5 Easy Ways to Make Money from Your Blog

Blogging can be a great way to spend your time: you get to write about things you love or that are interesting to you, people stop by and read them or even comment on them and if you’re lucky, your readership grows and you become popular. But that is actually a 2-edged sword. Not you have a feeling of responsibility to your readers. You owe them. Suddenly your enjoyable online diversion has become a duty. You are spending more and more time on something just to keep your readership happy. Finally you hit the “Puss In Boots” moment – how can I make money with this blog?

You are in luck because making money on the internet with a blog is a growing business. While not the heyday of a few years ago where almost anything seemed to work, the advantages now are the wide range of money-making opportunities available to the blogger. Following is a list of 5 easy ways to make money from your blog.

1. Adsense

Adsense Perhaps the biggest money maker around. Big names like Problogger.net and ShoeMoney.com use it to great advantage. In fact ShoeMoney.com got a lot of mileage and exposure for showing a photo of his $132,994 check from Google for Adsense. You most likely won’t make as much because that check was for more than one site, but you have to start somewhere. Sign up for an account and start testing out different Adsense placements.

2. Amazon

Amazon The other 800 pound gorilla when it comes to making money with your blog. Read a book you liked? Write about it and link to it on Amazon. Watched a good movie? Bought a great coffeemaker? Like a certain watch? Write about them and throw up a link to Amazon. Every purchase made within 24 hours of someone going to their site gives you a small percentage. Not much, but it adds up.

3. Ebooks

Surely you are an expert about something, right? Whatever it is, write an ebook about it, promote it like there’s no tomorrow and sell it from your website. It won’t make you enough money to retire, but it could be a nice little extra money on the side. One ebook turns into two which then turns into a series. Lots of places online to help you write, format and sell, sell, sell your ebook.

4. Referrals

If you don’t have a product to sell, you can make money by guiding people to another place that wants to sell to them. Programs, software, ebooks and more are willing to pay you a little bit of money for every person who signs up for their service or buys what they are selling. Again, the focus here is on lots of little sales that add up together to make a decent amount of money. Paid reviews are the other side of this coin – many companies will pay a blogger a certain amount of cash upfront to write a favorable review for one of their products. Only accept things you are comfortable recommending and you will sleep very well at night.

5. Advertising

If you have people coming to your blog to read what you write or see what’s going on, you can possibly sell ad space directly to advertisers. Banner ads and text-link ads are two common ways for this, although paid reviews are kind of in this genre as well. It is not always easy to figure out what to charge advertisers. Number of visitors to your blog everyday, both repeat and unique visitors are a factor as well as several other things. Look around for advice on the Internet about how much to charge. Sometimes advertisers will contact you directly although many people will go out and track down advertisers themselves. If you are the one on the hunt, it is a good idea to have a fair price in mind and be willing to either stick to your guns or come down on the price if you really want the advertiser.

Making money from your blog may not be the easiest thing in the world, but it beats having to go to work and listen to your boss order you around. You may not end up like Puss In Boots’ master with a castle and a princess for your bride, but you will most likely make some money if you put a little effort into it.