Blog Monetization

Before you decide to monetize your blog, you will want to evaluate the options available and choose one that blends with your target audience, blog focus and overall theme. In truth, not every blog is easily monetized especially if your audience isn’t fond of commercialized websites, which is what yours will be once you tag in a few modules and integrate a handful of sponsor ads.

If you are sure you want to go this route however, there are many opportunities available to you if you are interested in being paid to blog, as well as additional options as far as making money with the advertising space available on your blog. You can feature sponsors, JV partners, affiliate products through marketplaces like ClickBank or can integrate Google Adsense throughout your navigation system, such as by featuring it in the side bar area of your blog.

In reality, you truly can make a decent income with your blog, as many bloggers are reporting $100 per day Adsense earnings, and even more with affiliate based campaigns. To join the ranks of pro bloggers, however, you need to be willing to roll up your sleeves and dig into the daily grind of creating relevant content, link bait, interesting posts as well as improving on your existing skill set to ensure your blog is taking advantage of the many tools and utilites to increase user interaction and return visits.

Some of these elements include:

• RSS Newsletter/Syndication
• List Building (with autoresponders)
• Trackbacks, Pings, Feed Aggregators
• Blog Carnivals and community participation
• Utilizing SEO plugins to help your blog rank
• Social bookmarketing, contextual advertising

And more..

While you don’t have to be a techy, or a professional web developer to make money with blogs, you should know the basics of blogging including your blog structure and the different tools and resources that will make your blog monetizing even easier.

Other elements could include podcasting, creating videos for display on your blog (or pulling videos from YouTube with blog based video plugins), or you could create your own weekly newsletter that offers tips and resources based on your blogs content. The more interactive you can make your blog, the more likely people will return.

Part of the reason why many bloggers fail when trying to make money blogging is by simply not understanding the various elements that successful bloggers focus on every single day. You need to make a significant effort to learn as much as you can about basic (and advanced) blogging so that you are easily able to take your blog to a whole new level.

Here are a few resources to help you get started:

Contextual Advertising:

Google Adsense

Chitika

Clicksor

AdSonar

Yahoo Publisher Network

Adbrite Marketing

Text Link Ads:
http://www.text-link-ads.com

Blogging as a career

The fact is that it is absolutely possible to make a living with a career in blogging. Well-known expert bloggers like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net and Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com have had great success blogging, with some of these top bloggers making six figures a year.

Having said all of that, you also need to know that most bloggers fail to make blogging a career. If you are considering blogging as a career, there are three specific things that you need to do in order to be successful:

1) Be Patient. Successful blogging takes time. If you want to have a career in blogging, you have got to put in the time and energy needed to make your blog successful. Writing your blog posts is only a small portion of this endeavor. You need to spend time every day building channels of communication with other bloggers and other web sites. You need to spent time every day marketing your blog. You need to spend time every day looking at the various monetization options available to you. Beyond this, you have to realize that it takes many months for a blog to become successful, and that your blogging career will probably take as much as six months to a year to really get started.

2) Write good Content. Content is King. You’ve heard this a thousand times by now. Everybody tells you that the key to a successful blogging career is producing good content. The reason they tell you this is that it is TRUE. If you want to make blogging your career, you need to hone your writing skills so that you are really on top of your competition. Beyond this, you need to be creative in the way you approach content, and consider using unique methods, from video blogging to podcasting, to provide value to your readers. Without good content, all of the marketing in the world can’t save your blog, or give you a career in blogging.

3) Choose the right monetization techniques. For most bloggers, Google AdSense isn’t going to provide you with a full-time income. You need to have other forms of monetization, whether it is affiliate income, direct ad sales, or some other sort of monetization. The best forms of monetization are going to be those that are recursive – that pay you over and over again as time goes on. A good example of recursive income is selling an affiliate membership-type product that pays you a portion of the customer’s membership fees every month, long after they have signed up.

While doing these three things won’t guarantee you will be able to make a career from blogging, you can be certain that you won’t make it as a blogger if you don’t do them.