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
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.
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
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