How to make money with your blog

A lot of us dream about making money blogging, here is a guide to how you can start making money on your blog without having to spend years promoting it. There are no guarantees that you will make a lot of money but some money should definitely come your way if you follow these simple steps.

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You finally decided you want a passive income

If you read this you probably already decided that you want to start making money while you sleep. Making money blogging is usually categorized in Passive Income, this sounds a bit better than it is. Passive Income does not mean that you don't have to do anything, it just means that you don't have to do anything at the exact time when you make the money.

This Guide

This guide is a quick and easy guide that will teach you how to set up and promote your blog so that you can make money from advertising. There are of course more ways to make the blog profitable but this is the way that suits most bloggers. By driving targeted traffic to advertisers you can actually make a lot of money on ads but it differs a little depending on the topic of your blog. There are topics where the money is a lot better than others, a few examples are gambling, finance and travel. If your blog happens to be in one of those areas you have struck a gold mine. If it's a blog about something else, don't despair, the Internet is large enough for you too, you can make money on anything online.

First Step: Make sure you have the visitors

When you sell advertising online the fundamental function is to get cheap traffic and convert it into expensive traffic. You get your visitors for a low cost and sell them to an advertiser for a higher cost. It's not harder than that in theory. With a blog you have an advantage against others, it's pretty easy to get cheap traffic to a blog which you probably already have noticed, I guess you have visitors even if you haven't spent anything other than the time it took to write your posts.

Let's start with how you get lots of visitors (the more visitors the bigger the potential for making good money):

Quality Content

High Quality Content is the base for all profitable Internet business. When you write your blog posts there are a number of things you need to think about:

The content should:

Attract the reader to continue reading
Inspire the reader to comment or participate in some other way
Encourage the reader to visit your advertisers
Have the potential to attract visitors from Search Engines

If you manage to create blog posts that do these 4 things you are set. It is a bit tricky of course and you might have to go over your content continuously to constantly improve it. Most professional affiliates and ad driven sites have someone that works with the content all the time to constantly improve it. For a start, just think about these 4 points when you are writing, that should take you a long way, most people actually never even reflected about this so you will already have an advantage.

Traffic Sources

There are a lot of different ways of getting traffic to a blog. Each one of these are a science of their own so we will only do a very basic plan and if you want to improve it later you can try and get a deeper knowledge on the ones you select.

SEO

Search Engine Optimizing is one of the most powerful methods of getting traffic to a site. You already have an advantage here as blogs are usually very good for getting good positions in Search Engines. For this guide we will settle with a few pointers and if you want more information on SEO you can read the knol: SEO .

Make sure Search Engine Spiders can find your blog by checking so that you don't have any private settings on and that you have at least one link pointing to your blog from somewhere else. You can try and search for your blog on Google and see if it's indexed.
Use Googles Adwords Tool (here) to see what keywords are important within your field. Remember these when you write your posts and use them in titles and headlines.
Get other bloggers to link to your blog and your posts. There are lots of ways of doing this and I'm sure you can think of some.

Social Networks

You are probably already active on social networks such as Facebook , Twitter and Jaiku. By carefully promoting your blog and it's posts to your friends you can start getting both traffic and links from these networks. Make sure you are careful and never spam, you don't want to lose your friends over this. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when you promote things on social networks:

Targeted information. Your friends will still like you if you give them something they are interested in but if you start sending them ads about any- and everything they will resent you.
Gentle touch. You have to be very careful and soft in your promoting. People in general have no problem with self promoting if it's done in a nice and gentle way.
The right amount. One of the problems is that you have to send enough material for people to get interested but sending to much will make them stop listening. Be very selective in what you send.

Communicating

By being an active and friendly blogger you can get a lot of long term friends in other blogs. By commenting in other blogs on your topic where you have some value to add you can get both direct traffic and good relations with others in your market. This is one of the most powerful aspects with blogs.

Keep in mind not to spam, write comments on the right places where you have some value to add.

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising can actually be a good way of driving traffic to a blog but be careful not to spend more money per visitor than the visitor is worth to you. The obvious choice is of course AdWords but there are a lot of other ways too, if you Google around a bit you can usually find a lot of sites letting you add free ads for example. Another way is contacting bloggers in your field and see what they can offer you on their blogs.

Step 2: Get started with the ads

There are a lot of different systems for advertising online. From traditional banners to targeted text links such as AdSense. The easiest way to start is to just go and sign up for an AdSense account. Google automaticly does most of your job by showing ads that targets your group of visitors.

If you want to take it to another step and do some more complex advertising there are some choices you need to do. There are different forms of payment programs such as PPC (Pay per click), CPA (Cost per Action) and Revenue Share, these have different advantages and different difficulties, chose the method that works best for you. In general if you are new to affiliate marketing the less your visitors have to do before you get paid the better so if you don't know, go for PPC.

Depending on your niche the big sites on the topic might have working affiliate systems. If this is the case that is very good, sign up for them and add them to your site. A lot of areas still don't have sites with their own affiliate systems and in this case Tradedoubler might be the best place to start.

Step 3: Make sure your visitors convert

A conversion is when your visitor does what you want hem to do. If he clicks on the ad, signs up for the newsletter or buys the product your site has converted him. Getting the visitors to convert is the hardest part in this so we will spend a little more time at this subject.

We will start by going through a number of important factors that influence how visitors behave on your blog.

Targeted Ads
Banner or Text Link
Quality Control
Short path

Targeted Ads

This is probably the most important factor deciding your level of success. The better the ads relate to your visitors the more clicks/sign ups/purchases you will get. It's quite obvious if you think about it, a visitor on your blog about FC Barcelona will generate few clicks on a Real Estate add. Ads about Soccer will be more interesting for your visitor and ads about Soccer in Spain will be even more interesting.

If you use AdSense Google will actually do this job for you. The money you make on AdSense is not always the best but you can count on getting targeted ads without having to to anything more than signing up and adding the snippet on your blog.

The absolutely best is to relate your ads to your specific blog post. A post about an event in Utah should have an add for that event. Usually it's a bit hard to find affiliate programs for your specific posts so the easy way of doing this is finding the affiliate programs in your niche and write posts about their specific products. One very good way of doing this is making top lists. A top list of the best Web Hosts for example is automaticly very targeted and if you put some effort in to doing this you can also give your visitors extra value by telling them which host you actually think is best. By testing products and writing reviews you get very targeted ads.

Banner or Text Link

You don't have to chose but you need to know something about this. A banner is usually more intrusive in your design and a lot of readers find them annoying. They can make people bounce right off your blog just because you have them. Another thing is that most of us don't actually see the banners any more therefore generating less clicks. Sometimes banners work perfectly though and it's very hard to tell in advance how it will work with your blog so you need to test. If you don't have time or energy for testing, go with text links, they usually work better.

Quality Control

You have to check the quality of your advertisers. If you promote crap you won't make money. Test the products or services, make sure they are easy to use and have a high quality. Remember the top list mentioned in the Targeted Ads section, if you can tell your visitors that this is actually something good then your visitors will make more money for you.

Short Path

Your visitor has just landed on your blog post with the top list on the best Hotels in San Jose. He has already decided he wants to go to San Jose and he needs to book a hotel. If it is tricky for him to book it from your post he will go back to Google and try another site because he is lazy. If you have a very simple way of getting from the entry point to a complete booking he will book the hotel from you. The whole process has to be easy, from clicking on your link to choosing hotel to paying for it. Here are a few pointers:

Few exits. Show in a very clear way where he can book the room, don't let him wander off somewhere else.
Few Clicks. If your visitor has to go through a long chain of clicks from your page to the complete booking he will get sick of it and leave, make sure he has to make as few clicks as possible.
Directly to the product. Make sure your visitor goes from your page directly to the product that he is interested in, don't send him to the start page of the web shop but to the product it self.

Do it again

If you have set up your blog from the guidelines here you should already be making some money. It is probably not much (unless you had a great natural talent for it or got really lucky). What you have to do now is to do it again. Now you have some data and a start, now you can get it better. By going trough the steps again you will increase your profit. Add more quality content, make sure you get even better results in Search Engines and constantly improve your conversion rate.