How to Make Money With Blogs

Can you make money with blogs? Yes absolutely, though claims of enormous wads of cash for little work are to be treated with suspicion. The fact is that those lucky people with big earnings from blogs have worked for it. Just like with a traditional website the larger the volume of traffic to your blog the more you can make. Getting that traffic is a matter of building up incoming links, on page optimization for search engines and advertising, a whole other subject of its own. Monetizing that traffic is what we look at here.

One easy way to monetize your blog is with contextual advertising such as the programs from Google's Adsense and Chitika. These are small ads which are automatically selected by their relevance to the subject of the page they appear on. After signing up for the program you get a snippet of code to include in your pages where you want the ads to appear. The program provider then serves ads which are relevant to your audience and shares the revenue those ads raise with you. Depending on the subject, these can be quite generous payments. Some specialized subjects can attract payments measured in dollars per click though typically the payments are less.

Another way to make money with blogs is to join a paid to post system. You get paid to write posts relating to various products or websites. If your site is a genuine one and not just made to carry ads you can make relatively large amounts of money without having big volumes of visitors. There are some restrictions as to how much you can post to stop you abusing these systems but if you have a blog with original material you can do quite well with systems like this.

Another avenue is to sell links from your blog to other websites or directly to merchants. Google frowns on selling links just to improve another sites pagerank but you can still sell advertising space if its structured correctly. Webmaster forums and your own networking efforts are good ways to find opportunities like this and by using Paypal you can keep track on payments easily.

Selling products as an affiliate has been around since long before blogs but is a very viable method of making money with them. If you're not already familiar with this concept I'd suggest you sign up with a well established affiliate system like Commission Junction or Linkshare to get the hang of things. Better still learn from the good folks over at Wealthy Affiliate how to be a successful affiliate, they make it easy to understand and follow. You'll find links on my site.

There are other methods of making money with blogs such as selling custom souvenir shirts, mugs, and the like from Cafepress but these tend to be rather low commissions. If you're good at setting up blogs you can consider setting them up for a fee or establishing them with traffic to begin with then selling them to folks looking for ready made blogs to move into. This practice known as blog flipping has become more popular recently as established blog properties, just like in real estate, can fetch high prices.

This is not a complete list of ways to make blog money but hopefully it gives you some ideas for your own blog.