There are a number of ways you can earn money from your blog/website. This is a beginner’s guide to monetizing your site.
Creating a blog and a website was once a purely creative endeavour. However, for a good period of time already webmasters and bloggers have realised that they can make money from their site. These revenue streams can represent anything from a few extra dollars a month to enough money to support a family to a fortune. The trick is to know what avenues you have available to you in order to turn your blog/website into a cash cow.
This is the first of a few articles that will look at the different options open to webmasters/blog owners who want to start monetizing their sites. Once you know how, it is easy to use the technologies available to make your site a commercial business.
Here are five ways you can make money from your blog.
One of the most popular ways people make money from their online sites is through PPC advertising. Google AdSense would be the most well-known of all the different PPC advertising networks. It is a very simple process to start with Google AdSense. You create an account with the network by signing up and you will get some code that you need to paste on your site/blog. Google AdSense will then place ads that are relevant to your site and for each click each ad gets, you will be paid.
Of course, the key to making money from this process is to make sure you have good levels of traffic to your site. Click-through rate is something else you will become familiar with as this will impact the cost per click you earn.
As a general rule, traffic that you get from search engines will be of a higher value as they were already searching with something in mind when they landed on your site/blog. Traffic that you incentivise or get from social media sites tend to have less value as they most often ignore ads.
Popular ad networks are:
CPM advertising is another way to make money with your blog/site. They work in a similar way to PPC networks but here you will be paid for the number of times an ad is displayed. CPM means cost per thousand. An example of how this would translate into money is to say there is a blog that has 100 000 page view a month with an advertising banner of $1 CPM would earn $100 a month.
CPM can range from 10 cents to $10 per 1000 impressions. Test a few networks to see which one works best for you.
Popular CPM networks are:
Having banner advertising on your site is one of the best ways to make money. You would need to build up good traffic first though to benefit from this as advertisers are going to want to know your site offers them lots of eyeballs to see their ad. You can decide how much you want to charge for space on your website and you don’t have to pay a network part of your commissions, making this option very attractive. You do need to put a little more time into managing the banners and payments though.
A few resources on getting banners advertising to your site:
Getting advertisers to your site
Getting advertisers to your blog
Placing text link adverts on your site is a good way to make money. The adverts are subtle and you can use networks to help you with the process.
Popular text link networks are:
Text Links Ads – http://www.text-link-ads.com/
Affiliate marketing has been a big noise on the internet for a few years now and it is easy to understand why. With this process you work with a merchant who is willing to let you sell his/her products and pay you for doing that. CPA is the payment option here (cost per acquisition) and you can earn CPA rates in the high hundreds of dollars depending on which merchant you work for.
There are many ways to promote the merchants you wish to promote from banners to links to writing articles on them.
Some popular affiliate networks to start with are:
Sat, Oct 4, 2008, by Claire M
Money Making