Starting a Blog: Next steps
Posted on January 16, 2008
Filed Under Making Money |
If you read the first steps to blogging, you should now have the beginnings of a blog plan. You aren’t quite finished planning yet though. If you are going to monetize (make money) from your blog, you will need to decide what methods you are going to use. You will want to make sure that your theme and blog platform will allow and accomodate your choices. A little advance planning here will save you a lot of time and aggravation later.
There are several methods of monetization that you can use and different subjects and audiences perform better with some than others. I am going to cover a few of the more basic methods.
AdSense: This is pretty simple to get started. Google has made it simple and has multiple options. You can add Adsense for content where you see ads that are related to the content of your blog or post. They also have an option for search and YouTube. Drawback to AdSense is the initial payout is $100 and for a small or beginning blogger it can take time to build to that amount. You get paid when people click on the ads. You can apply for AdSense here.
Affiliate marketing: Affiliate market is basically earning a commission for referring someone to a website where they purchase or sign up for something. There are many, many affiliate possibilities open. One of the easier ones is Amazon.com. Their affiliate program is easy to set up and you can select products that fit into your subject matter. They also have a text link option that selects keywords from your posts and turns them into links to Amazon books and products.
More Affiliate programs that will accept small/medium sized blogs:
Widget Bucks
Earn $$ with WidgetBucks
Pay Per Post: Your Momma blogs…and we pay her to do it!
This is a strategy where you are paid to post a review of certain products. The amount of payment depends on the product, and often your alexa ranking. If you have a popular blog, this can be very lucrative but be forewarned, too many of these will drive away your readership.
Text Link Ads are another possibility eventually but they do have minimum requirements for readership and subscribers. The text links are scripted into your blog and they scan each post and link pertinent keywords to advertisers . When you apply, if you don’t qualify now they are supposed to send an email when you do.
As you can see there are many options and choices to make when you are considering monetizing a blog. My advice is to choose a couple, check out their site and investigate some other blogs to see what they look like and how they are placed. After you get your blog up and running, see which performs best for you and which don’t. Each blog’s readership is a bit different and will react differently to different ads.
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