After a while of blogging, many bloggers start thinking about what opportunities they have to make money with their blogs.
Many people draw a very rosy picture of it and say that there is a lot of money to be made off a blog, but in the end of the day, that’s not fully true. How much any person can make from his blog depends on the blog, the topics he discusses, how many visitors he gets daily, how much effort he puts into it, how well he sets up his money-making options and a bunch of other things.
In this post, what I’ll be trying to do is to list the most popular money-making opportunities for bloggers and what it takes to make money out of them.
Google Adsense
Maybe the most popular option out there providing contextual ads. How much you make out of Google Adsense depends on the topics you write about, how many people you get on your blog, how well you place the ads aside your content.
Text Link Ads
Another popular option is selling text links either directly or through a text link marketplace like Text Link Ads or AdBrite.
How much you’re able to make through these programs depends on how popular your blog is, where the links are placed, how many visitors you get daily and how many clicks they generate.
Chitika eMiniMalls
An innovative pay per click advertising program that surged in popularity pretty quickly. It presents a number of products and their details in a small space in an interesting way.
– Chitika eMiniMalls
Amazon Associates
Amazon’s affiliate program is one of the most popular ones among webmasters and bloggers although it’s not a very rewarding program with the commission being quite small.
But the idea for Amazon affiliates is to offer up products from Amazon that are relevant to the topic they’re talking about in an attempt to prompt as many readers to buy the item so that they can make a lot of money out of those little commissions.
– Amazon Associates
Affiliate Programs
Just like Amazon Associates, there are many other affiliate programs that offer up performance based commissions. These can be joined either directly from the company’s website or through sites like: Commission Junction, LinkShare and Clickbank.
Sponsorship / Sponsored Entries
If your blog becomes quite popular, you will sometimes find yourself in the position of companies contacting you to buy sponsored space on your blog or for you to review their products/services and write entries about them.
PayPerPost is a service that attempts to be the middleman between businesses and blogs willing to write about their products or services.
Donations
A number of bloggers have setup donation systems through Paypal or Amazon, and it works for some of them as a secondary income source.
If you do decide to give it a try, good luck turning your blog into a money-making venture, just be careful not to overdo it and splash all kinds of ads all over your blog in a way that will offend your readers and ruin the experience for them.
In my opinion, the best ads are the ones you don’t notice, so try to make them as unobtrusive as possible and in a way that compliments your content instead of shadowing it.
payperpost.com an example of “Sponsored Entries” middleman sevice (if this thing works, it is going to kil lthe blogosphere) !!!
There is also Blogads.com
Actually I have to disagree. Right after paid banner ads I find Amazon Associates very profitable. I make around $1000-$1500 a quarter from Amazon Associates. I think it works better then anything else because of the way it integrates into your posts.
@Houssein: Thanks for reminding me of PayPerPost, it was there among the references I was going to put for this post, but slipped my mind along the way, I’ve added it now 🙂 Thanks 🙂
As for BlogAds, when I was writing this post, I was going to put with the text link ads, but then I thought that it didn’t really fit as it provided image ads too, so I thought I’d put it elsewhere, and well it seems I finished it up without actually putting it somewhere. I think I’ll be adding another section for banner ads.
@Mark: Well I agree with you, and re-reading what I wrote, maybe it wasn’t clear, I’ve rephrased it now. What I meant is that item by item it’s not a really rewarding program as the commission is a small one, but using the program well can help you generate many sales and make a lot of money out of all those little commissions.
If you want big chunks of cash, Dreamhost rewards is a good way. You can get up to 97$ per referrel.
http://dreamhost.com/rewards.html