Using Advertising to Support Your Blog Expenses

Have you ever tried to make money online? Although the medium of the blog is now getting old in terms of the tech community, it is still one of the leading methods that people use to make money online.

While there are some blogs that have a personal theme and have just a handful of readers, there are others that are much more successful. There are political blogs like the Huffington Post that get over a million hits on a daily basis. There are entertainment blogs like TMZ that get millions of hits on a monthly basis. There are blogs about blogging like Problogger that get tons of traffic by giving tips to those who are entering the blogosphere.

Most blogs will not make a large amount of money on a monthly basis. The vast majority of people who blog do so as a hobby. There a several different blogging platforms that would-be bloggers can use for free. The most popular are Google's Blogger platform and the Wordpress.com platform.

Those who want to earn money while spending no money will want to choose Blogger, because the free Wordpress site does not allow for much in the way of monetization. There are limitations when it comes to free blog sites in relation to advertisements and themes, but newbie bloggers might want to experiment with one of the free sites.

Most blogging experts recommend that those who really want to monetize their blogs should switch to a self-hosted blog. This is when blogging will start to cost a bit of money. Users of self-hosted blogs will have to pay for a domain name and will also have to pay for web hosting. Domain names can cost around $15 for a year, and web hosting can vary widely based upon how much support a person desires.

One of the most common ways for people to make money on a blog is through the use of Google's AdSense program. Not everyone who has a website can get in on AdSense because Google has gotten a bit more strict with their acceptance of new affiliates. People seem to get accepted with AdSense after having written several posts on their own personal blog or on a site like HubPages.

The amount of money that a blogger can earn with AdSense varies widely. The ads are contextualized based upon the content of the site and/or specific web page. This means that a site on education would have ads related to colleges or a site on earning money would have ads related to business opportunities.

Google pays based upon the number of people that click on the ads, as well as the number of people who view the ads. The former will pay much better. It is very important that users avoid clicking their ads, because Google will disable the AdSense account for offenders.

Another way to monetize a blog and pay blogging expenses is through the use of affiliate links. Rather than contextualized ads, these ads are specifically chosen by the blogger. A number of companies will allow affiliates to use links to earn a percentage of sales.

One of the easiest affiliate programs to get started with is Amazon's Affiliate program. There are people who write review articles on their blogs that make quite a bit of money through Amazon Affiliates. The pay starts at 4% for the first seven sales in a month and then moves up progressively as users make more sales from their site.

Blogs that get a higher readership can then start to branch out and start to sell other products. Some of the more popular affiliate links come from print-on-demand sites like Zazzle. The income derived from these sites can vary based upon the blog and the type of posts.

One final way to monetize that several bloggers are finding quite profitable is through the sale of products that they themselves have developed. Whereas blogging used to be viewed as a business in itself, many bloggers are now looking at blogging as a way to drive business.

One possible avenue of success is through the sale of self-published books. With the popularity of e-books, it is possible to write up a short e-book and then sell if for $3 or $4 and make a handy profit if the readership is high and it provides additional value. Just a few sales will pay for the cost of the blog for a year (which can be as low as around $100-$150), and any additional income then becomes icing on the proverbial cake.

Earning money with a blog will take lots of hard work. Only a very small fraction of those who attempt to make a living online will be successful. However, through the use of multiple advertising strategies, you can possibly not only pay for the cost of hosting the blog, but also earn enough to supplement your monthly income.