3 Effective Ways to Monetize Your Blog
We all know many bloggers are open minded people who do blogging for fun. They run their web logs for their friends, relatives and like-minded people who they hang around the Web with, so they don’t usually look into making money on their websites. Well, if you are a pro blogger or your blog is simply that popular that you can’t lose your chance to earn something on it, you need to think of how to monetize its traffic.
If your blog is not a community supporting news feed or an add-on page for some website, but a sole project, there are not that many ways to earn on it, but choosing one of those, that we are going to introduce is definitely worth trying.
1. Become an affiliate
One of the easiest ways to start earning money on your web log is enroll into affiliate partnership with some company. The more relevant you partner is to the topics you cover, the more sales you are expected to get. For instance, if you are a photographer and deal with e-shops where you get your equipment, you can place their banner on your blog so any sale made by your visitors from your website will be rewarded with a commission.
The most interesting thing about affiliate partnership is that in fact you don’t need to be bound with one company specifically – you can cooperate with as many of them as you like. And of course, the topics you write about play a very important role. The more niches your blog covers the more different companies you can advertise, and the hosting provider, too, by the way, since you host your blog somewhere, don’t you? Who says your readers don’t want to run their own sites as smoothly as yours. And if you do not want to deal with specific companies and participate in various affiliate programs making new deals anytime you or they need to change something – you can join an affiliate network, like the one held by Commission Junction. Cooperating with them will let you find best affiliate offers and help you with marketplace picking.
2. Offer advertising positions
If your affiliate earnings are going to depend on the visitors’ interest and your partner’s reputation, selling advertising positions will guarantee you constant stable profit. The profit, however, may be questionable and so may be the interest in occupying those positions. Your blog has got to be very popular and have a great number of daily hits to be worth placing one’s advertisement at.
To look and sound more serious and attractive it is advisable to have your blog prepared for expected adverts – work out the positions you are going to leave for them, create kind of a media plan to estimate pricing for those positions depending on the size and period of an ad, gather some traffic information about your resource – number of daily/monthly hits, incoming traffic sources, conversion rates (if any are available by that time). Finally you may look for companies that don’t run affiliate programs but nevertheless may be interested in partnership – even if that doesn’t multiply your funds, you may still expect some bonuses. To find potential advertisers, you may check the relevant keywords on Google – find the keywords that make your blog get displayed on top of search results and check the resources that prompt in Google Adwords – this is going to be a perfect match for your blog. Then you may study the resources you like best and contact their holders personally.
3. Place sponsored reviews
Sponsored reviews is something that is not usually considered as fair advertising. Those e-commerce owners who are not much concerned about acting fair prefer this way of advertising. On the other hand, those bloggers who honor fair-play never accept sponsored reviews placement proposals, although these are well-paid. Well, if you want to earn on this and keep your honor, you may offer placement of such reviews on your own, picking those service or goods providers, you would recommend your readers in fact. If you don’t know how they do it, you can take a look at some of those resources that deal with sponsored reviews placement – http://linkfromblog.com/, http://bloganything.net, http://www.solidblogger.com.
As far as you can see, even doing blogging just for fun may bring some profit. The tips above will hardly make you rich overnight, but will for sure help you cover the cost of your hosting and some other minor spendings. In order to start earning by any of those means you need to make sure your blog is interesting and the contacts you are trying to partner with are relevant. Of course, this will also require good communication skills, but this is something, bloggers don’t usually miss, so good luck 🙂 By the way, if you are looking for an affiliate partner, already – spend another minute to check out our Affiliate Program at SiteValley.com.