How to make money blogging

Making money blogging is also called "Monetize blog". 80% of the bloggers blog to make some income online. But successful blogs are those which are written with passion and not thinking about earning. Yes, it's true, if you focus only on money, then you will be missing the quality of your content. The best thing for all the bloggers is to start blogging with passion for quite a time and after it gets noticed as one among the best blogs on the selected niche (in the web world), the blogger may then start monetizing it. So, I assume that you have at least an average level content in your blog and therefore looking to monetize it.

Here we discuss 13 ways of making money through blogs.

1. Selling your own products or merchandising 

Say, you are having products like fashion items, hand made art/craft works, T-shirts, electronics, wallpapers, themes or anything, your blog helps you to promote your business and offer them products by online purchasing. You can review your product in your own blog and make customers understand the benefits of using your product. Also, you will be paid by selling the products of others (merchandising) by giving reviews about that product in your blog as well as letting customers purchase products through your blog.

Some popular networks allowing you create your own products are

• CafePress 
• Zazzle 
• Spreadshirt 
• Createspace 
• Threadless 

2. Selling your own ebook or paperback

If you happened to be a great mentor, and say you wrote very good posts that helped many people educate online (like design, engineering, blogging, marketing, business, all other education, finance tips etc.) Then after writing a good number of posts and understanding the demand for your posts, you may go for reproducing your posts in ebook or paperback book format. The same can be sold directly from your own blog or from other blogs/websites as well as by putting them in affiliate programs. This is a great way of popularizing as well as earning money from your blog. 

3. Affiliate marketing 

Let me tell you one thing, if your blog is new and say it contains very few posts, you cannot include AdSense (the most used ad network for making money) immediately. Also, for developing countries like India and China, Google expects at least 6 months of active blog usage from the bloggers end; before approving their account. So, it seems like you cannot earn money for the first six months. Even if your AdSense account gets approved, then also it takes time to grow traffic to your blog and hence monetize it. For blogs with ordinary traffic, we can't expect even 1$ per day. It's true, it takes a lot of investment in (terms of time) and you really need to be patient. 

Wait, just don't get depressed, there are some other ways of earning from your blog as soon as you start writing. The best option being Affiliate Marketing. Famous Affiliate programs like ebay and Amazon lets you add product ads of your own interest filed. Say if you are writing review about electronic gadgets or writing about upcoming gadgets, then you can select ads related to electronics from the thousands number of available option. 

The beautiful thing in affiliate marketing is you are even free to choose any single product (of your choice) for display and can change the same anytime. Usually they will give you 8 to 20% of actual product cost as commission; only if the product gets sold from your blog. But you won't get paid for any clicks like AdSense does. Famous Affiliate programmes for Indian bloggers - Flipkart, and snap deal  

Some other Affiliate programs are

ClickBank 

ShareASale 

LinkShare 

iTunes Affiliate 

Freelancers 

4. Google Adsense

Google AdSense is a slow but steady way of earning money online. The process is very especially slow  for bloggers. Like I said above, getting satisfied income from AdSense is a long process. You really need to be patient and you cannot rush to earn some $ per day. But, once your blog gets older and attains great traffic, you can earn money like you never expected. You may even leave your job (remove employee tag) and sit at home for full time blogging (an entrepreneur !). Interesting is it ? but this can be possible ! 

Google Ads does not allow you to select a particular product to display like affiliate programs does. But, it will display relevant ads in your blog page, based on your blog's content and keywords. The ads may be text, image or even video. It may be related to online product sales, books, education/careers, promotional advertisements, events, webinars, conference, lifestyle and lot more to say. Google will pay you even if someone clicks your ad through CPC programmes. 

But getting your AdSense account approved (for blog) is really a tough process, I implemented some tricks that helped me with this - Learn 11 tips for getting your AdSense account approved 

5. AdSense Alternatives

Although AdSense is a great way of monetizing, bloggers wants more and therefore some other alternatives emerged. Check a comprehensive list of alternatives for Adsense below

Chitika

Kontera

Bidvertiser

Clicksor

BuySellAds

Adpushup

Infolinks (In-text advertising)

Skimlinks 

Vibrant media, 

Media.net

Exit Junction and more .

I heard that Kontera is not much helpful source. They pay less. Chitika, Bidvertiser, clicksor and Adside are good to try. Clicksor offers greater cost per click bid values and they will help you earn a decent income. Chitika ads are great but looks dull in your blog. Unfortunately Yahoo ads are available only for US zone.Overall it depends on your site layout. For some sites, chitika looks great but for others kontera and infolinks may suit well. Just give a try. 

Anyway I feel that, AdSense still rules the ad or internet world and therefore I consider that as a king platform. If incase you still want to try other alternatives, then I would recommend you to try the following list - Chitika, Media.net, BuySellAds, Infolinks, Bidvertiser, Clicksor.

  

6. Sell space for advertisers to bid for text, image and video display

To include advertisements about other websites, You need to contact them say by writing a decent mail stating how by incorporating ad will help them grow their business. Additionally you have to send your blog's stat; in order to let them view as well as analyze your blog's health. There is another way of doing this. You can use Ad Space Auctions (famously called as Banner Auction). The biggest advantage with banner ads is that you can sell ad spaces on time-basis (like $ per day or week) that is far better than other methods like cost per click or impressions.

7. Reviews - of other products, webinars, business, offer consulting

These are other ways of making money. By giving a detailed but honest review about others products would let you earn money. The product for which you are reviewing in your blog should mostly be related to your blog's content so as to help the target audience. Say your blog is about gadgets, writing a review about say Lumia mobile or something like that may help you earn income. Your review should be quite honest and preferably include pro's and con's of the product. Frankly speaking I never tried this !

Here is a great place where you can earn money just by reviewing about other advertisers, products or blogs in your own blog - Blogvertise

8. Guest writing 

Famously called as "Paid posts" is another way of earning online. You will be paid whenever you write for other websites/blog/business. A number of sites will pay you for writing for them. 

Examples:

PayPerPost - 

BlogBurner - 

LinkPost - 

ReviewMe - 

Makeliving writing by Carol Tice -  

You may learn more about guest blogging in this article by Gloria Surban in writersweekly.com 

  

9. Pop up ads

Pop up ads are the easiest as well as quickest way of earning money, but honestly speaking, including pop up ads in your blog irritate users. I have been visiting number of sites every day and whenever I see a site with pop up ads, I immediately close that page. This may be true with you too. The reason is simple, users initially expects the content to be covered, later if they are interested - they may go through the ads and if the user feels that your blog was created just for making money (your own benefit) and not for content promotion (user benefit), then he will stop visiting your site. Including Pop-up ads will give same feeling to the users. This seems to be dangerous right ?

Even though you earn in the beginning with the use of this kind, you might be losing the trust among your visitors and so slowly your blog's traffic drops. You may notice that Google never provides such type of pop up ads in AdSense. The fact is they won't encourage such things. So, please be careful in choosing pop-up ads. I personally recommend you not to include this in your blog.

Anyway I am giving here a list of famous Pop up advertisers for your reference.

Edmoz

Popads

Zedo

TribalFusion

infolinks and lot more to list !

10. Selling your blog

Ok, the fact is you cannot sell your blogspot blog to anyone. It's against Google policy and if they find this, they will ban your account. Anyway there is a way to do this ! You actually have to give away your email credentials (ID and passwords) to the purchaser of your blog. Only this way, you can sell your blog. So, it's better if you maintain blog's with multiple mails and not on single Google ID. 

Learn more about selling blogs from dukeo.com - 

Here are some sites where you may sell your blog 

sellmyblog  

Flippa 

Bloggeries 

11. Donations button 

This is a minor way of making money. We all know Wikipedia as a  great website for information. It is considered as the largest encyclopedia in the web world. The interesting thing is they never displayed ads, not even text ads !. Did you ever guess how they manage to run their website without income through ads ? The actual fact is they get some income - not by ads but by Donations !. There are some gentle contributors who contribute to wikipedia regularly, some contribute occasionally. The contribution level increases when visitors feel that the topic they read from the website is unique and most useful to them.

Similarly, If the users of your blog find your content much useful and honest, then including donations option in your blog, definitely helps you earn some decent income. To include donations button or option, you need to register with money transfer units like PayPal.

12. Adding videos in YTD and monetize 

Images and videos speak a lot than simple plain writings. That's why these days online marketers (website and blog owners) started putting images after the title just like the one shown in this page (even though not required and not related !). the reason is - adding images in posts helps them pin posts in pinterest as well as attract the readers by avoiding boring plain explanations. 

Videos also works great in blogs. Also, you may put your blog post in the form of a neat video with easy explanations. Upload the video to YouTube and select the option 'monetize' in YouTube settings. By doing so allows AdSense account embed ads in your video, thus helping you earn money !. Trust me, YouTube advertising is a great place for monetizing.

13. Hosting an event by conducting presentations

If your blog did awesome and say it helped many people and if you happened to be a great speaker or mentor, then you may conduct an event and educate people about that selected niche topic.

These are 13 ways of making money, hope this helped you. What do you feel about this article. Don't feel shy, just leave your comment below.

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