Blogging - Make Money | Internet Home Businesses Blog

I first started blogging in 2005 as a means to share with friends and family the details of my wedding planning. Since then, the blog that began on the free hosted blog platform – blogdrive, was migrated to blogger and eventually into my own self-hosted blog on wordpress.

If you’re interested, you can see the original blog on blogger – Getting Hitched - which eventually became The Household COO, since I’m now married and the blog is no longer about getting married.

After blogging about my wedding, I discovered I really enjoyed blogging and wanted to continue doing just for my enjoyment of writing. Naturally, I enjoyed it so much, the thought eventually moved on to, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could earn money by blogging?” With that thought in mind, I bought a book called “Blogging for Dummies” by Brad Hill.

It was disappointing to discover that I knew everything I wanted to know about blogging without reading the book. The chapter on making money from blogging was also sadly lacking because Brad Hill (the book was published in 2006 so I’ll give him the benefit of poor foresight) was of the opinion that you couldn’t make much money from blogging. I believe he said something along the lines that at best, you could probably earn enough to pay for your hosting fees. Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed.

During 2006, I discovered affiliate marketing and Payperpost, and that was when blogging took on a new life for me. I realised that you could make money from blogging, although I didn’t know what the potential was like. Little did I know that there were people like Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak who were already making money online back when Brad Hill was still of the opinion that you could only make petty cash blogging.

Indeed, Yaro started a Blogmastermind mentorship program teaching people how to make a living from blogging (the program is currently closed until further notice, but his Blog Profits Blueprint is still available for download).

Darren recently published a book called “ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income” which has yet to be released, although you can preorder from Amazon and save 34% on it.

Although I do not know how to “blog your way to a six figure income” yet, I am aware of 8 ways you can make some decent money blogging (and yes, you’ll definitely get more than just your hosting fees back). Each of these methods have varying success rates in income generation depending on your blog topic, flow of traffic and blog ranking. So if you can’t wait for Darren’s book and you just want a little taste of success before sinking into the bigger morsels offered by Darren, here are some tried and tested (and some not so tried and tested) methods of making money from your blog:

1. Sponsored Posts

Writing sponsored posts on your blog is by far the easiest and more reliable way to generate some extra cash from your blog. How much you can earn depends on the popularity of your blog and your blog ranking. In general, the higher your blog’s rank and the more traffic your blog receives, the more sponsored post offers you will receive and the better the rate you will be offered for each sponsored post you write.

There are several sites that can calculate your blog’s PR (or page rank), but the one that really count’s is Google’s PR. Google gives your blog a page rank out of 10. To check your blog’s Google PR, you use this link. Sponsored posts usually start from $5 per post and upwards.

The great thing about writing sponsored posts is that you can still earn an income even if your blog is new, with a relatively low traffic count. Most other blog income methods are dependent on traffic flow to your blog.

To get sponsored posts offers, you will need to sign up for a blogger’s account at any of the following sites (there may be more, but these are the ones I am currently aware of):

I have not seen any rule that says you can’t sign up for all of them and generally, the more you register for, the more offers you will get. Each site has its own rules and regulations which you will need to read up on and make sure you meet. For instance, you may be required to have a blog that is at least 3 months old with at least twenty posts; you must not have more than 50% sponsored posts in your blog; your posts must have at least 50 words; etc.

Once you have registered your blog (most allow you to register more than one blog), you will have to wait for them to approve your blog before you will be able to take on any sponsored post assignments.

2. Text Links

There are several text-link brokers that will sell text-links to advertisers on your behalf. All you need to do is submit your blog to them and wait to be approved. Once approved, the text-link broker will look for advertisers who want to purchase text-links on your blog. You will then be paid on a monthly basis for as long as the text-link is hosted on your blog.

The difference between text-links and sponsored posts is that text-links are purchased from content you have already written on your blog. Sponsored posts require you to write new posts based around the text-links they request. Here are a couple of text-link brokers you can try:

3. Blogging Networks

Part of the problem of generating an income from your own blog can be due to the low traffic levels you may be receiving. With more and more people starting their own blog, creating a blog with a good flow of traffic is becoming more and more challenging even if you can write great blog posts. To circumvent this problem, you can sign up to write on blogging networks. Due to their large membership of bloggers and content, they usually have better PR and traffic flow so if you choose to write for them, your blog posts have a better chance of receiving more attention.

Blogging networks usually monetise their sites with ad agencies like Adsense, Amazon, and eBay and you will generate an income based on the traffic that visit the articles you write. As I mentioned above, the main advantage for writing on these sites is that they have many writers who are all constantly submitting new articles. The search engines love websites that are constantly being updated so they get good rankings and lots of traffic. Lots of traffic means more click throughs which generate more revenue for the website and you.

Here are some blogging networks you can look up:

4. Affiliate Marketing

If you have a blog that has high traffic, then affiliate marketing is something you really should consider. An affiliate marketing program is simply a referral program that pays you a commission for recommending someone else’s products. All you have to do is either place banners, text-links or write about the affiliate product you are recommending. If your visitors click through and purchase that product, you will receive a commission for the sale of that product.

The key to affiliate marketing is choosing products that are related to your blog’s topic. For instance, there is no point promoting health supplements if your blog is on scrapbooking.

There are many affiliate programs available on the internet. Some companies offer affiliate programs directly from their website, while others may advertise their affiliate program on an affiliate marketing network. Here are a few affiliate marketing networks you can join for free:

5. Contextual Ads

If you have a blog or website, you can place contextual ads on them. Contextual ads are basically clever ads that search the content of your webpages and displays ads that are relevant to your content. For instance, if you write a blog post about early childhood development, your contextual ads might display educational DVDs and books for toddlers. A few sites that offer contextual ad codes are listed below:

Bidvertiser
Kontera (they have a requirement of accepting only websites that have a minimum of 50,000 page views, however, if you visit John Chow’s Blog and sign up for Kontera via his sign up link, you can get your site accepted as long as they find your content suitable because John has a special arrangement with Kontera)
Google Adsense

6. Shopping Widgets

You can also place shopping widgets on your blog and get paid whenever one of your visitors clicks on an ad displayed on your widget. Unlike contextual ads, these aren’t based on your blog content, however it makes better sense to your site if you choose categories that are related to your blog content in some way. My only gripe about these widgets is that they slow down the loading time for your blog. Here are a couple of sites that offer shopping widgets that you can easily add to you blog:

Click here to see an example of what a shopping widget looks like at the bottom of a blog post.

7. Paid Blogger

You can also get a job as a blogger. With the increasing popularity of blogs, more and more companies are adding blogs to their websites to help increase their website’s ranking in the search engines. The only problem with a blog is that it needs to be mantained and updated on a regular basis, so these companies are also hiring freelance writers to produce the content on their blogs. You can look for blogging jobs at:

Problogger Job Board
Indeed (just search for blogging jobs)

8. Sponsored Ads

If you have a popular blog or if your blog topic happens to cover a niche topic, you can invite sponsors to place ads on your blog for a price. You can include a page on your blog about advertising on your blog and list down the various ad spots available and how much they cost. Anyone who views your blog can then contact you if they want to purchase an ad space.

Alternatively, you can choose to be more pro-active and approach companies that sell products related to your blog topic and offer them an advertising package with your blog.

Blog Traffic

You may have noticed by now that most of the techniques that allow you to generate an income on your blog require you to have a blog with good traffic. Here are some tips to help increase your blog readership:

pick a niche topic to blog about – the more specific you can be the better
write new blog posts on a frequent basis (once a day is a good target to aim for)
write strong articles that your readers will find useful and interesting to read – they should aim to educate; be informative; provide advice or tips; and be relevant regardless of time (how-to articles are great ones)
make sure the topic you choose is one that you are passionate about – if you’re going to have to blog on a daily basis, it will be a lot easier if you enjoyed what you’re doing
offer a free e-Book

For more suggestions on how to make money from your blog or to generate more traffic, I recommend signing up for BlogMastermind. If you want to see what you get out of BlogMastermind, you can download the Blog Profits Blueprint for free. Blog Profits Blueprint is an excellent free eBook that offers loads of tips and advice that you can use to generate an income and increase traffic to your blog. If you are serious about making money from your blog, even if you don’t join BlogMastermind, you should download the Blog Profits Blueprint.