, it is the content of your blog that matters in the long run.

Once you have realized that no matter what monetization option you try, unless you don't provide the real content, you are a dead duck. Now let us explore the various monetization options available to a professional blogger.

Options for Blog Monetization

1. Advertising
2. Affiliate System
3. Sponsored Ads
4. Selling your own products
5. Donations

Advertising

The most common method that first comes in mind to monetize the blog is advertising. There are plenty of good advertising networks with different types of implementations and commission structure. Adsense and YPN are the two most widely used advertising programs used by bloggers. Both programs serve contextual ads on pay per click (CPC) and pay per thousand impressions (CPM) basis. These programs are very popular as they serve highly targeted ads, which are relevant to the site content, and visitors find these ads useful for them. Other CPC advertising programs like Chitika eMiniMalls are also available to experiment on your blog. Several text ads programs are also good options for medium to high traffic blogs. These ads are sold for fixed amount on per month basis and are good option to try. Popular Text Ads programs are Text Link Ads, BidVertiser and AdBrite.

Affiliate System

If your chosen niche is narrow and concentrates hard on specialized domain, there are good chances to earn decent money from affiliate system. Amazon, Commission Junction and LinkShare are the three most trusted and highly rated affiliate programs. They have huge inventory of products and services to choose from, which you can promote or sell on your blog.

Sponsored Ads

Getting sponsors for your blog is another option, but to attract companies for sponsorship, your blog must be popular enough to convince the sponsoring company. Once your blog popularity reaches certain level, you will automatically get offers from relevant companies for sponsorship.

Selling Your Own Products

I have seen all top bloggers using this technique very effectively to grab direct advertisements. You can create customized blog themes and can sell them aggressively on your blog. A classic example is Blogging Experiment, which generates decent income by selling blog theme. You can also offer your other services like content creation to create one more stream of income.

Donations

Do not hesitate to put a donation link on your blog. But keep one thing in mind. Your blog must provide real meaty content and other useful resources before you ask for donation from your visitors. A visitor will only donate if he thinks that you are contributing to society in some way. Make your blog a place where your visitors get their answers.

Conclusion

Once you decide to monetize your blog, do it aggressively. Make sure you do not flood your posts with Ads. It's going to make your visitors run away to never return back. Provide high quality content consistently and use all the available options at your disposal.