Monetizing a blog; there are many ways to do it
A lot of people I know all want to find a way to make money with the Internet. Yeah, a lot of people do make money on the world wide web. There is severals ways to do it. Today, I'll focus on how to make money with a blog.
First, a blog has to provide something good to your readers. If you only rewrite articles you find on the web, you will not be able to attract readers, you will only have search engine traffic. Everyday readers are the key to succes, so when you offer something they like on a specific niche, they will subscribe to your feed and read your articles.
An important thing to respect is that blogs are by definition FREE, so never think about asking your readers to pay to read your articles; you will simply never get readers.
Before reading ways to monetize a blog, you need to always remember this : traffic, traffic, traffic. If you don't bring people to your website, you will never make a dime with it, even if you follow every tip you can find here.
1. Advertising
Advertising is simple, you place banners on your site and when people click on ads shown in those banners, you get money. Sometimes you get money only because ads are being shown (a 1000 of time).
The most paying advertising program is Google AdSense. You can also try Yahoo! Ads and Microsoft AdCenter. There is some other small companies that try to emerge in the world of advertising so you can give it a try but, for my personnal opinion (and experience), use Google AdSense.
2. Advertising for RSS feeds
Because your readers will probably subscribe to your feeds to read you everyday, they will probably never visit your blog again (or rarely), so that means the ads you display on your website will not reach your readers and you will not make money. The way you can display ads to your readers is by displaying them on your feeds. As far as I know, this feature is only available in Google AdSense (use with FeedBurner).
3. Donations
In addition to ads, you can provide a way for your readers to send you money when they like what you do. It's more common than you think to be paid by readers, so don't neglate it. It will never be your most money-generating feature but you don't lose anything by putting a simple PayPal donate button on your blog. Because you want your readers to be able to easily send you money, you have to use PayPal.
4. Affiliate programs
Like advertising, affiliate programs are banners that you put on your websites. Unlike advertising, you don't generally get paid when readers click on your ads but instead you get paid when the condition of the program is met. Conditions can be things like "when a user clicks and then create an account" or "when a user clicks and the buy something in the next 90 days". These programs are well-paying because they normally offer great commisions. For a simple account created it can be between 1$ and 10$ and for a sell it can be up to 50% of the total price.
There is one thing you need to be aware of... you need to redirect very well targeted traffic if you want to generate conversions on the other website because if you redirect people interested in dating on sites that talks about weight loss...