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So you got into blogging and you’re doing fairly well. Let’s face it, we all want to make money but we aren’t all as high ranked as say Undersigned on Technorati and/or search engines to expect a huge number of hits, but we do get a fair amount of hits and have carved a small market of readers to ourselves.

Now some of us won’t ever bother to try and make money off our blog, either we don’t think we can, or just won’t bother. Those that do have nothing to lose. Ad-supported sites can be respectable and well made, it just takes work on your part to make it successful.

Basic requirements to make money off your blog:

• A Blog, we use WordPress as an example.
• A domain, because a blog.wordpress.com account won’t let you add advertisements.**
• Advertisement tools to use on your site.
• Time, you got to invest time and effort into getting your ads to blend and flow with the content.

**Certain free blogging platforms like Blogger will let you add Google Adsense to your blog.

So you got the basic’s already. Now onto the next step, actually adding these ads, tracking them and improving them after some review.

• Step 1: Sign up to a few of the more popular and easy to use advertisement services that are sure to get your income started. We’ll look at a few later on in this post.
• Step 2: Start editing your site to include the ad code. Make it flow with the content, rather than stick out like a sore blob on your blog and make users avoid it. Remember, good ad placement is a key to getting users attention while at the same time not obstructing the content they are after. For example, starting your post with a huge banner ad is a no-no, but putting that same ad as a set of text-links somewhere in the middle of the post makes all the difference.
• Step 3: Use Meta tags and other tools to help get the right ads targeted to your blog. You don’t want to sell insurance ads on a blog that mainly talks about Health Food and Dieting do you?
• Step 4: Submit your Sitemap and blog link to popular Blog Directories such as Blog Flux and Technorati.
• Step 5: Other than for just posting regularly on your blog, make an effort to post complete pages. Once these are crawled by search engines, they can become valuable inbound links for your site.

Now you know what needs to be done, let’s take a look at some of the more popular advertisement tools and ways to get your income started.

• Google Adsense: By far one of the most common and easy to implement Ad programs out there. All you need to do is sign-up, and start putting the ad code in your blog to display relevant ads. Be careful of what you choose though..color, size, location, they all matter. Google provides you quite a decent choice of Ad sizes and various other ways to customize the Ads. Also included are referral programs that pay a decent amount as well.
• Yahoo Publisher Network: I haven’t used this myself, but it’s a another alternative to Google Adsense, don’t restrict yourself to any 1 program, but remember that some of these Ad programs won’t allow you to place competing ads on the same site.
• Adbrite: Another ad program that seems to work alongside larger ones such as Google & Yahoo. Selling your advertisement space (in hopes that someone might want to buy it in the first place) is a great way to get ads on your site, remember to see what publishers want to place on your site before approving any ads though, the ad content may be totally wrong for your site to begin with.
• Amazon Affiliate Program: I noticed this is a really popular program now, being an Amazon affiliate you can create your own store, called aStore, whereby you have total control of what gets sold. It’s like having your very own virtual store to sell Amazon products.
• PayPal: Never underestimate the power of a satisfied reader. Prior to content based ads and affiliate programs were started, donations were pretty much the only way a relatively small website owner could make some revenue off the site. Don’t overestimate the kindness of readers as well, many just won’t bother clicking that Donate button to help you out, and it’s usually a few dollars anyway. It doesn’t hurt having it setup on your site, so don’t ignore it as an option.

Ad-based & Affiliate programs have their own advantages & disadvantages. For example, Ad based content is easy to make money off of, because all it takes is a click, where as Affiliate programs require that a reader make a purchase before you get anything out of it.

Don’t miss my previous post on what all I had learned through my first few months of blogging, I hope it helps you out as well.

Some handy links for you to read:

seomoz.org
seobythesea.com
lizstrauss.com
blog-republic.com
directory.sootle.com

Thanks for reading everyone. Any tips or guides you may have are more than welcome here.

TechZ

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