Top 9 Ways To Make Money From Blogging

Blogging is the craze of the 21st century. Already, the question addressed to any business owner - "do you have a website?" - has morphed into the more widely-applicable question addressed to anyone with a pulse - "do you have a blog?" With the time investment required to maintain a blog, and the growing expectation that any serious self-employed professional or writer does maintain at least one blog - if not more! - people are starting to look at ways to make money from blogging itself.

If you can make money from blogging, it "takes the curse off" from spending the amount of time it takes to write the posts, social bookmark and backlink to them, and network with other bloggers on your topic. Even if there is no immediate result in terms of new contracts for your main business or profession, the fact that the blog itself is a profit center is a reason to press on.

The first, and to most people most obvious, income-generating option to make money from blogging is to put Adsense advertising on your blog. It's easy, it takes very little time to install and maintain, and it provides a steady trickle of income whenever people click on the Adsense ads, which ramps up as your readership increases.

On the down side, some people don't like the look of Adsense ads - this can impact your ability to attract and retain readers.

Other Pay-Per-Click (PPC) providers like Yahoo and MSN have similar benefits and disadvantages as a way to make money from blogging. Adsense is simply the largest and most popular, because it is run by the 800-pound gorilla of internet advertising, Google.

A slightly different form of advertising, which is also paid per click, is called "text link" advertising. This form of advertising chooses words from amongst the content on your pages, underlines them, and makes them into links to advertiser sites. With some providers, when you mouse over the text link, a bubble pops up with some teaser text to encourage people to click.

Apart from pay-per-click, there are other forms of advertising you can use to make money from blogging.

CPM advertising pays you based on the number of people who see the ad. CPM stands for "cost per thousand" - M being the Latin numeral for 1000 - and advertisers using CPM advertising don't require people to click on an ad in order to pay you. They will pay you simply for showing the ad.

CPA (cost per action) advertising pays much more than CPM or PPC advertising, but only when the visitor completes an action, such as filling in an online form to request a quote. PPC advertising might pay you 50c to $1 for a click, while a CPA ad in the same industry might pay you $25-$65 for a completed action.

Paid links are another form of advertising which enable you to make money from blogging.

Paid links can be inserted on the front page of your blog, or at the end of a particular blog post. The beauty of paid links is that they are paid by time - so much per month, usually. You don't need to worry about whether people will click on them or take an action, or even how many times the page is viewed. The amount paid for a link varies, based on the Google Page Rank of the page, or its Alexa ranking.

In some cases, you can be paid in advance for up to a year for a paid link placement. There are advantages and disadvantages to this - you get a lump of cash up front, but your PR and Alexa ranking may improve during the time the prepaid ad is running, in which case you could possible have earned more by charging month-to-month.

My personal opinion when it comes to paid advertising is to grab as much prepayment as you can possibly can. Business is a fast-moving landscape, and the company may well change its strategy in three months and pull the ad if they are paying month-to-month. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!

You can make money from blogging in ways other than advertising on your blog.

It is posible to be paid to write blog posts. These posts are usually reviews of products, and there is somewhat limited editorial freedom. Payment is reasonably low in most cases - $5 to $15 per post. The major disadvantage of pay-per-post blogging is that it can cost you readers. Integrity is very important to your reputation as a blogger, and your readers don't want to think you can be "bought".

You can make money from blogging about affiliate products, too. These are products produced by other people, who will give you a commission for sending customers their way. You put a link in your blog post for people to click to find out more about the product, and the link contains some identifying information which lets the product producer know who sent that customer to their site. Again, you need to take care when doing this, so you don't lose readers.

Creating your own information products is a great way to make money from blogging. You are filling your blog with really good information about your topic of interest - why not package it up into an electronic book, and sell it for a few extra dollars?

You can put a widget in the sidebar of your blog, offering the book for sale.

In the meanshile, there are sites where you can offer reprint rights to your blog posts for sale - this can bring in a few dollars while you work up the the full book.

The best way to make money from blogging, though, is to consider your blog to be a huge lead-generating exercise. Your blog attracts people who are interested in a particular subject. Chances are, they will be buying products and services related to this subject. If you use your e-book as a give-away in exchange for their email address, you are building an email list of people with an interest in the subject.

You can queue up a scheduled series of emails to go out to people after they subscribe to your email list, containing whatever you like - which may include promotions for you new products, or other people's products. As a rule of thumb, you can make about $1 per month per subscriber, if you do everything right. So a list of 1000 people is quite valuable!

To make money from blogging, you need to think past the act of typing words into your blog interface. Think about the people who will come to read your blog. Think about what they are looking for, what their frustrations and desires are, and how you can supply those needs. If you use a blog as the marketing platform for a business, it's much easier to make money from blogging than if you try to get your income from the words themselves. Bloggers who put one of those "please make a donation" begging buttons beside a blog that's nothing but a wall of untargeted words aren't likely to make much money from blogging!

Images: Joi, Mike Licht