3 Ways to Make Money Blogging

Have you ever considered starting a blog to supplement your income? You wouldn’t be alone. Millions of stay at home moms, bored college students, and frustrated office workers have turned to the world of blogging to help pad their income.

There are blogs that cover just about every topic you can imagine. Sports, politics, parenting, investing, entertainment, current events…pretty much any topic under the sun can be turned into a blog. And with user-friendly blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, all you have to do is choose a topic that interests you and start pumping out blog posts!
But how does a blog make you money?

Well, first you have to create some content that people will find interesting or useful. That usually means writing articles, but it could also include audio, video, comic strips, or whatever else your creative mind can create.

Once you have a little traffic coming to your site you can start considering different methods you can use to monetize your blog. Let’s talk about 3 of the most common monetization techniques.

Google AdSense is probably the easiest way to monetize a web site. All you have to do is sign up for an account and then paste a little snippet of code into your site. The code reads the content on your blog and automatically generates advertisements that are relevant to your readers. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of those ads, you get paid a commission. Your cut can range anywhere from a penny to several dollars. If you get a lot of traffic to your blog you can make a lot of money with AdSense.

Affiliate marketing is when you send traffic to a merchant’s website and earn a commission on any sales that you generate. When you join a company’s affiliate program, they give you a special link to use when you promote their products or services. That affiliate link contains your tracking id so you can be credited with any sales that are generated through it. There are thousands of affiliate programs out there and they cover just about any niche you can imagine. Some pay commissions as a percentage of sales and others pay a flat dollar amount, and payments can range from a few cents to hundreds of dollars sale.

Another way to monetize your site is through direct advertising. You won’t get many bites when you’re first starting out, but as your traffic goes up advertisers will start contacting you. You’ll need to decide exactly what kinds of advertising you are willing to accept and how much you will charge. You can offer different prices for banner ads, text links, sponsored posts, and any other ad placement you are asked to consider. And remember that in the end it is your blog and you can choose not to accept certain types of advertising (gambling or adult ads for example).

Of course, you don’t have to choose only one monetization method for your blog. Most bloggers use a combination of the three.