How to Make Money From a Blog

By Steve Faber

Bloggers! Did you know you could be making money from your blogging passion? It's true, and it's easier than you may think to make a nice income from your blog. Read on and start your blog money faucet flowing now!

How to make money from a blog is one of the most common questions asked by Internet marketers who are also bloggers, or by bloggers who want to make their first foray into monetizing their blogs. There are several common ways to have your blog be a profit center for you instead of just a fun way to pass the time. You're about to discover how to get paid for blogging.

You can make money from just about any blog, but if you start with the idea of pulling in a bit of cash from your posting efforts, your successful journey into entrepreneurship will be much easier. There are a couple of things you have to do in preparation for your little blog venture to make sure you're not starting the next non profit.

First is to do some research into the niche or theme that you'll be blogging about. You want a theme that has solid profit potential. There's no sense in prattling on and on about your crazy Aunt Mary or your family's visit to you brother Bob's house in Tuscaloosa. Although that may be of great interest to you, that's about as far as it will go.

You're trying to attract visitors that have some monetarily value to someone. You'll determine just who your visitors have value to from a business perspective by how you choose to monetize your blog. You have a veritable plethora of choices here. The most common source of revenue for bloggers is probably contextual advertising, such as Google's Adsense.

Contextual advertising is simply placing ads on your blog that are closely matched to the content of your post or page. The ad provider automatically looks at your post to determine what ads are the most relevant to the content of the particular post. When one of your visitors clicks on the ad, you're paid a percentage of the revenue paid by the advertiser.

The advantages are that if you're approved it's very easy to place the ads, and if you have significant traffic in a profitable niche, it can add up to big dollars. Many bloggers make an extra $20 - $100 a day using this kind of advertising, and some make far, far more than that.

The other popular way to get some cash from your blog is through affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you are paid for referring one of your visitors to a merchant's website. Once they get there you'll be paid when your visitor performs the required action. The two most common types of actions are pay per sale and pay per lead actions.

With a pay per sale you're paid for referring one of your visitors that buys something. For example, if you have a blog about fishing, you can review a new fly rod, and then if you really like it, communicate that fact to your readers. Provide a link to a vendor with an affiliate program who sells that particular fly rod. If one of your visitors reads your review then clicks on your link to the vendor, and purchases it from them, you'll be paid a commission for your efforts.

Done correctly, this can be extremely lucrative. The advantages are that you have no customer service issues, as you're not selling any products, you're simply referring your visitors. The disadvantages are that you have no control, and are at the mercy of the vendors, who can, and do change the terms of their affiliate programs at will.

These are two of the most common ways to make money from your blog. There are countless more, including selling banner ads and using your blog as a sales tool for your own company or products. The point is that you don't have to just blog for fun if you know how to make money from a blog.