How to Make Money Blogging

In the goold old days, if you were a writer, you either made it big or found yourself struggling to pay the rent. Finding a publisher and appropriate endorsements composed a formidable obstacle. Luck played a big factor, even if you did have the skills and the talents. Luckily, with the advent of blogging, you don’t need any luck, or any skills and talents for that matter, to make some good money from the World Wide Web. Knowledge is the key. Making money is not hard, especially if you know what to do.

With blogs, the key to success is to diversify your money making sources. There are many sources to choose from. Here are some of the most popular ones:

1. Google Adsense- making money blogging with Google really is as easy as one, two, and three. Simply create the blog, customize the ads, and insert them into your blog. Getting into Adsense used to be somewhat of a big deal for beginning webmasters. Google tend to be a little picky with their application approvals. However, since its purchase of Blogger and to encourage its usage, you can get an Adsense account by simply signing up with Blogger, which is a lot easier to get in. You don’t even have to use your Blogger account, since your Adsense ID is good on any website you choose to use it on. Adsense does a really good job of blending the ads into surrounding content to make them more interesting to visitors. This helps you greatly, since you will be paid per click through. Each click can bring pennies or dollars into your account, depending on the competition between the advertisers on your niche. However, lower paying niches can be offset by getting more visitors (and clicks), which also happens to be easier than high-paying niches. 

2. Affiliate Programs- Here's how you make money blogging- for every visitor that goes to the sponsor’s site through your own website and purchases something, you receive a percentage of the total amount. This percentage depends on the products the sponsor sell. They usually range from 10-40% for hard goods, and up to 70% for digital goods (like E-books, softwares, etc…) Affiliate marketing has been in existence long before Adsense, and they will continue to do so as long as the earth is round. In comparison to Adsense, affiliate programs might be a little intimidating to use at first. But they can be powerful money makers. In fact, a guru once told me that no matter how much you make in Adsense, be it $100 or $1000 per day, you can always make more with affiliate programs. 

3. Rent out Ad Space- this is perhaps the easiest way to make money blogging, because once you get into the program, the money is essentially guaranteed. However, you must have really high-quality, high-traffic blogs to be eligible for this luxury route. When you rent out ad space, companies pay you a fixed amount before hand to post their ads on your blogs. This payment continues periodically in exchange for you keeping the ads on your blogs. A number of companies act as the middlemen in facilitating this type of service, like BlogAd and Adbrite.

4. Rent out links- this works similar to renting out ad spaces. Instead of displaying commercial ads, you add a link to the renter’s website on your blog to help his website gain popularity. The internet is basically a huge, finger-pointing medium. Whoever has the most fingers pointed to them gets the most attention. A smaller site just starting out is often willing to pay other sites to point to them. But to qualify, your site must have already been established for a long time. It’s much easier to find suitors to rent out links to than ad spaces. Again, there are companies that act as the middlemen here, but you also advertise your blog on E-bay yourself. 

A good strategy to make money blogging would be to join an assortment of programs, both contextual ads and affiliate programs. Just be sure that the affiliate programs you join have something to do with the topic of your blog, to ensure high conversion rates for your traffic. Also note that if you have Adsnese on a page, you can’t have any other types of ads. You can offset this by joining another contextual program like Adbrite, which is much more liberal with their regulations, and put them on the page in conjunction with your affiliate programs. Once your blog gets firmly established, you can then start renting out ad spaces and/or links, which is the easy to make money blogging.