Monetizing Your Blog - Closer Look

By Peter Nedyalkov

Monetizing your blog is probably an idea that came into many people heads primarily because of the different benefits it offers. People are starting to read on these things, leaded by two motivational factors - endless potential, self control.

Let's look closer at the different ways to monetize your blog or website.
1. PPC Advertising Networks

As many of you already know, Google AdSense is probably the most popular option under this category, which doesn't mean that there are no others to chose from. Basically what you need to do is - signup with the network and paste the code snippets on your website. Then the network itself will serve contextual ads, being either images or text which correspond to your website. For every click you will earn a certain amount of money.

The success of PPC depends primary on the traffic levels of your website, which leads us to the click-through rate (CTR) and the cost per clicking an ad (CPC). Have in mind that the CTR might really depend on the design of the website, ads which are placed above the fold or merged within the content will be clicked more frequently.

Talking about the CPC, it only depends on your niche and the current situation with advertisers. Financial products, college related ads etc usually get a higher CPC, and meanwhile site like mine or any tech site get just a couple of cents per click.

The source of the traffic is also important for the CTR rate. For example certain countries, including mine, are probably the worst ad clickers ever. We just have some natural ignorance about it, nothing personal, I was born that way. On the other hand organic traffic, the one that comes from the major search engines, tends to perform better cause the visitors were already looking for something, they found your site and might click on ads often.

There are some popular CPC advertising networks, that we will look closer at later.

* Google Adsense

* Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN)

* BidVertiser

* Chitika

* Clicksor

2. CPM Advertising Networks

Similar to PPC networks, CPM is all about impressions. You get paid for a fixed amount of page views (impressions), CPM is the short for of Cost per Mille, in other words 1000 impressions.

Let's pretend that your blog generates 500,000 page views monthly, and you have a banner with $1 CPM. You will earn $500 monthly only from displaying the ad on your site. The rate may vary, depending on the network, position and format of the ad. The better network you pick, the higher your CPM rate might be, also you will be interested to put the ad as top as you can on the page, that will help your CPM too. Another aspect of the CPM is the size of the ad, in pixels, the so called banners.

Normally the CPM varies from $0,1 to $10 per 1,000 impressions. Keep in mind it works better on community sites that generate lots of page views per visitor, such as forums, magazines and so on.

There are some popular CPM advertising networks, we will look closer at each of them later on.

* Casale Media

* Burst Media

* Value Click

* Advertising.com

* Tribal Fusion

* Right Media

3. Banner Advertising

As stated previously, selling advertising space on your site is a very profitable monetization method, and the best of all is that you can determine your own rates. Will it be either a 120×600 skyscraper, a 125×125 ad space like mine, or a 720×90 leader bord, its up to you. However you do need a lot of visitors to get good advertisers.

Related links:

* How to Find Advertisers for Your Website

* Finding Advertisers for Your Blog

* Direct Advertising Sales for Beginners

* Openads Ad Server

* OIO Publisher Ad Platform

4. Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads are becoming less and less popular cause of the fact that Google will penalize blogers who don't use the no follow tag on their text links. People still use them however.
5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing involves promoting a specific product or service and eventually earning commission whenever a referred user makes a purchase through your site, or reaching the seller site by coming from your site.

This is quite profitable industry with endless options to pick from. You like cell phones? Promote cell phone selling sites and cell phone plans, simple as that.

The end results of course depends on you, your blog visibility, your product and the way you do it. If you do it the proper way, affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful ways to make money from the web. You can consider using programs such as ClickBank, CJ, Amazon which are one of the main affiliate marketplaces.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:

* Commission Junction

* ClickBank

* Azoogle Ads

* Link Share

6. RSS Feed Ads

Due to the growing of the RSS technology, website owners started to find ways to monetize even this. Feedburner for example has its own publisher network for displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer.

Some blogs are even opting to sell banners or messages on their feed directly.

Related links:

* Feedburner

* BidVertiser

* Pheedo

7. Sponsored Reviews

The base was set by PayPerPost, it took a while but many companies followed their example. We have to stop here at Sponsored Reviews as one of the biggest.

In case you join in such community, it will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics which match your blog. You might not be enough, you might not like the product but.. many people are doing this and making good money of it.

List of sponsored reviews and paid blogging networks:

* PayPerPost

* Sponsored Reviews

* ReviewMe

* BlogVertise

* Smorty

8. Donations and Contributions

Placing a "Donate" link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.

While asking for donations you have to be very constructive as this might help the donations them self.
9. Private Forums

You do know that the internet is full with free forums, however there is also a way to create a private one where members have to pay a fee to join. You have to provide good content in the forum however, to keep visitors loyalty.
10.Premium Content

Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools for a certain amount of buck monthly of course.

There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.
11. Paid Surveys and Polls

Yes you heard me, there are paid surveys and polls, companies that will pay you some money to run a small surver on your website. The most popular is proably Vizu Answers.

Basically, what you need to do is signup with then, pick up the right poll and put it on your site.
12. Selling the website

This should be the LAST thing to do, however it has the potential to generate a big sum of money for a short period of time. Big community forums such as Digital Point or Site Point are the best place to put your site for sale. There are of course tons of parameters that determine the value of your website, the most popular it is, the higher the cost will be.