There are a lot of Bloggers that blog to share what they know about something or connect to others with the same interests or they blog because they just enjoy it a whole bunch. But lets face it, if bloggers could get paid to do what they enjoy they would certainly jump at the opportunity. The good thing is there are many opportunities to get paid for Blogging.
The important thing to remember when blogging is that you are writing quality original content and its interesting to your readers. This will make your blog sticky and help get much desired traffic.
So what ways can I make money when blogging?
Advertising- Advertising is the easiest and one of the first ways people monetize their blog. Programs like Google Adsense are the easiest to get started with as they will except anyone with any amount of traffic coming to your site or blog. Other programs are Yahoo Publisher Network and MSN Adcenter, Chitika eMiniMalls and Auction Ads.
RSS Advertising- With great feed readers like Google Reader and Bloglines many of your regulars will opt to subscribe to the feed rather than come directly to the blog. This make it more difficult to monetize this populous so you need a solution to put some ads on your RSS Feed. By doing this you include a small ad in the bottom of your posts on your feed. A couple of companies providing this type of advertising is Feed Burner (now owned by Google) and Text Link Ads.
Sell Links - The static links you see in the sidebars of blogs are typically either traded links or sold links. You can sell links in 1 of 2 ways on your blog. By using a link broker such as Text-Link-Ads or sell them directly from your site. The benefit of using a link broker is that they handle the marketing, selling and placement of your links while you concentrate on content and your Blog. The benefit of selling your own links is that there is no revenue share. You get to keep all the money. If your just starting out I recommend you use a link Broker.
Affiliate Programs- Someone sees a product on your blog, they click on it and it takes them to another site where they they purchase it and the affiliate sends you a check for a portion of the sell. Thats the idea behind affiliate programs. Amazon is one of the first affiliate programs that come to mind. If your writing an article about a particular product why not include a way for the reader to purchase the product and you get a little kick back.
Paid to Write- Whether a professional writer of not there are ways to make money writing original content for other blogs or blog networks. A growing number of jobs are being posted on free lance sites asking for writers to write a number of articles pertaining to a specific topic for a flat fee. In addition to free lace work there are full time gigs writing for blog networks such as Gawker Media and Web Logs Inc and a ton of other large networks. So if your looking to put your professional writing skills to the test this is a very lucrative road to take.
Donations- If you don’t want your Blog cluttered with advertisements and text links and all that other stuff you could just ask for reader support in the way of a donation. There is even a Word Press Plug-in called Buy me a Beer. The plug-in puts a short message at the end of each post: “If you like this post Buy me a Beer” When clicked on it take them to paypal and they can send you a small cash donation.
ReviewsAnother way to earn a few bucks is to do reviews on your site. This can be a review of a product or a service. Generally you get paid based on your sites popularity and pagerank. Like Text links you could sell reviews directly from your site but most successful bloggers choose to use a broker to handle marketing you as a reviewer. One popular review broker is ReviewMe.