Ways to Monetize Your Blog

The first step in monetizing your blog is to give some thought to what your goals are. How much money do you want to make with your blog? Do you want to get paid to write reviews and post them to your blog? Do you want to promote affiliate products? Or do you want to make money blogging by continuing to blog about whatever you regularly blog about and make some extra cash through pay-per-click advertising links?

The answers will likely depend on two factors: your personality and your blog's current theme/audience. If you are an internet marketer whose audience is internet marketers, you probably won't mind promoting internet marketing products through an affiliate program. However, if you run a blog for single moms that offers tips for shopping on a budget, you probably won't want to opt for promoting luxury cruise tickets. Instead, you might opt to join an affiliate network like shareasale.com, cj.com, or linkshare.com that have merchants who offer affiliates links to special deals for parents, coupons for grocery shopping, or discount clothes outlets.

Affiliate programs offer a relatively easy and efficient way to make money blogging. Affiliate networks offer bloggers the ability to choose which ads they place on their blogs. Affiliates get paid a percentage of each sale or on a per-lead basis. This means, if you post a link to a pet food affiliate, you can get paid a percentage of each sale every time one of your blog visitors clicks on the pet store ad and makes a purchase. Or, if you post a link for a credit repair affiliate, you can get paid each time someone clicks on the link and requests more information from the credit company.

The key to make money blogging with affiliate programs is finding products or services to promote that are a good match with your visitors. Beyond finding the right match, you'll have to find creative ways to promote the affiliates' product. While placing a banner ad at the side of your blog might make you a little extra cash, if you push the affiliates' products by writing recommendations or reviews in your blog's posts, you'll profit more.

Another way to make money blogging is to sell advertising space yourself. You can offer the option for visitors to sponsor your blog for a fee and in exchange give them a "sponsored by" link at the end of each post, or at the top of your blog, for a certain period of time. You could also sell banner ad space or classified ad space in your blog's sidebar.

Many bloggers also accept donations, often through PayPal. Your donations will generally come from regular visitors who find your content helpful. Accepting donations isn't the most lucrative way to make money blogging, but it is certainly an option.

Of course, the most common way to make money blogging is through pay-per-click ads. This is one of the easiest methods to set up and the simplest to maintain. You'll earn money each time someone clicks on your ad, even if they don't make a purchase. However, you'll earn much less per click than you would by promoting affiliate ads. Serious bloggers often use a combination of pay-per-click ads and affiliate program ads to make money blogging.