Turn Your Blog into an Income Machine with These Quick Tips

There was a time when a blog was something only super-nerds maintained. Getting online was tough, expensive and had not much real returns for the average Joe. The last decade has changed all of that. We’ve seen the internet go from being a curiosity to a necessity. Communication methods that we never imagined could exist are now integral parts of our lives. Most importantly, the internet has become a place where new ventures can achieve multi-billion dollar statures in a matter of months – something that most definitely was not the case a decade ago.
Here are six strategies for you to pick from and get started on building your own empire.

Run PPC Ads

Advertising is the easiest and quickest way to monetize a blog. Not every blog will earn thousands of dollars in ad revenue per month, but even a small start is a step in the right direction. You can pick from a variety of ad formats – text link ads, display ads or even paid content ads. Each time a visitor on your site clicks on one of these ad types, you end up earning a small fee. This fee varies among various ad networks and how much you can earn is largely a variable of the size of your blog’s traffic and the genre of content you create on it. Mahesh Mohan offers a very interesting calculation of how a blog needs at least 100,000 page views to make $100,000 a year from Google Ad Sense.

Promote Affiliate Products

Affiliate marketing is similar to direct ads on your blog, but not really the same thing. You see, instead of selling ad space on your blog, here you’ll be creating content about the brands that want to promote themselves and post these promotional posts on your blog.

Bloggers with a decent readership and a sizeable number of visitors per day are good bets to venture into affiliate marketing. This is because, unless your audience already trusts you and what you have to say, they’ll never consider the product or service you’re peddling seriously.

When they do consider it, click on to the affiliate merchant’s link and actually make a purchase during that visit, you stand to get a pre-decided commission on every such sale. Commissions can range from 10 to 30% of the sticker price of the product you helped sell. Rakuten and ShareASale are examples of affiliate networks you can pick from to promote brands on your blog.

 

Sell Stuff

What if you don’t want to turn your blog into a cluttered, ugly (or subtle) ad-addled site? You can still make tons of money without defacing your precious labor of love. Instead of promoting others’ businesses, sell your own stuff on your blog. The variety of things you could offer up for sale is truly limited only by your imagination and abilities. From ebooks to whitepapers to PowerPoint templates to website themes to good old real world products; there’s nothing ecommerce cannot help you sell. All you need is a simple shopping cart plugin like Shopify’s – no matter what CMS or framework your site is built on, whether it’s Weebly, Wix, or something else – and you’re in business in minutes!