5 Tips to Monetize Your Blog and Make Money Blogging
1. Advertising
Including advertisements on your blog is the most obvious way to derive an income from your blogging efforts. Ads can come in the form of text links or banner ads, and advertising options are available that you can easily tap into through pay-per-click, pay-per-post and affiliate programs online. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, eBay Affiliates and Pay-Per-Post are just a few of the most common advertising programs available to bloggers.
2. Merchandise
Another simple way to monetize your blog is by selling merchandise through a service such as CafePress who will work with you to create custom items for you to sell through your blog.
3. Reviews
Bloggers can make money by reviewing products, events, businesses and more through blog posts.
4. Ebooks
A great way to bring in some revenue on your blog is by writing an ebook and offering it for sale through your blog. Ebooks are particularly successful for bloggers who have positioned themselves as experts in their fields and advertise their ebooks as additional or exclusive information just for readers of their blogs.
5. Donations
Many bloggers add a donation button to their blogs asking readers to make a monetary donation to keep the blog alive. Donations are also solicited with clever taglines such as, “If you like this blog, why not buy me a cup of coffee?” The donation link leads the reader to another website such as PayPal where the individual can easily make their donation.
Free Advertising
Oh noes! Not free advertising?! It must be a gimmick! Well that’s simply a load of crap! Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of scams out there claiming to be free. But free can be good.
Amanda Mankins wrote “Have faith in things that are free. Just because it is free does not mean dismiss it as junk.. I have spent more money on junk. So just because you pay for something does not make it worth the money you spent for it. I am using free ad boards and forums to post my ads…With success!! These are available to you 100% FREE! So why do we spend countless dollars placing ads on networks that have tons of click fraud? Start using free services!” http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Amanda_Mankins
Like Amanda said, use free ad boards and forums to get your links out there. Also, including your link in comments when commenting on other blogs is helpful too. The more links to your site the better your ranking and the greater number of clicks. Building back links is essential to making money online. It’s free to do so there is no good excuse not to just get out there and take advantage of free advertising!
So now you may be asking yourself, where can I post my links? That really depends on the content and subject matter of your site. There are millions of communities out there and forums where members of those community gather to share ideas and opinions. Start posting comments on community sites or submit articles to blogs that are related to your site. Don’t forget to include your links to build up your back links.
So What’s The Secret?
What’s the secret to making money online you ask? It’s simple really, you simply just need to do it! If you’re motivated and passionate about a topic or subject then what I’m about to tell you will be easy. However, if you don’t have any passions and are looking to get rich quick, then I’m sorry to say that you most likely will not make any money online. The good news is if you’re here then chances are you are already motivated.
So here’s what you need to do. First, start a blog or some type of website. A blog is a simple way to create an online presence and you won’t need to spend a lot of time learning HTML or programming. There are several ways to start a blog with out spending a dime. Free blog sites like blogger.com, wordpress.com, and weebly.com just to name a few.
Once you start a blog it’s important to update the content on a regular basis. Make it a habbit to post at least once a day. Your posts should be detailed and informative. Your goal is to build a community, community building will encourage visitors to come back to your blog and contribute by leaving comments. When comments are posted to your blog make it a point to respond. Users will often come back to your blog to see if their comment has been answered. This is a good way to keep your audience engaged and continue to return.
Once the blog is up, you need to start generating revenue. After all, this is why you started in the first place. Adsense is a good way to start getting a return on your investment. Signing up for Adsense is quite simple. They operating on a pay per click model meaning when your ads are clicked you will generate revenue.
So that’s it in a nut shell. Start a blog, keep it updated, build a community, and put up some ads!
Top 5 URL Shorteners For Social Media SEO
With all the links being shared on social media communities like Twitter and Facebook, choosing the right link shortener is essential for maximizing your SEO efforts. The single most important factor is that the link shortening service does a 301 Redirect so that the shortened link will pass on the link juice to the destination website. In this post, I will profile the top 5 most popular URL shortening services that are also SEO-friendly.
The Top 5 URL Link Shorteners:

Bit.ly
Bit.ly – This is probably the hottest link shortener at the moment. It shortens your URLs, has a nice sidebar for sharing on Twitter and it also tracks each click on your shortened URL if you’re interested in social media analytics. It fully supports 301 Redirects so it is SEO friendly.

TinyUrl.com
TinyURL – This is one of the original link shortening services. It doesn’t have any tracking features like bit.ly, but it supports 301 redirects, has a unique toolbar that integrates in your browser and allows you to quickly shorten URLs. One advantage it does have is custom URL aliases, which allow you to give a custom name to your shortened link.

Su.Pr
Su.pr – This is a new link shortening services from massive social media network StumbleUpon. It offers many great features including post scheduling on Facebook/Twitter, extensive statistics on the clicks you receive and what makes it unique, it promotes your website by automatically stumbling your page with each click on the shortened URL. This can be a huge promotional tool, since StumbleUpon’s community of 8 million members is legendary for providing massive influxes of traffic form the service. Initially, there was some controversy with this service because it used SEO unfriendly 302 Redirects, but they have since changed to 301 Redirects so Stumble away!

Tr.im
Tr.im – This service offers very short URLs along with detailed statistics and integration with Twitter clients. It also offers 301 Redirects so it is 100% search engine friendly. If you want very short and slick looking URLs then Tr.im is an excellent option.

Cli.gs
Cli.gs – This is one of the fastest growing link shortening services because it offers one of the best combination of features. It has real-time analytics, geo-targeted destination URLs and a number of great tools to integrate it with Gmail, Wordpress, Twitterfeed and Firefox.
Source:http://www.marketingsmartt.com/top-5-url-shorteners-for-social-media-seo/
Learn How to Make Money with AdSense
Joel Comm, a successful internet marketer which earn 5 figures monthly AdSense revenue has published a new book calls The AdSense Code in May has ranks #3 in Amazon.com. And now the book is a New Yorks Times Paperback Best Seller, reaching #6 on the charts. This has proven that Google AdSense is now a popular way of making money with a websites and there are many people interested in learning how to make money with AdSense.
Making money with AdSense is definitely easier versus generating online sales but it does involve time, money and effort before you start earning any money from AdSense program.
If you are interested to learn how to start making money with AdSense this book will sure help you. Here the link to get the book.
A lot of Joel’s readers have been able to increase their AdSense figure after reading The AdSense Code.
http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network, the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’) and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Illustration of the concept of affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing. (2010, February 23). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:12, February 23, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Affiliate_marketing&oldid=345958580
