make money from blogging
Have you ever noticed that the majority of bloggers have maybe one or two methods of making money from their blog – and that’s it. For example they will have adsense and private ad sales, or the affiliate minded ones will have their adspots with affiliate links as well as promoting affiliate links in their post.

Today I want to take a quick look at the different ways you can make money from your blog and hopefully you are able to at least pick up another revenue stream.

  1. CPC Advertising

    This is adsense, bidvertiser or another other advertising program that pays you per click. Usually this is where people start and most of the time it is only pocket change -  a dollar here, a dollar there. However some blogs do make a substantial amount from adsense, but these blogs are usually in niches outside of the MMO or blog about blogging niches.

    I use adsense on a couple of my blogs, including this one. Only one of them is pulling in over a dollar a day, and that is a blog outside of those niches I mentioned above.

  2. Affiliate Ad Sales

    When you blog is new, you realise that no one is going to buy your adspots because you have no traffic stats. So what do you do? You sign up with Commission Junction and Clickbank and ad your little 125×125 ads, hoping that someone clicks though and buys something.

    Affiliate ad sales can be quite lucrative if you find one that your readers seem to connect with. I know a lot of hosting companies are paying $90+ on the affiliate sales (pity HostsBlog.com can’t seem to get any referrals yet :P)

  3. Private Ad Sales

    This is the path I have taken this month with my Adspot Auction. And seemed to do alright. I mean I’m no John Chow making $500 a month per spot, but its a start. Your adspot price usually seems to be determined by RSS subscribers because while I am earning about $10 per 125×125 spots, Tyler Cruz is selling out his 125×125 adspots and his alexa rating is almost twice what mine is (even though he has 4 times the subscribers!)

    But if you can make good money off your private ad sales it does provide a steady income.

  4. Paid Reviews

    Similar to private ad sales, where you get paid in advance for the ad. A paid review is where you get offered money to write a review about someones product of website. Prices for these vary greatly and it doesn’t necessarily depend on PR, feed count or traffic.

    I do a mixture of private paid reviews and using paid posting websites. Currently my private paid reviews are $30 – and I get about 2 of these a month, and paid posting websites which can be quite lucrative (I know Jim from TheNetfool.com got $200 for one paid review using the program I also use, Sponsored Reviews – they pay great and have a great referral commission for you affilliate ad people :D.

  5. Affiliate Reviews

    Here is where things start blending together. Affiliate reviews are a mixture between affiliate ad sales and paid reviews. The way you go about making money from affiliate reviews is you find a product that you like and wouldn’t have any trouble recommending, see if it will pay you a commission for getting people to sign up to their service or buy their product, and then write up a blog post reviewing the service or product (inserting affiliate links as you see fit).

    If you can make a habit of writing non-biased reviews that once again find your visitors sweet spot you can make quite a lot of money from affiliate reviews!

    The only thing I will add is that make sure you don’t just rewrite the sales blurb the the product has on their website. Make sure you try and test it out, see how it works. Even try and score yourself a free one by telling the creator that you want to make them some sales! But just don’t rehash what everyone else is saying… (Sorry. This is a pet hate of mine :P)

  6. Creating A Product And Use Your Blog As A Launching Pad

    I have watched a fair few bloggers get REALLY good results from this. I remember when Yaro announced his Blog Mastermind Program. His blog and the network he build from his blog is what really helped him successfully launch his blog. The same thing with Darren and his Problogger book.

    I am in the initial stages of doing the same, but a little bit different because I see this as the one way to make money from your blog that can quickly and exponentially increase your earnings!

I think that about covers them all, but if I missed one just let me know. I’d love to hear your stories of the methods that have work and those that haven’t – so please comment below!

Arrows to ecourse

About Thomas Sinfield

Thomas run multiple blogs and is busy testing different strategies and systems to increase profitability and exposure. He is currently working on a new project (yes another blog) that is set to be his most profitable yet.