5 Quick Ways to Make Money Blogging

Building an audience to your site is no small feat. It involves finding a niche, creating good content within it, promoting well and then sticking with it as your site grows.

However, finding an audience and driving traffic to your site is only the first step to creating a successful business off of your blog. At some point you need to convert those visitors into dollars without driving them away or ruining what you’ve built.

That’s why monetizing your blog can be a very difficult balancing act, one that requires constantly weighing the interests of your readers against your need to earn a profit. Fortunately though, there are many different methods of monetization that can work on your site, either alone or in combination, meaning that you can easily find the right one for you and blog.

Here are just five of the key strategies to consider and some of the better known tools in those fields to help you get started.

Advertising

Advertising is the best-known and most-common blog monetization strategy, largely because it is so easy to do. One just builds an audience, signs up for an Adsense account an then adds a few lines of code.

Unfortunately, this method does come with many drawbacks. In order to make money, you have to lose visitors, making it harder to continue building your audience, the money from ads is often very small and ads are generally seen as an unwanted intrusion by visitors.

Still, for some sites this can be a great tool, especially those with a very large number of visitors, though it may be worth exploring alternative advertising programs, such as Burst Media, as they may produce better results for some webmasters.

Sponsorships

Sponsorships are similar to ads in that others promote their sites or their products on your blog, but how they do so is very different.

With advertising, one generally works with a third party to run a stream of rotating ads that the blog owner is paid for every click. With sponsorships, the advertiser buys a block of time and gets some level of exclusivity on the site. The advertiser pays the same amount regardless of clicks.

This can be a better deal for bloggers, especially with strong brands others want to pair up with, but it can be a tough sell for promoters and the semi-exclusive nature of it can limit revenue. However, one doesn’t need any special tools to do it, just the ability to alter their theme and ad new links and/or images.

Subscription Content

Instead of looking to advertisers and sponsors for revenue, others turn to the readers themselves, seeking revenue from loyal subscribers. A subscription model is one way to do that,

Using a WordPress Plugin such as Membership Lite/Pro or Magic Members is a quick way to add a subscription feature to your site and process payments. All in all, there are about a dozen plugins that can aid in this task.

However, this route can mean writing a great deal of additional content and the systems for running the subscriptions systems can be both expensive and unwieldy. This approach is best used by sites in small niches where the information itself is often valuable.

eBook/Digital Good Sales

A similar solution to subscription content is to offer paid digital goods for downloads. This is often in the format of ebooks, but can take just about any format imaginable including high-res images and audio downloads.

The WP e-commerce plugin makes it easy to sell digital goods on one’s blog and services such as ZinePal make it free and easy to create ebooks from existing Web content. Generally, it is much easier to get started and costs are lower than subscriptions, there is also no need to write ongoing new content.

However, piracy does become an issue with digital good sales and not every blog has an audience that is likely to spend real money on a virtual good. Still, for tech-savvy audiences, this may be a good approach and an expanding market as the Kindle, iPad and other e-readers begin to take off.

CwF+RtB

Theh popular blog Techdirt refers to a monetization system it calls “Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy” and it puts it into action on its site. The idea is that you spend your energy connecting with your fans and then give them something of value to purchase, they will do so.

It can be almost anything from access to your time, such as with a consulting arrangement, badges on your site, custom-written posts or more. The idea is to offer something that is scarce and can only be obtained via purchase.

Every site has different opportunities here, but there’s almost certainly some available, This biggest hurdle may be that it is such a new concept in many regards, readers may resist it or not know how to approach it.

Bottom Line

It’s important to note though that you don’t have to use just one or even two systems. You can always experiment with multiple systems at the same time. Newspapers, for example, have offered paid subscriptions and advertisements for hundreds of years.

The key is to find the system or combination of systems that work best for your site.

Once you do that, turning your virtual audience into physical money becomes much easier and much more rewarding.

This post was sent By Danny who is a consultant for iAdvize and also runs the BeginSEOHere website.