You will quickly discover that it is not as easy as you once heard or believed to earn a steady and sufficient income from just blogging. Many bloggers over time (usually 3-5 years) manage to create valuable blogs, but this usually isn’t accomplished without much initial trials and tribulations. Below are some of the top ways to earn steady income through your own blog.
Affiliate Networks and Your Blog
One effective way to monetize a blog is through joining an affiliate network (Link Share, Commission Junction, etc.) and promoting the company created links, product images and banners of some of today’s top online stores and companies. Many top retailers online and offline utilize this type of system to get more targeted leads to their sites and to get more purchases. You will usually be paid per lead or a percentage of whatever is bought by a click-thru user for a set period of time via cookie tracking.
Affiliate programs were once hailed as the premiere way to earn a lot of cash very quickly online, but as with any such promise, many users found this to be false and have decided to stick to pay per click services like Google Adsense. If you really want to succeed in affiliate marketing you should look deeply into the processes of top Internet marketers and search engine marketing and be sure that you are placing very demographically targeted advertisements only on your blog.
Adsense & Chikita Pay Per Click Advertising
Adsense is another popular route, though many are converting to Chikita’s pay per click program as it is now looked upon as an even more properly targeted advertisement service. Many are claiming to be earning much greater profits from Chikita than they were from Google Adsense. You should mix the two services for the best results though.
Both services are free to use, but admittedly Chikita has a stricter policy on just who they will invite into their network. Chikita has also just partnered with Yahoo’s pay per click service, so expect it to gain even more popularity and exposure in the near future.
Getting Sponsorship of Your Blog
The last way you might want to consider in terms of monetizing your blog is by getting specific sponsors. Depending on your market share and abilities, you just might be able to persuade some very lucrative players into becoming your blog’s sponsors for several weeks or even several months or years for that matter. There are a growing number of online advertisement placement services that cater to popular blog owners that have up to 6 months of content posted on a daily basis. You should look to join one of these services once your blog grows in traffic volume to ease the road to sponsorship.
This is obviously the end goal for any professional blogging hopeful as it will inevitably prove to be the most profitable option out there for monetizing a blog. It also usually is the most steady, and thus, stable option for most bloggers. Getting to this point is hard though. You must keep excellent traffic ranking data, visitor data and daily page view records to display to potential advertisers that you are a valuable, capable source for their advertisements and money placement.
Many never get successful enough for this as you not only need continual traffic growth and high volumes of traffic, but also continually updated content materials rich in keywords that are relevant to your niche and advertiser’s niche markets. People that manage to do this can generally reach or exceed anywhere from 4-5 figure a month salaries to even 6-7+ figures a year.
Keep At Blogging and You’ll Succeed
It is important to note that only a few individuals reach such far reaching profits, however, it is certainly out there for your goal setting purposes. You will need to school yourself in the fine arts of advertisement placement on the Internet, as well as, learn how to properly tailor your content and other material (including keywords) to focus toward one or more key niches to find greater successes than most bloggers will ever find.
Be continuous in your blogging frequency and don’t stop tweaking your advertisement and affiliate link placements, colors and types (video, banners, image, text, etc.) and you should over time begin to see some decent money from your blogs. It may never amount to such that you can quit your day job, but at least it will possibly be something of value one day that you are earning virtually on a 24/7 basis.