I’ve been blogging for about 6-7 years and I get asked how to make money online all the time! Friends, family and random people who find out the industry where I work ask me all the time, “How do I make money online?”. Anyone with $10 and a little ambition can make money online. There is no prerequisite for becoming a blogger, website owner, or webmaster. I’m going to give you a few tips here on making money online by blogging.
This article will assume that you already have your domain name or maybe a subdomain through a free web hosting or blogging service. I also assume you have some idea of the content that you’ll be posting on your blog – make sure it’s something that people will actually search for. You can use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool to help you discover if your content is in demand.
Easiest Ways to Make Money Online Blogging:
1. Google Adsense – This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money online. You can signup online, grab your code within minutes, and paste into your webpages/blog posts. That’s it…you’ll be earning in no time. Your URL does need to be approved so that is the only thing you’ll have to wait for. You can include up to 3 ad units in your webpage, but this is an ample amount. Any more than 3 ad units would look bad anyways. If you start earning over $10,000/month you can become a part of the “UPS Club” where your checks will be send via UPS! Google Adsense displays text ads within an ad block that is relevant to your webpage’s content. So if someone searches Google for a keyword related to your content, then they visit your webpage, and finally they click on an ad that is related to your blog post.
2. Affiliate Programs – This is another easy way to make money blogging. There are thousands of products available online that have affiliate programs. There are also sites like ebay, buy.com, and amazon.com that have affiliate programs so you can review any product in their catalog. Affiliate programs track sales with affiliate tracking software which gathers info on sales from specific referrers (websites). If your website refers a customer to another website and they purchase something you can earn a percentage of that sale or flat fee. Some popular programs include web hosting affiliate programs, credit cards, health, and technology related sites. There are networks such as CJ or LinkShare that bring affiliates and vendors together in one place so you don’t have to search online for each product. You should insert affiliate links to vendors that have products related to your blog posts/articles.
3. Text Link Ads – If you have a WordPress blog you can sell text link ads right in your content without having to add them in yourself. There are services such as textlinkads.com that allow you to paste some code into your website or blog that automatically inserts text ads into your pages. You submit your website into the system and they set your initial pricing based on PageRank, Alexa ranking, and a few other factors. You can display many link ads per page, but you don’t want to over do it.
4. Banner Ads – Usually this method doesn’t work very great unless you have hundreds of visitors per day and thousands of impressions. You can sell banner ads direct to businesses or you can use services like Bravenet, ValueClick or AdBrite. These don’t pay as well as Google Adsense, but if your site or blog doesn’t really fit into Adsense – this would be an option for you. Banner ads don’t pay what they used to back in 1999, but they can give you some supplemental income.
5. Sell Products!!! If you have a blog that talks about a specific topic and you get tons of traffic…start selling products yourself! You could develop your own product or resell someone elses product on your website. If you have a weblog that focuses on free web hosting and you get tons of visitors…you could start a web hosting company to get your own customers.