You have a blog and a few followers, but you want to do more than shout your feelings and ideas to the world. You’re creating content, and judging by your visitor statistics some people think your content is valuable. There are a number of online tools you can leverage to make some extra money with your blog without spending all your free time on the effort.
Sell Ad Space
Bloggers with a good amount of traffic can sell text and banner ads on their sites. This works best if your blog is niche targeted. If you write a tech blog that gets views from tech customers and professionals, a computer or software company may be more likely to purchase space. If you write a mommy blog, then you could sell inexpensive ad space to other bloggers. Some steps to selling ad space include:
- Create a menu of ads with prices. Price space appropriately for your target advertiser.
- Place an advertising tab on your site with all pertinent information.
- Mention your advertising options from time to time, or reach out to companies that you think would be interested. Start with a simple email and list of advertising opportunities. Make sure to spell out how you can help the advertiser by including information about your audience or page views.
Become an Affiliate
Affiliate marketing is a great way to get advertisers without doing all the legwork yourself. A report from Affiliate Summit indicates that 60 percent of affiliates use blogging as a primary income generating method. As an affiliate, you receive a commission on all new business you send to a vendor. How you drive that business is up to you. You can run banner or text ads or specifically talk about the company on your blog.
There are many affiliate-marketing opportunities, so you can find the one that works best with your blog audience. Sign up as an Amazon affiliate and link your book recommendations and reviews to your affiliate account. You can also sign up with numerous vendors at one time through sites like ShareASale.com, which offers bloggers new to affiliate marketing a great way to get involved with monetization. If you have an audience that’s into things like Candy Crush, leverage gamer interest by offering links to play hidden object games, and you could earn up to 40 percent in commission.
Sell Your Own Designs
If you are clever with words, pictures, or drawings, you can open a Cafe Press or Zazzle store to make money from your own designs. Simply upload images or text, select from available product options like mugs, t-Shirt, and cards, and the online retailer does the rest. You make a small commission on each sale. It might not sound like much, but blogger Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, once made hundreds of dollars off pictures of a taxidermy boar’s head, so it’s probably worth checking out. Unless you’ve got thousands of daily page views, don’t expect Bloggess-level results immediately. Since most monetization options don’t require an upfront investment, though, it’s never too early to get the ball rolling.
Author: Josh Nadeau
Courtesy: www.genuineseo.net