You can make money online a variety of different ways, but you’ve probably learned that blogging can be very lucrative. After learning how to start a blog, it’s a lot of fun to express your ideas to the world. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from it. But if it doesn’t make any money, you’re still stuck in a day job! We assume you want to make money online, so today we’re talking about 5 easy ways that you can make money online with your blog and build your financial Independence!
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click (CPC) is what an advertiser pay to search engines and Internet publishers for a single click on their advertisement, which directs one visitor to the advertiser’s website.
Google’s Adsense program is the biggest player here. It’s pretty simple to get running as a publisher/blogger. You sign up for an account, use their tool to build an ad code, and then paste it onto your site. People click on those ads and Google pays you x amount per click. Hence the name “pay per click.” This is a great way to make passive income.
Basically they bring together advertisers and website owners and in return you split the profit with them. Google pays 68% of the money that they typically receive. They’re basically charging a third in commission, but two-thirds of something is a whole lot more than 100% of nothing.
The ads are contextual which means that they are selected based on your website’s content. They come in both text & graphic banners, and have various ad sizes.
Microsoft & Yahoo use to have their own Publisher programs, but have since exited that market. Yahoo recommended Chitika as replacement to its former publishers. Here’s a list of top 10 alternatives to AdSense.
Basically this type of cost per click blog advertising is great until you get big enough to attract direct advertisers – and that should be your goal!
Banner and Text Ads
Banner ads could be super lucrative and really help you make money online, but not always the easiest to get the off the ground. They range from simple logo to various ad unit sizes. It is what it says it is. Say you know Al of Al’s Health Foods and he wants to pay you ‘x’ amount of dollars a month to put his logo somewhere on your site. That my friends, is a banner ad…
It might seem like easy money, but there is a barrier of entry. As we said repeatedly, build your audience first, then the advertisers. There are also tons of ad networks out there, but most of them require that you have at least 100,000pageviews per month. Furthermore most of them pay pretty low ad rates, depending on your niche.
A text ad is similar to a banner ad but you are putting text (similar to a Google Ad) on your website. This is not the same as paid links which we highly discourage!
The difference can get blurry, but essentially if someone approaches to buy a link placement, you should be careful. Yes it’s easy money, but if search engines like Google ever catch on, then your website could be harshly penalized in lowered ranking. Many webmaster found their website traffic slowed to a trickle as the result.
Paid Product Reviews
Basically, when people are going to buy something, they go online first to see what people are saying about it. Companies know this and now often pay bloggers to review their products. Nothing wrong with it – just be sure to disclose that you are being paid to review it, or have a general disclaimer in your terms of use.
In late 2009, the FTC began to legally require bloggers and online publishers to have such disclaimer on their websites. However, bloggers get make money online, so we have to play by the rules!
Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon is the original granddaddy of affiliate programs. It’s where if someone goes to your web page and sees a little widget that says “Bob recommends this book on puppies” and that person clicks on that link and buys the book, you get some money.
Of course these days Amazon carries a lot more than books. You can find almost any retail item on their site. It’s a great way to earn money when you start. It’s easy because you can find items similar to your niche.
The downside of the convenience is that the payout is relatively poor with many items paying as low as 4%. So you might want to pay attention to specific affiliate programs as you begin to grow.
Sell Stuff (Yours or Other People’s Stuff)
This is our personal favorite way to make money online! For example if you’ve got a dating blog, and you have a rabid, dedicated following, and you’ve got tons of great posts that people love to read, why not collect your posts and make them for sale in a book/e-book format?
Plenty of sites like Chuck Norris Facts or Texts from last night make a ton of money off of this. Or you can even build premium content available only to paying members. Viola, now you have recurring income!
The numbers can add up dramatically if you offer substantial value and keep your members satisfied. This can lead to other sales opportunities such as coaching sessions, workshops, and other products.
You can even hire ghostwriters to create the product. That way you just sat back. Let them do the hard work, pay a fixed amount, and then collect a potentially lucrative payoff down the road.
Or if you don’t want to mess with your own product – because there are things to manage like sales pages, additional web hosting, customer service, & creating the product, then sell other people’s stuff. (affiliate programs)
The key is to partner with some of the really successful people in your niche to sell their products on your site for a commission. Hopefully they have a turnkey system setup that result in a high probability of sales. You don’t want to be a guinea pig to help someone unproven to work out the bugs in their sales process.
Many eBook authors will give you as high as 75% – 100% commission for each sale. (They make their money with repeat sales and memberships). So take advantage and build your success!
