Having a blog is your opportunity throw your voice into the wind and have it travel around the world. Subjects that you can opine about are virtually unlimited. Describe your kid’s first birthday or give away your grandma’s secret cake recipe, but don’t tell grandma. Your blog can be all about you and your interests or conversely some famous movie star or politician that you are zealously following online. Whatever it’s about, after your blog is up, chances are that you are paying ISP and or hosting fees for throwing your powerful voice into the wind. So how about making it pay for its own weight?
Blogs were started on the internet as dairies and journals. It wasn’t until 1997 that the word “blog” came into existence. Joran Barger was said to be the first recognized person to use the term “weblog”. Peter Merholz took the word weblog and broke it into we blog as part of a joke. Other bloggers latched onto the term and its popularity as a term needing dictionary status, grew and grew.
Bloggers were largely ignored as a force to be reckoned with until a specific televised event had critics up in arms. Some remarks made by 2002 Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, not shown by the media, were heavily criticized by bloggers. In fact bloggers made such a terrific din online about issues that the mainstream media had missed, that it raised a controversy at a national level which wound up with a very wounded and chastised Senator Lott stepping down unhappily from his lofty position.
Senator Lott was not the only victim of his own “fame”. The popular news show “60 Minutes” also fell victim to the tenaciousness of the blogger community. News anchor, Dan Rather, was reporting a story about President Bush’s military service. Documents presented to backup the story were later discovered to be forged and it was bloggers once again who raised the uproar. As a result, Dan Rather was fired and CBS had to broadcast a somewhat red-faced apology to the public.
One way to make money without actually going through the trouble of writing a blog is to buy and sell the domain names of blogs. Blogs that aren’t generating a lot of visitors or revenue can usually be bought for a very cheap price. Bloggers sometimes get bored of their blogs and put them up for sell. Refurbishing then reselling these at higher price to the right buyer for a quick profit can be a lucrative pastime.
Advertisers spend millions getting word of their product out to the consumers. Your blog can tap into some of this money by placing ads. Ad companies such as Google ( Google Adsense) and Adbright pay you for visitors who click your ads. From there you can select from the thousands of ads that reflect the content in your blog.
The advantage of having ads is that they can generate residual income. You can leave your blog alone for a few weeks and still have money come in from them. It is not even necessary to move them around occasionally since Google can put video ads, picture ads or just plain text ads on your blog… Thus creating a kind of fresh pictorial content if thats the type of ad that you allow Google to place on your blog.
Affiliate marketing is another revenue generator. You sell the products from your blog for a percentage of the profits. Your blog can be a platform for this potential gold mine. Use your blog to emphasize why the customer should buy this product. It helps a great deal if you are familiar with it.
Check out places like Clickbank, Commission Junction, and LinkShare for finding the right related products to put on your blog. There are literally thousands of products that you can earn a commission on. More sales mean more money for you.
Just remember, too many ads are a turn-off to potential customers. Messy looking blogs with too much advertising turns away customers and everyone runs from over-commercialization. So keep your blogs looking like they are offering more information than advertising and you should be doing just great.
Getting more people to visit your blog is important to generating sales or getting more ad revenue. The more people who visit your site, the more potential for income that you have. Traffic can be directed toward your blog by commenting in other topic related blogs and leaving your own blog address in those. Consider putting your blog address in your signature as your comment in forums and don’t be shy to put your blog url/address in your Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Linkln or Myspace accounts for more curiousity seeking traffic.
MSN and Yahoo are two search engines that appear to put emphasis on indexing blogs which are up to date. Reach 100-200 search engines just by submitting your blog posts to a number of ping services. An automatic ping/alert goes out when you update your blog so insure that your blog settings include a number of ping services and not just the standard default rpc.pingomatic.com. This will tremendously ensure that many search engines are immediately made aware that you have a new entry in your blog. Thus you can increase your traffic, with a simple update.
Making money from your blog is a realistic and achievable goal. It does take some work and elbow grease type investment to figure out the combination that works best for you. When it does succeed, its often a pleasant surprise to see small checks coming in continuously.Many of the ideas mentioned above are general commonsense ideas. Some of you may have known about them, and for some there may be just a little new information here. Understand however, that while these are all great ideas, implementing them in exactly the right way to make a ton of money is typically a trial and error process that many of you can relate to. Suppose however that there was a way to cut through the wasted trials and use an existing formula that simply works? Read a review of 5 of the web’s best known blog authors, whom all make 7 to 8 figure salaries from their blogs.
Many of us have interesting blogs . Very few of us, however have blogs earning us more than $50 a month. 5 of the big boys earning 8 figure incomes spill their guts in this free review. See what they have to say.Earning Revenue from your Blog.