Make Money through Blogging

In the past 2 years of my blogging, I haven’t paid so much attention to other revenue streams for blogging besides advertising and so the consequence was a meager earning a month, which is, sad to say, less than $100. My reason was always, I have no time for it (because I’m also doing offline freelance work) or it would be another tedious work for me which, eventually, will land me in a very stressful and complicated situation. I’ve got too much unreasonable excuses which kept me at bay most of the time.

In short, I’ve laid my eggs only in one basket. Yes, you’ve got it right, it’s the Adsense basket. (I’ve also tried a few affiliate programs that I won’t mention here but I removed them since they don’t generate any earnings at all.) I’ve also got one affiliate program still running and Adbrite that generates, well, a small percentage of my income (but still worthwhile). And so for you guys, to avoid the pit falls where I’ve been, I would advice that you should give more time exploring all the possible earning opportunities for your blog and not just stick to one channel of revenue, if you’re really into generating an income from your blog.

After discovering my mistakes, I begin to wonder and begin to search for an answer. How do you add more revenue streams to your blog? It lead me to several articles which eventually brought me to the things I’ve been reading early in my blogging career which I might’ve forgotten along the way and several new stuffs as well.

What I’ve discovered is that basically, you can earn from blogging even without a blog of your own but it really helps if you have one. You can also earn from blogging even if you have little blog traffic and low page rank; but then again, it really really helps if you have a popular and highly visited blog.

Here are some easy ways upon which you can earn from blogging:

Advertising Programs

They are sites that conduct advertising programs for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers go to them to get their ads running on the web. Publishers, like us bloggers, will then place these ads by the advertisers to our sidebars or anywhere else in our blogs where the visitors will see and decide whether they will try it (click it) or not.

There several types of advertising programs. Cost per click (CPC) advertising gives you a percentage of the ad revenue (or earnings) every time your visitor clicks on the ad in your blog.

Cost per action (CPA) advertising is similar to CPC in a sense that you also earn a percentage from of the ad revenue placed in your blog. The only catch is they’ll only pay you when one of your visitors does an action such as signing-up, downloading, or purchase something instead of just clicking the ad.

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is different from CPC or CPA. Advertisers pay a certain amount for every thousand impression their ad makes. It doesn’t mean that you won’t earn if you don’t get a thousand impressions. It just means you’d still earn an amount every time their ads show up in your blog, the more the better.

Advertising programs work best if you have many visitors. Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser, Yahoo Publisher Network, WidgetBucks, and Text Link Ads are just a few of its examples.

RSS Advertisements

Actually, it’s just another advertising program that could have a CPC, CPA, or CPM. The only difference is that it shows up not in your blog but in your feeds. Earning a considerable amount from this form of advertising requires that you also have a considerable amount of feed readers. So if you have a lot of new visitors getting into your blog and quite many loyal readers, then you’re in good hands.

I haven’t tried it yet since I’m still having second thoughts about it as it might scare away some of my readers; but I’m hearing some bloggers earning a lot from this form of advertising. Perhaps I’ll try it out on this blog’s feed later on when I finally have sufficient readers to apply it upon.

Feedburner.com, Feedvertising, Pheedo, and Kanoodle are some of the online networks that are offering RSS advertisements.

Affiliate Programs

Yes, there are virtually countless upon countless of them scattered all throughout the web. They are companies, networks, blogs, and all sorts of revenue generating sites that offer commissions to affiliates that send traffic and sales to their site or network.

Bloggers can become an affiliate and start pasting html or javascript codes with their respective id code (which the affiliate program or network will automatically provide) into their blogs. (The id code serves as you’re identity for the affiliate network to recognize) These can be strange flashing images ranging from the smallest button to the widest header banners scattered all through out a blog whose owner is desperate for an income.

The trick with these is to become an affiliate of a program whose theme or business is related to the niche of your blog. Also, don’t grow too fund of placing too many image links of your affiliate network. Use text links as much as possible and a few of these images in the appropriate places within your blog.

Pay per post or Paid Blogging

You are to blog about a website, a product, or a service and they pay you after you made it. You will make money by making a review. This is new to me actually but it’s kind of interesting. They said it started in 2006. Now I’m wondering where I’ve been why I haven’t heard of it.

The paid blog post can be a review or an introduction on the advertiser's website, products or services. The blogger will be paid a least $5 for each sponsor post. Blogs that have massive traffic, high Page Rank, and large number of subscribers can charge a few hundred dollars for just writing one sponsor post.

The only drawback though is that writing too many sponsor posts that are not relevant to your blog content can seriously affect your traffic.

ReviewMe, PayPerPost, and SponsoredReviews are examples the networks that offer this type of earning opportunity.

Blogging for Networks

Blog networks are also blogs like the blogs we bloggers have; the only difference is that they are in a network or an aggregate identity and they serve professionally written posts that get the heads of big names in the industry turning. They have a newsier feel to the content they produce.

From time to time, the need for new bloggers from among their ranks emerges out of the blue. If you believe that you already have what it takes to write the same level as they do, then by all means you can try. These networks are willing to pay bloggers good amount of money using a variety of payment models if you really deserve to be paid like so. Unlike blogging for your self, writing for established networks has some advantage since they will handle a lot of the set up, promotion, admin and SEO, etc.

Examples of known blog networks are b5media, Gawker Media, and Weblogs, Inc.

E-Books

If you’re an expert at some field and felt that it’s valuable information which you can share to others, why not make an e-book. You can sell it through your blog and, maybe, before you know it, you’ve got a best seller in your hands.

Donations

You can place a donation button leading to your “Paypal” account somewhere in your sidebar. And watch the donations start flowing-in. Although it’s not applicable for every blogger, if you know that you are providing a comprehensive and useful blog why not give it a try.

I’ve seen many of these donation buttons in “ad-free” blogs. It’s their method of monetizing their blogs without the intervention of “capitalist greed” anywhere. There have been full-time and part-time bloggers who earn from this kind of revenue stream.


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