What, in your opinion, is the best way to monetize our use of blogs?

Karen Dries

Hi Karen,

Boy that’s a big question!

There are a few things you can do, but NONE of these work if you don’t have traffic to your blog! You’ve got to have readers who come and visit regularly and or you’ve got to have subscribers to your rss feed. If you don’t have that no matter what you do you won’t make money from your blog.

So here are some things you can do once you have readers:

1. Get paid from Pay Per Post to post about products and web sites on your blog (see my previous post on pay per post blogging). For a new web site you can make $5-$10 per post. For established blogs that have a large following you can make hundreds of dollars for posting a single post to your blog.

For this one you need a blog on your own domain name and you have to have at least a little Google (PR) Page Rank. You don’t have to have a popular blog or a high page rank, but if you do then you’ll make even more money advertising.

2. Put affiliate links inside the blog posts. When you recommend products and people like you and like reading your blog they’ll want to click those links and perhaps purchase from you. It’s best if you hide the affiliate links using a tool like Power Link Generator.

3. Use pay per click advertising like Adsense, Chitika, or Yahoo Publisher Network. However this largely depends on the topic of your blog. If your blog is about Foreign Exchange Currency Trading, Stock Tips, etc. you wouldn’t want to use Chitika ads. However if your blog is about HDTV or IPOD tips then a Chitika shopping advertisement might work well for you.

4. Build a mailing list. I haven’t done this with my blog but I like this strategy and may employ it soon. One blog I read has password protected posts about once per week. In order to get the password you have to join the mailing list. This is a great way to build your mailing list which opens up opportunities for you to sell additional products.

The service I use for my mailing list is Aweber and they are one of the best. Service starts at only $20 a month and you can try it for one month free.

Wow! Another long post. I hope that’s ok?

Thank you Karen for the great question.

- Ben Fitts
the custom card guy

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