How To Make Money From Your Blog

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?

Writing diaries and journals has been a popular activity since paper and pen were readily available. So when the internet rolled around, it only made sense that writers put their words on the computer. These diaries or journals weren’t called blogs until Joran Barger phrased the term “weblog.” It was through a simple joke from a blogger, Peter Merholz that cut weblog into we blog. Other bloggers began picking up the word blog and soon it spread like wildfire.

Still for all this, the term “blog” remained relatively unknown to the mainstream public until bloggers ousted the 2002 Senate Majority Leader. Trent Lott. Senator Lott made some statements that were largely ignored by the general media who covered the event. Bloggers started writing about these hot comments. As more of the public became aware, Senator Lott became the center of a controversy. Finally, public pressure was too much and Senator Lott resigned from being the Senate Majority Leader.

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.

You don’t have to write a blog to make money off of a blog. When bloggers get bored of writing their blog, or traffic has dropped off, they often put their blogs up for sale. You can sometimes purchase these blogs including the domain name for a very reasonable price. After a bit of investment in time and effort, sometimes these can be turned around as being much more valuable than their original price. At times it can be a very quick turn around and some have reported that this can be done without having to write a single additional word on the blog. We personally believe that a little elbow grease in polishing a rough product can always allow its underlying shine to come through more powerfully.

Other bloggers are attempting to grab a piece of the millions of available advertising dollars by putting ads on their blog. Visitors leaving those blogs often click on the ads and for each click, the owner gets some small revenue. Google Adsense, and Adbright are just two of the many online entities that allow you to customize ads for 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 one of the most powerful tools for generating income for your blog. Basically, you use your blog to sell someone else’s products for a percentage of the sales. Usually, the best products to put nice pretty “affiliate tagged” images of on your blog are those that are related to your blog topic. Your enthusiasm for the related topic will help the product to sell itself to the customers. And as a bonus for helping to keep your blog interesting, you can get great graphics that are not **just pretty pictures**.

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.

Cluttered ads on a blog are particularly unattractive to potential customers. A nice mix of valuable content combined with related product ads is your best bet at getting your product sold. Try not to put too many different classifications of products together. This can make your blog awkward looking and turn off some potential buyers. Another tip, the more focused the topic of your blog is, is the more money you will make from Google’s adsense should you choose to use this easy option. Blogs that talk about everything under the sun, tend to have audiences that are searching and not buying. Blogs that focus on Polish Camera Lenses or light weight racing bicycles or dating in afghanistan ( note how specific these topics are ) tend to have audiences that are far more likely to buy or purchase something and Google and others are well aware of this distinction.

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.

Yahoo and MSN search engines prioritize blogs. To keep your blog on top, keep adding new content. Alert your readers to new content by submitting your blog to many of the ping services available. New content will automatically send a ping/alert to the 100-200 search engines particularly if you have added more ping services than the default rpc.pingomatic.com that is set up in your blog writing options area. This will re-prioritize your blog to higher levels in the search engines.

The power of a blog can be extraordinary. Most of us who have blogs update them once or twice a month, oblivious to the fact that there are others who are earning tremendous 6 and 7 figure amounts from their blog. At some point in time, most of us have heard of these few geniuses and have even tried a few things to see how we can monetize our blogs. Unfortunately most of us have failed or just not made more than a few dollars monthly. The truth is that sometimes a few simple changes can both increase traffic exponentially and also create a steady income of $50 to $100 dollars daily on autopilot, which most of us would find to be quite fantastic. What kind of changes would those be? Click below to find out.

Many of us have exciting blogs . Very few of us, however have blogs earning us more than $50 a month. 5 of the big boys earning 7 figure incomes spill their guts in this free report. See what they have to say.Earning Revenue from your Blog.