You can make money either directly from your blog or make money
because of your blog. In the former method, you show advertisements to
your visitors or sell affiliate products while in the latter style, you
make money indirectly as blogging can help you find a new job or get
freelancing work (after all, your blog is a portfolio of your thoughts,
ideas and skills.)
To display advertisements on your blog, you
can either partner with existing advertising programmes (like Google
Adsense, Chitika, etc) or contact prospective advertisers directly (say
you have a popular blog about Sports Shoes, then Nike or Reebok could be
interested in showcasing their products to your visitors).
We
will first discuss the popular advertising programmes and then suggest a
few other approaches to generate income from your blog.
Blog-Ads
are the pioneer in blog advertising.
Blog-ads generally pay well and also
provide you the liberty to choose which ads are displayed on your blog.
The other big advantage is that Blog-ads offer a fixed payment
irrespective of the number of site visitors. But the downside is that
you can gain entry into the Blog-ads network, only when your website
receives a decent amount of traffic and some advertiser is willing to
sponsor you. That could be a huge requirement for a new blog but
established bloggers should consider Blog-ads, provided they find
sponsors.
The biggest and most famous player in web advertising
is Google.
Their Google Adsense program is hugely popular because it
offers contextual ads, meaning Google spiders scan the content of the
webpage on which Google Ads would be displayed and then show ads based
on the context of the content. Contextual Ads offer very good returns,
as site visitors are more interested in knowing about products that are
related to the content they are reading. For example, someone reading
about cars will show more interest in advertisements about car loans
than in software like Microsoft Office. Google algorithms make sure that
your site visitors see only relevant ads.
Getting Google Adsense
ads for you blog is very simple.
There are absolutely no
pre-requirements like finding sponsors or site traffic levels or
geographic location except one – your blog should stay away from topics
like gambling, piracy or sexual content. Once you fit the bill, applying
is a one step process. Google engineers review your site the next day
and send you a small “ad code” that you can integrate in your blog. Ads
start getting displayed almost immediately.
Google Ads can be
either “Pay per Click” or “Pay per Impression”.
Their reporting system
is almost real-time – you can check at any time of the day what your
earnings have been since the start of the day. Google even has the
largest pool of advertisers, so you can virtually write on any topic and
Google will find relevant ads for you. Also, Google Adsense is more
suitable for Indian Publishers as Google sends a monthly payment cheque
in Indian Rupees so you save paying bank commissions for international
transactions. Highly recommended.
Chitika is another player though relatively new.
Chitika Comparison
Shopping Ads are generally more popular on product related blogs that
write about gadgets, clothes, software since Chitika displays
merchandise from Shopping.com. Chitika Ads, known as Chitika eMiniMalls,
are presented in an interactive ad unit – one can compare prices from
different merchants, read the main features of a product and even search
the shopping database – everything inside one ad.
Chitika is
known to offer good returns but there’s one drawback.
Though anyone can
apply for their programme, Chitika won’t pay you for traffic from India,
Pakistan and some other countries. That means if a site visitor in
India clicks a Chitika ad, the site owner won’t receive any benefit.
Sites that primarily receive traffic from US, UK can consider Chitika as
a good alternative.
TextLinkAds and Adbrite are other popular
site-targeted non-contextual advertising programmes. They are extremely
popular with gambling, adult content and file uploading sites like
rapidshare or megaupload. The reason that these programmes are popular
lies in the flexibility and small entry-level requirements – an
advertiser can choose to run his ad on your site, for just one day or
maybe seven days and immediately calculate the conversion ratio. No
bidding competitors and the ad is guaranteed to run on the blogger’s
website. These programmes are particularly popular among small
advertisers or who do not fit the Adwords Policies. Recommended. So we have looked at advertising, now let’s examine some different approaches to make money from blogs.
Companies like Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction
offer affiliate programmes. The way they function is that you promote a
product like a book or a software on your blog, your readers visit the
merchant’s website and when they actually buy it – you get a commission
ranging from 5% up to 50% of the sale proceedings. Remember, the ratio
of a site visit converting into a product sale, is very low.
Donations
Don’t be surprised, you can actually make good money from Donations.
There are a lot of “good people” on planet earth who are willing to
share their fortune (maybe just 0.00001%) provided they enjoy reading
your blog and probably benefit from the blog content. For example, if
you wrote about some fuel saving tip and if it actually worked, people
may be interested in sending you a token of appreciation via Paypal.
There’s
one more option ‘Sell your Blog as a Brand’
If you are a popular
blogger and have a huge fan following, it’s time to capitalize on it.
Start selling T-shirts, coffee mugs, handbags with your logo and your
fans will actually buy them. CafePress is a popular choice here – When
someone makes a purchase, Cafepress sends you a commission or if you can write eBooks on your favourite subjects, Blogs can be a good selling place.
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