Making Money From Your Blog

I'm starting to notice more blogs that cover ways to make money from a blog. One of the best I've seen is ProBlogger, which has a wide collection of articles on affiliate marketing, Google AdSense, and other money-making programs for bloggers.

It makes sense given the growing popularity of blogging. Not every blogger wants to earn a living from blogging (though a few lucky ones do), but many want to cover their hosting costs and make a little side money. There are generally two ways to make money from your blog - advertising and affiliate marketing. Both have their pros and cons.

Advertising can be easier if you know how to put ad code into the HTML of your blog. With a pay-per-click program like AdSense, Google automatically places ads it deems relevant to the content of your blog. You make money when people click through the ads. The downside is that you need to drive a lot of traffic to your blog in order to make any real money. And it helps if your content is related to high-value keywords in demand by advertisers.

Affiliate marketing requires a little more work in that you have to place links to merchants, but it can result in more money for lower-traffic blogs. Instead of being paid for clicks in the advertising model, an affiliate earns a commission on referred purchases. If you write just for your friends and family, you can probably make more money if you ask them to purchase through affiliate links in your blog than click on ads.

I'm biased because Zoundry is an enabler of affiliate marketing for bloggers, but you should try both and see what works best for you (or use both.) One last plug for the affiliate route: If you decide to syndicate your posts through an RSS feed, then affiliate links allow readers to purchase directly from your feed instead of having to go back to your blog and click on an ad. This will be increasingly important as more people use RSS aggregators like My Yahoo! or Bloglines, to read blogs and news.