Nota Bene Consulting

How To Monetize Your Blog

Most people who start a blog are looking to make money from it. Some are looking to make just enough to cover hosting costs while others are dreaming of making thousands of dollars a month which in turn lets them work for themselves.

So, where exactly do you start at when you decide to finally monetize your blog or site?

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is referring people to a product that somebody else is selling and you get paid for it.

There are 2 ways that you can get paid, Cost Per Action/Lead or Cost Per Sale.

Cost Per Action is the process when a visitor that you send to another site fills out a form. Usually this can consist of simply their email address or it could go all the way into asking for credit card information. The more that is required from the individual the higher the payout almost all of the time. You can typically expect to make anywhere from 50c to around $25 on the very high end. The more traffic you can drive that converts into qualified leads the more you can make.

Cost Per Sale is when you refer a visitor to a site but you only get paid when they actually buy something. So the visitor may go to the site and fill out a form requesting more information but you don’t get paid for it unless later on down the line they end up buying something. Obviously you have a lot less chance at making money this way because people have to actually spend money, but the payouts are a lot higher as well. Depending upon the cost of the product and the percentage of commission that the owner is willing to pay you could make anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars.

There are many affiliate networks out there, but here is a handful to get you started:
MarketLeverage, PepperJam Network, Azoogle Ads, Shareasale, NeverBlue Ads, LinkShare, ClickBank and Commission Junction.

While some offers are shared by multiple networks, I do recommend you sign up for more than one and look out for those exclusive deals.

Contextual Advertising

Probably the easiest way to start making money is by adding Google AdSense onto your site or blog. Once you place this on your blog Google will try to relate the ads to best match your page’s content. Yahoo also has a similar program but Google is the king because of their massive inventory of advertisers. You can also choose to use services such as Kontera and Chitika. These programs will find words inside of your content and turn them into links. Usually they will place a popup window on your site when a visitor mouses over the link and more information will be displayed. If a visitor clicks through you get paid a certain amount of money which is determined by how competitive the word is.

Private Ad Sales

Once you start driving some traffic to your site you may end up receiving emails from companies wanting to advertise their services and products on your site. Private ad sales are one of the best ways of making money because you are pretty much guaranteed to make money and you know what you are going to make up front.

The advertising can work two ways; CPM or CPC.

CPM stands for ‘Cost Per Thousand Impressions’, which means each time the banner or ad is viewed 1000 times the advertiser pays you a set amount.

CPC stands for ‘Cost Per Click’ and works exactly like contextual advertising. The advertiser only pays you a set amount of money when a visitor clicks the ad. CPM is great because you don’t have to worry about people clicking but you usually have to be driving a good amount of traffic in order to make it worth the advertiser’s time and money.

Selling Your Services

Now this method isn’t for everybody but there are people out there making some good money from it. Depending upon what your site or blog is about will determine if you can setup something like this. If your site has something to do with web design you could obviously sell web design services to your readers. Typically this can only work with something online but it is possible that you could set something up to work locally if your site is targeted for it.

Email Marketing

This is a big one and it is how people who make a lot of money actually go about things. You can give away something to get your visitors to sign up to an email list. Once you have them signed up, you can send them emails about related products that they might be interested in. Somewhat the same as affiliate marketing as you are most likely going to be referring your email subscribers to products but the thing with email marketing is that your subscribers already show an interest in the product. This makes it a whole lot easier for you because you have to do that much less convincing.

Pay Per Click

There is of course PPC, or ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising, but that is best covered in a post of it’s own.

Which One Is Best?

Choosing which one is right for you can only be decided by you. You may end up figuring out that email marketing isn’t your thing but that you can easily make money with contextual advertising (which is actually probably the easiest way). Private ad sales will most always make the most money but it is also the hardest to get started. You really have to prove to somebody that it is worth their money to pay you to advertise their product for them.