Income Streams for Bloggers
Make Money From Your Blog
There are many different opportunities for bloggers to make money from blogging. This article presents those opportunities and explains how you might take advantage of them.
One thing for sure about most of the techniques for revenue generation with a blog is that they won’t make you rich quick, unless you are very lucky and hit on something very special.
However, as money-making opportunities go, if you can write reasonably well, and you have something interesting to say, it’s one of the easiest income streams you can create. What’s more, it’s one of the cheapest – you can set up a blog for free.
Advertising Programs
Probably the most obvious way of monetizing your blog. Anyone who has ever viewed more than one or two pages in a browser will have come across “Ads by Google”. It costs nothing to get a Google AdSense account, and once you have it, all you need to do is add the code that they give you to your website or blog and the adverts will be displayed automatically.
But Google is not the only advertisement provider. Every day, new providers seem to appear on the scene, because advertising is worth big money. Google’s AdSense payout doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be, so it is well worth considering other providers. But that doesn’t mean you should exclude AdSense.
Check out these alternatives to AdSense: Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick, Value Click, and BlogAds.
RSS Advertising
RSS is a way of syndicating articles from one website to another. RSS Advertising syndicates advertisements. It’s as simple as that.
The providers create an RSS feed containing advertisements, which you syndicate on to your own site. This technique is in its infancy, so may not be as effective as others.
Sponsorship
Sell your advertising space directly. Instead of displaying dynamic ads provided by organisations such as Google, the advertiser pays you to appear on your site. An example of this would be if you ran a popular blog on motoring, then a manufacturer such as Volkswagen might like to advertise on it.
If large corporations get involved, then you could be talking serious money.
Affiliate Programs
There are thousands of products being sold via affiliate or associate programs. You can promote those items directly from your blog (eg via a ClickBank link), or use one of the larger companies such as Amazon, who will insert context-based adverts in your pages. This works in a similar way to AdSense, but the products being presented are all being sold by Amazon.
Digital Assets
If you create your own ebooks, reports, courses, software, videos, or audio, your blog is the ideal place to sell those products. They all have one thing in common and that is that they are digital and therefore downloadable. The advantage of that is that you do not have to be involved in the delivery of your product. The system is totally automated – the purchaser pays for the product and in return they receive a download link. The purchaser can be anywhere in the world, in any time-zone, and they will receive their purchase almost instantly. The first thing you will know about it is an email saying that you have received some money.
Physical Products
Your products might not be digital. No problem. Take orders from your blog and deliver them the conventional way. Be even more cunning and promote products provided by a Drop-shipping company and you don’t even have to handle the stock or fulfil the orders.
Professional Blogging
You may have come across blogs belonging to famous people and celebrities. Do you think they write them themselves? In most cases, it’s unlikely. Professional bloggers, working for the celebrity’s agent write them.
It’s probably not easy to swing a deal writing a pop star’s blog, but there are a number of companies and organisations who run blogs but don’t have time to keep them updated. Find those, contact the company and strike a deal.
Donations
Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years. If you write useful, informative posts, provide an important information service, or give away useful items, some people will donate money to you.
There have been reports of bloggers being able to quit their jobs to become full-time bloggers by virtue of the donations they have received.
Blog Flipping
Create a blog, build it up, and make it popular.
Once you’ve made that blog “the place to go”, you can sell it.
Go for it! Make that blog! Make money!
Article Marketing
