How to Make Money Blogging

These days it seems like everyone and their dog has a blog. Some of them even manage to make money blogging to the tune of five or six figures a year. While making good cash with your blog does take effort and patience it is an achievable goal. Here are some tips to turning your blog posts into cold hard cash.

Content is King

You’ve probably heard this phrase so many times you could scream but, like many other clichés, it keeps popping up for a reason. Blogs are all about their content so if yours is lacking you have slightly less than a zero percent chance to make money blogging.

To give people content they want to read about you must first choose a main theme or topic for your blog. Plan blog posts that address the questions and concerns that would appeal to readers interested in your blog’s topic. If you give them what they want—which is really interesting and/or helpful content—they will come and come back for more.

It is recommended to start a blog by writing five to ten posts on issues relating to your blog’s topic. Upload them to your blog all at once, scheduling them to appear two to three days apart over the next week or so. This will keep the fresh content coming while you research new topics. The worst thing you can do is leave long gaps of time in between your posts so keep the content coming on a regular basis.

How to Make Money off Your Traffic

One of the most popular ways to make money blogging is to put Google’s Adsense ads on your blog. For those unfamiliar with Adsense they are content based links that match relevant ads placed in the Google Adwords network onto your blog. This method works best if you have a blog that targets a topic in which the price of Adwords ads is high. To determine this check out the Google’s Keyword tool and enter your main keyword (topic) for your blog. Pay attention to the light blue bar graph next to each keyword that comes back in the results. If many of them are filled or nearly filled it means there’s a lot of competition for those ads. Competition equates to money. Each time someone clicks on one of your Adsense ads you earn a portion of the ad revenue. It can ad up quickly in the right niche.

Chitika is another excellent ad network and is perfect for those who want to make money blogging but don’t want to “bother” their regular visitors with constant ads. Chitika is a search based form of advertising in which your Chitika ads are only displayed to visitors who find your blog through the search engines. It will show relevant ads based on the keyword phrase they typed in to find your blog for truly targeted marketing. The best part is these ads remain invisible to your regular visitors who visit your blog directly through the URL or RSS feed links.

For every topic there is an affiliate program to match, I promise you. Affiliate marketing programs such as the ones at Commission Junction , Clickbank and Link Share , to name a few, will have countless products and services you can offer your visitors. Whether you choose to promote an ebook related to your blog’s topic, physical merchandise or a complimentary service you can make an impressive amount of money simply by placing banner or text ads on your blog. Those who like the “soft sell” approach can simply create hyperlinks containing your affiliate ID right into the body of your blog posts for discreet yet effective advertising.

Amazon.com has one of the oldest affiliate programs around and it gives you a multitude of ways to display their ads. One of the most effective ways is with the use of the Page Recommender widget. Use this to lengthen your visitor’s time on your blog and serve up ads based on items they’ve been searching for through the use of keywords. Very smart and a great way to give all your blog pages more exposure while making money on the side.

Kontera is definitely a program bloggers should look into. Another contextual form of advertising this program creates the hyperlinks mentioned earlier in the affiliate programs option automatically. Some bloggers earn as much as .10 to .30 cents a click without taking up any additional advertising space on your blog. If you want to advertise without appearing to be doing so this is a great method to make money blogging. Use it either on its own or in conjunction with other programs listed within the article.

As you can see there are many ways to make money blogging with various forms of advertising. The quickest way to make money blogging is to learn how to marry great content with targeted advertising. When you can do that the money will soon follow.