The Quick Guide to Making Money from Blogs
This is to quickly get you started making money off of blogs ... whether you already have a blog, or you want to start blogging.
Most information about blogging is just a lot of miscellaneous "fluff" written by journalists. About how blogging has become a phenomenon and all that. Whenever you read about how to do blogging they give you about a hundred links for other things to read. You could spend days just reading articles, and looking at blogs ... and while that stuff can be interesting, I'm assuming you're here because you want to make actual money with blogging!
So without further ado, here are the main things you need to know:
Tip #1: Write things that people other than your friends and family would be interested in
The large majority of blogs out there are people just writing about whatever is going on in their lives, no matter how trivial.
That's great for friends/family ... and if you're going to blog it's good to have such a blog for your own personal use. But this is about making money. So unless you want to be asking your friends for money on your blog, you'll want to have information that a lot more people would find interesting.
Tip #2: Avoid using free blog accounts
A lot of people like to use blogger.com, and other free accounts. That's fine if you just want something for people to read, and you don't care about making money. But those free blog accounts show ads, and if you want to make money you want any ads or links to be
your ads or links that you make money from.
It doesn't cost much to have your own blog, without any of the "clutter". And even better, you can do your own blog with your own domain name (example: "www.JohnSmithsPlace.com"). And for not much more cost you can have a number of
different blogs, each with their own separate domain name.
See
the hosting page for more details on hosting. And
the domain name page for more details on cheaply getting your own domain name.
Tip #3: Put in things that will bring in money!
Okay, that may seem obvious. But the key is to try different things and find what works. Just because someone says that you "have" to use one way or another, doesn't mean it's the best thing for your blog. For example, probably the most popular way of "monetizing" a site (blog or otherwise) right now is through Google. But maybe a given page, or even your entire blog, is more geared toward selling products. You might be much better off putting in affiliate links, and making commissions off of sales, than with letting people get distracted by Google ads.
Bottom line is that you need to experiment to see what's the best mix of things to monetize your site. That's not a bad thing. If you have anything in place to make money, and you get traffic to your site, you will get money coming in (though maybe not as much as you would like). From there you can add and modify your monetization to see how to improve it. And also adding more content as you go to. So over time you'll just keep increasing the amount you make. That's always a good thing!
Tip #4: The best ways to get started bringing in money
As I mentioned above, you'll want to play around and see what mix works best. There are a number of different ways, but here are the main ways that pay off and are fairly easy to do:
- Google AdSense
- Amazon
- Chitika eMiniMalls
- Clickbank
I'll be adding more to this site later. But those are the main things to get you going. Your main mission right now should be to just get a blog up and then start making a little money from it. Start with Amazon or Google, since they're both so broad they can be used for anything. Clickbank is for information products (mainly ebooks), so those links are for ebooks that relate to what your "content" is. But that's a whole different topic - the main thing is to just get started, and then have fun trying some of these other money sources.