5 Ways To Make Your Blog Work For You

How do you make money from a blog? With so much choice regarding websites and hosting, the common blog is an ideal platform for showcasing your products and business. Most blogs are free to set-up, maintain and are a ready made traffic center. So how do you make money from a blog? There are many ways to do this and I have listed some here:

1. Display Affiliate Links and Banners

Make money from a blog displaying affiliate links and banners, you earn commission for referring a visitor to the affiliate’s site, your blog acts as a sales agent. The links should be relevant and placed within context otherwise people disregard it and see it as spam. Take a look at Commission Junction for ideas.

2. Sell Advertising Space

This may seem obvious but is commonly overlooked. The blog is full of opportunities to display small ads of different sizes. Providing they are relevant to your blog, you could earn a nice monthly income. AdSense, DoubleClick and BlogAds are amongst some of the more successful.

3. Sell Your Product

Direct selling of your own products such as books or videos, direct to the customer via a shopping cart or a sales page. For example Janet, the cake maker could sell her own cake recipe book and even a range of cake mixes.

It all depends on the market as to whether your product will sell, although if it does you could join an affiliate network and have others sell your product for a commission.

Companies such as Cafepress create, sell and drop-ship your products. An ideal solution for those who want to concentrate on running their business and not let their business run them.

4. Getting Paid for Writing Articles

Writing articles for your blog or for another has many benefits. There are many free article banks and article writing centers but Google now penalises duplicate content and disregards all back links on these sites meaning only the unique and relevant get through.

Each article you write and submit to the article banks though can be rewarding especially as each one has your link on it allowing thousands to access your material and link back to you.

You may still have to rewrite the content if you post it on your own blog and you should only write on relevant topics that match your content otherwise your audience will get turned off.

5. Write your blog and sell it!

Finally, once you have completed all your hard work designing and filling the blog with wonderful content. Sell it on to a large organisation.

Not just confined to social networking sites and search engines, many websites are bought out by larger companies, usually the competitors who are after a bigger market share.

This is by no means a complete list and as more ideas emerge they shall be added in. Think about how you are going to make money from your blog as it can have an impact on your writing.