You’ve been blogging now for a few years and despite the ego rush of seeing your hits soar, you’re left wondering whats the point or rather how do you finally make some cash off all that hard work.

In the beginning it can be tough when you’re not earning from your blog, but there are lots of options when it comes to monetization.

6 Ways to Make Money From Your Blog

First Choose your topic and start generating traffic. Focus your blog, blogs that make money usually target a specific market and audience. Be passionate about your subject and generate as much traffic as you can. If you’re obsessed with your topic then others will be as well.

Tip: dont expect to get rich from your blog (at least not right away)

Some blogs report up to 40,000 dollars a month in earnings, but unless you have millions of visitors already then don’t expect to quit your day job yet.

1. Sell PPC Advertising Space

The best Pay Per Click advertising network today is Google Adsense. They will place relevant ads directly onto your pages based on the keywords and topics your write about. If your reader clicks on the link then you get paid.

Exactly how much depends on your traffic and the topic you are writing about.

Tip: This method is easy but you don’t get to choose which advertisers show ads and how much they pay you.

2. Sell Dedicated Ad Space

Some networks like BlogAds will allow you to directly contact an advertisers and sell them your space.

Tip: this method puts you in control, but you might make poor choices about advertisers and prices.

3. Write Paid Reviews

Sites like Pay Per Post will match your blog with people who are looking for paid reviews. You can earn money by writing paid reviews.

Tip: stay credible, be honest and don’t post too many paid reviews.

Be careful because if you overdo it, you can lose readers and traffic.

4. Sell Your Own Merchandise

If you have developed your own brand name or slogans that have become popular then you can find people who will buy your products. Company’s like Zazzle and Cafepress will manufacture and ship products for you and give you a commission on each sale.

5. Sell Affiliate Products

The most popular affiliate program is with Amazon. You can embed items from amazons marketplace directly into your website and earn commissions off of each sale. This method works very well if your blog is centered around a certain product.

Tip: affiliate sales are the best route for newer blogs

6. Take Donations

Sometimes this is called e-begging, but you can use paypal to ask your readers for donations

Dear Blog,
Today I had lots of traffic.
I learned lots about getting super rich with Google Adsense.
I can’t wait till all those clicks start rolling in.
Check out this picture

Later

Going through all of my older blog posts I often find much room for improvement. The more you learn, the more you realize you didn’t know. So when I look at older posts some of them seem like a complete waste of time and others have huge potential to bring in traffic. There are a few things you can look for to improve old posts.

#1 Syntax Errors

The number trick I’ve learned for SEO and good blogging practices has been how to use “Validator.” Sometimes old entries appear to be good posts but are filled with bad html code which can hurt the quality score and the search engine rankings.

On a few occasions I have run old posts through validator and fixed all of the errors, resulting in a boost to my quality score and a huge spike in search engine hits to that particular post.

#2 Dead Links

If you have ever linked to a website that doesn’t exist anymore or posted a video that disappears after a few months then you will understand. These kinds of errors can harm the user experience and make your site look very unprofessional.

Go back and check for broken links and dead videos.

#3 Bad Information or Lack Information

We all make errors, however an errors doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. Make sure you check back through you older posts for accuracy of your statements.

Also there are some posts I found to be missing information all together. For example when I was first starting out I thought that just posting a video by itself would be enough to get search traffic if people were searching for that video.

Now that I know Google doesn’t search inside of video’s I know how important it is to write a detailed post to go along with any video I’ve posted. By just revising those old video posts and adding a few hundred extra words I have seen a sizeable increase in traffic coming to those pages as well.

The more you practice the better you will become at blogging and SEO. So remember to update your older work and not let all of that practice go to waste.

Alot of people ask ” How can I make money” but aren’t willing to invest either time or money. Those people should quite frankly quit. Because they are never going to have success and probably don’t have the intelligence or desire to make it work.

The process IS easy, but I didn’t say instant.

To do so, you use a little understood the power of Leverage.

You think Rome was built in a day? No. But it DID grow and your business can grow to too.

You get there by leveraging more than just MONEY. Sure, reinvesting is great but a lot of you have little money now. So first you need to get some.

You need to leverage what you HAVE in the most effective way possible. That is your time, and your brain.

Step 1 – Pick A Market or “Niche”

It doesn’t matter which one, just pick something you are interested in. Here are a few examples:

• Health and Wellness
• Wealth
• Relationships
• Pets
• Weight loss
• Debt problems
• Foreclosure issues
• Making money online

With your chosen category go to Clickbank. Find the highest gravity product.

Next, go to Quantcast.com and enter your chosen products web address to find out your targets demographics. Age, sex, location, frequently visited sites. Write this information down.

After that, look up 10 forums on your niche. Write down what they desire, what they are looking for.

These are called HOT BUTTONS. This is what will make you SELL.

Finally, go look at your chosen products sales page. Line up the hot buttons with your target demographic.

Step 2 – The Squeeze

Build “Opt-in” Bait for a squeeze page. Find out what your market wants and create a short little product for them to download. This is “bait” to get them to opt-in. A free 20 page report works well.

Now make the squeeze page. Put the benefits to your product on your squeeze page in bullet points. Line those up with your target markets needs. (You discovered these in step one).

Then, on the thank you page, put a review of the product you chose to promote. Video reviews work well. Then offer a bonus for buying through your link.

Finally, write up 10 emails to follow up with them. Offer them solid content and inside that content, put your affiliate link. Switch up straight promotions with content.

For those that purchase, get them on your “buyers list”. Those that don’t, wait 10 days then offer them another affiliate product. You’ll pick up more buyers this way.

Step 3 – Traffic

We built up our opt-in bait and squeeze page, with thank you page testimonial review. Now it is time to get the TRAFFIC. And this is where the magic happens. I used this SINGLE technique and I got 1000 subscribers in just a few days.

At that time, I got lucky. REAL lucky. I was clueless to what I was doing. But not anymore.

Here is the strategy:

First find people with medium to large email lists already.

Search for 10 affiliates already established in your niche. Approach them with a reasonable offer. If they need article writing, graphic design work, copywriting, preferably something they HATE doing. (link building, etc.) and offer to work for them in these areas.

“Why do all that for them when I’m building their business and not mine?

How they PAY YOU is with their email list. They send out a broadcast or two advertising your website.

This can result in hundreds or thousands being added to your list in a VERY short time.

For me, it was a little over 1000 subscribers, 314 dollars in IMMEDIATE income, and 2 to 3k a month from there on out. Just from this SINGLE TRANSACTION.

Step 4 – Ad Swaps

Now you should go find 10 more affiliates inside your niche and offer them Ad Swaps.

This is where you basically trade lists. You can safely do this with your list 2 times a month…and in doing so double or triple the size of your list VERY fast.

So, lets say you got 500 subscribers with the first JV deal. You then do 6 swaps over 3 months, that should grow your list to 2k pretty fast.

To give you some metric’s that should be 2000 a month in affiliate commissions.

Next we kick it into overdrive.

Step 5 – Outsourcing

Hire a content writer and submitter from the Philippines. The are many advantages to the Philippines, they have amazing english skills and good work ethic, plus very loyal. Also, it’s only about 300 to 600 a month. Easy for you, now that you’re earning 2k a month.

You are going to get them to write and submit articles for you. Train them well (how to do so is beyond the scope of this “mini course”, info is out there if you look)

They’ll start driving DIRECT traffic to your site without you lifting a finger. This allows you to CONTINUE to build relationships and do more JV ad swaps.

By now, a few months has passed and you should have about 3 to 4 thousand on your list…this is where it gets exciting!

Check back next week for the rest of this fast and easy money making strategy!

I host several blogs, the problem that I have is coming up with fresh original content on a daily basis for all of them. Recently I found a Writing Services Website called Article Alley “Free Content for your Blog”. Article alley hosts tons of original content that is free to use. Topics ranging from Automotive, Finance, Marketing, and even Pets.

Here is an example their free content that would be good for this website.

Intro to Internet Marketing

Promoting a product brings up the sales to the company and gets more customers. The marketing plays an important role in getting the company’s revenue . The main aim of marketing is to get more and more customers by fulfilling the existing customer’s needs and requirements. Out of many strategies in use for marketing, internet marketing is one of most important way of marketing. Advertizing the products or services on World Wide Web is called Internet marketing. With the increasing technology people are slowly switching over to the internet to search for all their needs, right from getting themselves home appliances to booking movie tickets. The trend now is using internet for any kind of communication and has replaced the traditional postal services. The firms and various companies can advertise the product online, as the generation has become very net savvy. You can find some great matter on

The internet has greatly helped in the marketing of products.To promote your product online there are a few things you will need.A website or blog is the first thing you will need to promote products online. The site needs to contain information about the products and services that you offer. While putting up information on your site, make sure that it is genuine and not copied from somewhere. Also make sure you insert details like shipment, payment and contact details. So when making the site make sure that it contains all the information mentioned above, so that the customer would be able to buy your product.

Continued…

Next you are out of ideas, or simply out of time but still need to post some original content, you can check out Article Alley for some inspiration.

When comparing the different types of traffic that come through their advertising network, the researchers at Chitika compared the different types of Google traffic – people who click on the “Google Search” button, people who search by hitting the enter key, people who search from browser toolbars, etc. While the overall clickthrough rate for the entire Google-searching sample was 0.95%, the people who searched by clicking on the search button at Google.com clicked ads at a 1.56% rate, over half again higher.

But the question becomes, why such a high disparity? Why are people who type in their query and hit enter so much less likely to click on an ad than someone who performs a search differently through the same website?

“Sophistication is my guess,” says Rand Fishkin, SEO guru and CEO of SEOMoz.org. ”Hitting enter means you’re not moving your hands away from the keyboard and likely indicates a more tech-savvy (and hence, click-sensitive) individual.”

So it appears that advertising click rates are inversely proportional to the “tech-savviness” of the people receiving the ads. By defining a user’s tech-savviness, it’s possible that ad networks going forward will be able to target better and better, driving revenue for websites while showing less ads.

Chitika Ad Network

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Recently I’ve written about image search optimization. Not too long ago I began to reap the benefits of tediously setting up images across all my sites a specific way. One day this week my site traffic spiked way up. I was pretty excited until I found out that 90 out of 100 of the new visitors were all visiting though google image search. They were all looking for one particular image on my server.

So realistically I didn’t actually gain any new readers at all, but I did gain over a extra hundred people. I was tempted to delete the image and move on, but I stopped to think about what possible benefits I could get from this newfound traffic source. It’s a very small image they are after and it doesn’t put much extra load on my server by letting people download it. However the extra traffic could help give me a boost in Alexa rankings or page rank, and I feel like I’m providing some kind of service for the people by letting them come and take my pictures, even it they have no interest in what I’m talking about. Especially as much as I’ve used Google image search in the past.

In the end I decided that even though this group may never click ads or even read my articles, if I could get 1 out of 100 people to come back and visit, then its a worthwhile investment. So what would you say if more people came to your website everyday just to find an image and then left, than actually came to appreciate your work. Would you welcome them in or would you take down the picture and ask the moochers to get their kicks somewhere else? Share your opinions in the comment section.

You can’t simply will your business into existence. Darren Rowse, editor in chief of ProBlogger.net, recently talked about how he took his blog from a simple hobby to a full-time job. So whats the key to a successful business? Stop day dreaming and get to work. I’m guilty of sitting back and ‘thinking’ and planning about what I would like my blog to become, but there comes a point when you are doing more thinking than actually doing. The turning point for Darren came when his wife came him the ultimatum.

“You’ve got six months to make it blogging full time.” After that it was get a real job time for Darren, something many of us are desperately avoiding.

I’d been talking a lot…. dreaming a lot…. creating a lot of pretty graphs…. and not really DOING a lot.

I didn’t really see it (I was too close and too caught up in my dreams) but my wife knew it and so she set me an ultimatum – a deadline that changed my thinking and more importantly led to me changing the way I went about my blogging.

I knew that if I were to succeed in going full time in the next six months that that had to change. I needed to start looking at my blogging as a business now – even though it was only earning a day or two a week’s income.

11 Things Darren did from that day forward:

* Started putting more time aside for blogging

* Became more focused upon my core tasks of creating content

* Wasted less time on distractions

* Became more strategic in my thinking and set goals to work towards

* Began to look for new income streams - beyond AdSense

* Looking for advertisers – finding businesses in my niche and pitching my blog to them

* Seek out guest writing opportunities on other blogs and even in main stream media

* Setting deadlines, posting a certain number of posts a day and set a calendar

* Networking more with other bloggers

* Invested more time and money into learningof different aspects of blogging

* Looked for a business coachwho could teach me how to be more business minded

That day began the process for me of looking at what I do as a business.

While not a lot changed on my blogs that day – the impact over the last 4-5 years has been significant. I’ve not looked back and many of the things I changed back then have become patterns and a natural part of my blogging work flow.

Many times we can get caught up in the dream. Take some time to reflect on how productive you actually are vs. how productive you could be. When you don’t have a boss it can be easy to take it easy on yourself, but its important to remember that the key to success requires DO’ing and not just THINK’ing.

It happens to me from time to time. As I sit down and begin to write a blog post, I start to feel like this could be one of my best pieces of work yet. Then I am faced with a dilemma. Should I post this now, despite having very little readership, or should I wait and deliver this gem once my audience is bigger.

I’ve arrived at two different ways of thinking about this problem.

If I was to publish such great content now then it would attract more readers to my blog. Oppositely if I post it now and not many people see it, then it may become buried. After that point it will be much harder to resurrect it when I have more fans. It may even become lost forever. Which leaves me in a difficult position.

I have tried both methods with some measure of success and also with great failures.

One time I posted the article and I saw a dramatic increase in my readership. Another time I was very confident that it was going to be a great article and not only did it fail to bring in new readers, I actually saw a decrease in traffic. Needless to say I was quite disappointed and I thought it would have been better to wait until I had more traffic coming through to post it. It’s difficult to know what is going to be a success and what is not.

I haven’t come up with a steadfast rule yet but currently I take a look at my last week or so’s posts to see how much powerful content I’ve had already. If it’s been a good week then I might feel more inclined to save it for a slow news day.

What’s your strategy when it comes to you best content? Do you put it all out whenever you can, or do you save something special for later? Let me know in the comments.

I recently got an email from a reader.

“Great site you have. I am happy to send you a signed copy of my book “The Leap”. Just shoot me an email with an address.” -Rick

I was surprised that someone had noticed my little blog here, but even more surprised when a signed copy of his book “The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes can Propel Your Career from Good to Great” arrived in the mail not more than a few days later.

In his book Smith puts to rest the idea that entrepreneurship means taking great risks. He also talks about how the best ideas are contagious because they are big, selfless, and simple. Finally, before you are ready to make the leap you need to know who you and what motivates you by finding your Primary Color.

The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great

Description

Have you ever asked yourself, “Is this it?”

Maybe you’re trapped in a dead-end job that you’re afraid to leave. Or maybe you already have a good job-one that gives you room to grow and exercise your talents-but you don’t really feel like you’re doing your best work. Your life is plain vanilla, yet you know in your heart that you can be a triple scoop banana split. You just don’t know how to make that leap.

Rick Smith knows firsthand what it’s like to feel stuck in a career rut. He worked in a midlevel job where he had modest success. Then his life took an unexpected turn and he found himself creating a business that became successful beyond his wildest dreams. He unlocked a level of performance he did not know he had in him. After all, Smith was just a regular guy who didn’t like to take chances or even step outside his comfort zone. But as he found out, those qualities don’t have to be stumbling blocks. In fact, they’re two of the keys to making the leap from good to great.

And after talking to others who had also transformed their careers from mundane to magnificent, he realized that the secret doesn’t lie with some mysterious talent, trait, or affinity for risk. And it certainly doesn’t require you to quit your job and start from scratch. Rather, it lies with your ability to harness your true strengths and passions. What Smith calls your Primary Color.

ABC News from Rick Smith on Vimeo.

Celebrity Reviews:

“This invaluable book leads you around the common traps that so often keep us from pursuing our strengths and passions.”
- Marcus Buckingham, bestselling author of Now, Discover Your Strengths

“Rick Smith goes from flat line to the front line of life and shows you how to ignite your career.”
- Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, author, YOU: the Owner’s Manual series

“An inspiring book for anyone who has ever looked at his or her life andwondered: Is this it? The Leap will help you discover your true path to personal and professional success.”
-Arianna Huffington, cofounder and editor in chief, The Huffington Post

“Packed with actionable insights and inspiring stories, The Leap shows how to not just improve but redefine your career. Rick Smith brilliantly lays out three simple, manageable steps that make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to take the leap and unlock their ultimate potential.”
-Tony Robbins

“Finally, a book that kills the myth of the daredevil. This is must- read for anyone who thinks they are a breed apart from Bill Gates or other mavericks deified as risk takers. The truth? To do the impossible-whether as an entrepreneur or an employee-minimizing risk and making small bets is the rule rather than the exception.”
-Tim Ferriss, number one New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek

Conclusion

I wanted to take a chance to thank Mr. Smith for his contribution. I’ve already started my “Leap” from good to Great.

In case anyone is wondering my color is “Berry” – Effective Leader

For more information about the Author visit: RickSmith.me