Methods to Make Money Online from Blogs

Darren Rowse has written a long article describing methods available for bloggers to earn money online directly from their blogs. The essence of this guide to making money online, added with some entry of my own, is summarized below.

A number of different monetizing methods are available for bloggers to use. Selection of which methods to use depends on blogs' niche, number of visitors/subscribers, impressions and expertise, among other things.

1. Advertising

• Contextual Ads - This is a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) ads system based on blog contents (e.g. Adsense, YPN). It is a good system for blogs with specific niche topic. General blogs or blogs without any niche will not work well because the systems do not have any context to 'lock' on to when selecting what ads to display (resulting in displays of some very general ads).
• Non-contextual CPC ads - Display ads without having to relate to context, such as Chitika’s eMiniMalls.
• Impression-based ads - Payment are made based on the number of people viewing the ads; only good for blogs with large traffic). Examples: Fastclick and Tribal Fusion.
  
• Text Ads - A text-link on your blog sold as ads by text-link ads programs (such as AdBrite, Text Link Ads, and Bidvertiser). These programs sell your text-links to their own pool of advertisers; the benefit is that you don’t have to go through the hassle of finding your own advertisers. You also have a degree of control over what ads to run and what prices to set.
• RSS Ads – Many ads programs display ads in RSS feeds. Some programs only offer this option to blogs with a certain number of traffic, impressions, or subscribers.

2. Sponsorship
Well established blogs with large traffic have better chances of directly finding their own advertisers or sponsors to display ads. Typically, blogs with specific niche have more chances of getting sponsors with the same niche (e.g. blogs about camera getting Nikon or Kodak as sponsors). Ads are sold in the form of banners, text-links, buttons, or newsletters. Another type of sponsorship is sponsored posts: bloggers are paid to write specific posts as required by sponsors, or posts reviewing sponsors’ own blogs (positively I suppose).

3. Affiliate Programs
Affiliate program providers (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Linkshare, Commision Junction, Clickbank) pay you commissions for sending readers to purchase their products/services. Participating in these programs may require you to put more effort (than needed to setup ads in your blog) to influence readers to buy the products or services.

4. Selling Blogs
Well established and profitable blogs may be (and have been) sold at lucrative prices. An example is Weblogs Inc. which were sold to AOL for $25 million. But, to reach that level of success is extremely difficult and rare. Some smaller blogs have been sold at auction sites like eBay and SitePoint.

5. Donations
Only a very small number of blogs have been successful at making profitable income through donations. Most of them have large number of loyal readers.

6. Merchandising
Successful bloggers have used their influential blogs as brand names to be sold as merchandises (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc).

7. Paid Subscriptions
Selling blog contents to subscribers is an option to bloggers but a difficult one to profit from because similar contents are available free online. Bloggers would need a certain degree of expertise or exclusivity to have readers wanting to pay for these contents.

8. Blog Networks
There are two ways to profit from these methods: (1) Start your own network and pay bloggers to write in your network while profiting from the seven methods above. (2) Join other networks as a paid writer.

My Comments
If you're new to this, getting too excited to try everything on the list at the same time would be a big mistake. Building your blog from the basics up the ladder - with patience - is the key. It's tempting to try all the different monetizing methods and see if it works more than others, but you'll end up wasting your time too much learning on how to get the most out of the different methods. It's best to start from the most common ones (most likely Adsense) and build up your experience getting the most out of it. Your experience then will make it easier for you to learn other new methods in time. Anyway, Adsense has been reported to bring in the biggest chunk of revenues to many popular bloggers.

Photo by annia316

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This post is a summary of an original post by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net (Alexa rank: 3185). The original post length of 1993 words has been cut down to 624 words (69% reduction).

Great Money Making Schemes for Your Blog

Everton Blair gave out great money-making programs that he’s optimized in his blog to earn him a collected annual income of about $180K. He has been blogging for more than two years after loosing his day job. His main advice to bloggers is that they must take advantage growing the revenue when getting large volumes of traffic, rather than taking some time out relaxing and passively ripping income from those traffic. Here is the list of the schemes he recommends:

Affiliate Schemes

• TNX – Offers amazing lets you sell contextual links and have great referral schemes.
• CashCrate – Have scheme that pays you money directly by completing offers and have a referral scheme that pays you not only by sending referrals to them, but also getting paid for the referrals from your referrals. You’ll get 75% for completed offers and up to 30% of your referrals’ earnings.

Advertising

• Adsense – The most popular ads program that serves high click-through-rate (CTR) contextual advertising.
• Text Link Ads – For some bloggers, TLA is their biggest earner. The advantage is that the process of finding advertisers, signing them up, and renewing their monthly campaign is done automatically via TLA.
• ReviewMe – Publishers get paid $50 - $500 per review of a product, service, blog, or website. The ReviewMe pool of advertisers that’ll pay publishers for writing reviews are growing each month.
• Chitika – Works best to product-related blog as the Chitika eMiniMalls display product offers.
• Vizu – an innovative and reader-friendly way to monetizing your site. CPMs are in the range of $1.50 - $3.50. Revenues are generated through the addition of Polls in your site that matches the content.
• Vibrant In-Text – Only accepts sites with 200K+ page impressions a month. Their in-line ads are quite profitable.
• Tribal Fusion - Only accepts sites with 200K+ page impressions a month. Payments are based on CPM as opposed to CPC with relatively high rates depending on the placement of ads.

Photo by greg westfall.

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This post is the main summary of an original post by Everton Blair at ConnectedInternet.com (Alexa rank: 32,143). The original length of 776 words has been compressed to 318 words (59% less).

Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns

Having Adsense setup in your blog doesn't guarantee great success generating money with it. It needs to be optimized and tweaked accordingly to ensure that you get the best outcomes from it. There are many factors determining Adsense success, or its failure. In this post, you'll learn what all these factors are and what to focus on when optimizing Adsense. All the materials are presented in a very compact form to help you learn the most important points fast, quickly, and easily found if you want to come have a look at it again.

Before reading through them, it's best if you have already understood what Adsense is and what its policies are. Also, be sure that your blog is acceptable by Adsense.

Photo by alexdecarvalho.

Factors for Success
There are 4 major factors to make Adsense more successful to bring money in:

• Traffic Levels - As the number of visitors increases, so does the total number of clicks.
• High Paying Ads - Ads that cost the advertisers $3 per click will add more to your revenue than ads that cost $0.01 per click. Finding the right keywords to be the niche of your blog that targets these high (or at least moderate) paying ads are very crucial before you start a blog. Targeting niche keywords that pay very little is not worth your effort.
• Relevant Ads - Ads that are more closely related to your blog are more likely to interest your visitors to click upon. 'Public Service Announcement' or ads that are not related to your content are less likely to be clicked upon because generally, they don't spark any interest in your visitors.
• Optimal Ads Position and Design - Ads position, colors, sizes, number of units, and borders do affect visitors' behavior in looking or clicking at them. Finding the optimal design and position is crucial to maximize your Adsense income.

Each one of these factors are as important as the other. Do not only focus on one or two of them and leaving the other parts weak. Your Adsense success is as good as the weakest part. This is a fact adviced by many probloggers. For example, having high paying ads served on your blog but with only a small number of visitors won't result in good amount of conversion. More details on these factors are explained below.

How to Increase Traffic
These are some practical tips to increase traffic levels that have worked well for many experienced bloggers.

• Build useful, quality, interesting and original content - Reflect on the blogs that you read often and think again why you read them.
• Good blog design - Do you tend to think that a blog has quality content if the design is terrible?
• Link to others - You'll only have others linking to you if you have shown your generosity in linking to others first. Linking helps in two ways: (1) Bring more visitors. (2) Increase your ranking.
• Comment on other blogs - Interact with others genuinely (not spamming) by giving thoughtful comments in other blogs. People will grow their interest in your blog as you interact more with them.
• Update frequently - a significant part of large traffic comes from frequent readers, who wants to see fresh contents all the time.
• Interact with readers - Interact with your readers actively. Answer comments, questions, create memes, games, etc.
• Optimize for search engines - Visitors that tend to click on the ads the most come from search engines. Doing SEO will increase your revenues and your rank as well.
• Add your blog add in your email signature - This can help increase visitor numbers to your blog too.
• Create RSS feed - Let your readers have the option to subscribe easily to your blog's content. Visit Feedburner.com for more details. This method eases their connectivity to your blog.
• List your URL in directories - This increases the chance for people of relevant interest finding your blog easier through many mediums and portals.
• Submit to search engines - Send your blog URL to search engines too and similar sites such as Technorati. Use the right and relevant keywords to describe your blog as this is the most crucial information that connects your blog to your visitors.
• Create a newsletter - This is another option to update your readers of new postings.
• Get involve in other blog projects - Make yourself visible in the blogosphere by actively participating in other projects or memes. The more visibility you have the better.
• Participate in forums - This are the places to find other with similar interest. You can draw visitors to your blog by making yourself visible through helping others in the forums.
• Promote your posts - Send your great posts to others or submit them in social media if you think they have a chance to get votted up. Be selective of which posts to promote to avoid being too annoying.
• Add an 'Email a Friend' button - Add this button below each of your posts to let your readers have the option to email their friends.

High Paying Ads
It's pretty obvious that you should target high paying keywords to get a higher money return from Adsense. There are some sites on the internet listing out a limited number of keywords that are high paying ones. The downside of targeting these keywords are that they are highly competitive too: others are doing it as well. It's now becoming more difficult to rank well in search engines on these keywords. But that this does not mean that you shouldn't do it if you're confident to write excellent and quality content on those keywords.

A more common high paying keywords are the ones related to technology products as those are expensive products and businesses are willing to pay more to get advertised. Examples of successful blogs running these types of contents are Engadget, Gizmodo, and PVRblog just to name a few.

Targeting these high paying keywords alone doesn't guarantee success. The rules of getting high traffic still applies - and you have to be able to build high quality content for that. If you're more comfortable writing on moderately paying content and get more traffic on these niches, then this is a better strategy to do.

There are some strategies and tools to use to find and research more on these high paying keywords:

• Do these keywords serve ads? - The first thing you want to check is whether the keywords you want to target serve ads. Simply type those keywords in Google and see if ads are served. If not, then your content related to those keywords are unlikely to serve ads too. By searching this way, you can also see other sites and blogs focusing on those keywords.
• Buy them - There are many professional tools available at a cost that gives you hundreds of thousands of these keywords.
• Use WordTracker - They have the best tool available related to finding and researching on keywords. They also tell you the number of other competing sites/blogs on any specific keywords.
• Use Adwords - If you are ready to invest some cash, try becoming the advertisers yourself and see how much people are bidding for any keywords and get a better feel how to optimize the keywords you use.

Remember again that you have to focus on building high traffic levels too. If you're not able to do this using the extremely high paying keywords, then they're not worth it. Try the more moderate paying ones, as long as you can build quality content on it. But at the other extreme, targeting those low paying ads is not worthwhile.

Relevant Ads
Imagine a blog that wants to target 'making money online' as keywords but have the word 'blog' or 'blogging' too many times throughout the content, even the title and URL. The keyword 'money' or its related keywords are not frequently used. As a result, the ads served are more related to 'creating blogs' and not entirely relevant to the whole content of making money online. This is one example scenario of irrelevant ads.

There are a few things that you can do to get more relevant ads served on your blog:

• Are there ads available? - Make sure the keywords you're targeting have ads available to be served on your blog. If not, look for other keywords or different keywords with similar meaning that serve more ads.
• Increase keyword density - Words that are used more frequently bound to be recognized as the main keywords of your blog. Try to increase the number of keywords in your content, title, header, URL, sidebars, footer, menus, outward links, bold text, etc. But don't repeat too much to the point that it becomes to obvious and annoying to the readers. Keyword Density at SEOChat.com is a good tool to use for this purpose.
• Reduce irrelevant keywords - Check for words that are not your keywords but have quite a high density in your URL, header, menus, content, sidebars, footer, etc. They may be recognized as important keywords by Adsense bots. Make sure that the ads served are not related to them. Otherwise, you have to change them a bit to reduce their density.
• One topic per page - Do not focus on too many keywords per page. This confuses Adsense bots to decide which keywords are the most relevant. If this happen to you, it's better to split the text into a few series in different pages.
• Block irrelevant ads - Adsense gives you the option to block ads unrelated to your blog content that may appear without you wanting it to be there.

Optimal Ads Position and Design
Adsense allows a number of different ads design and position to choose from. Depending on your blog design and content, some of these ads position and design work better than the others. Which ones the best for you?

One thing for sure, it work differently for different people and different blog. The best way is to test them all. But there are some pointers to follow to cut your work short:

• Blend content and ads - Most Adsense users found success when ads and content are blended together as if the ad blocks are not advertisements at all. A few tricks to do this is making the ads background and borders the same color as the content background, ads titles and links to be just like the content links. Many guides mention that blue is the best color for ads titles because they are the most common link color.
• Place ads in content - Ads will blend better with content if they are placed together with the content. For example, see this page where you have the ads wrapped with the content just below the Post Title. But too much ads wrapped with the contents can annoy your reader. So try to do this moderately. You can look for examples in well-established blogs and see how the pros do it and adapt those strategies into your own blog.
• Above the fold - Above the fold means that you put the ads where readers can see it without needing to scroll down the page. A substantial amount of visitors just check out sites for a few seconds only. Any ads that need scrolling would have missed their eyes.
• Follow the heat map - The heat map below has been produced by Google based on the statistics of visits to Adsense ads. Clearly, based on this map, the best place to put ads is just at the beginning of the post, blended with the content itself. The other good section is on the left and above/below the post.
• Not too much ads - The main purpose of a blog or site is to serve information to its readers. Crowding it with too much ads defeat the purpose, and people are not blind to see what you're trying to do. Avoid over-crowding yours with ads. Find a balance. There are other types of sites that are more commercial in nature - serving quick infos with lots of outward links. This maybe a place for you to place more ads to provide your visitors the option of finding the best products (i.e. ads) to go to.
• Keep changing ads position and design - Regular visitors and frequent readers to your blog are more 'blind' to your ads, meaning that they've seen it too often that they know where NOT to look at. Avoid this 'Ad-blindness' by frequently moving around the ads position and changing their designs. Many bloggers found that this technique improved their click-through-rates after the changes, until the next ads-blindness kicks in again.

Bringing All Together
The key to Adsense success is to work on all these 4 different areas. Working on only 3 and leaving 1 factor behind will mean that your return is as good as the weakest one that you leave behind.

There are other small things that you'll want to consider in addition to the core tips above:

• Not too much outgoing links - The less outgoing links you have, the less 'exit doors' your visitors have to leave. But not having any links at all would mean that you're not focusing on building quality informative site which is suppose to provide options for additional details. So, provide your readers with these outbound links but don't have them too excessively.
• Using frames - if you're using frames, place your ads and contents within the same frame. Otherwise, Adsense bots will not recognize the connection between the two.
• Don’t click your own ads - This is obvious. Google knows well. They'll even know if somebody else is doing this dirty 'deeds' for you. It's all in the IPs and correlating the click patterns. Don't even encourage your readers to do it by giving some incentives as this violates the rule and will get you banned from the program. Basic rule - don't do it.
• Monitor your statistics - One good tool to use is Adsense Tracker. This isn't a freeware. But, it does provide many options for you track your Adsense performance. It logs the performance of individual ad units, every pages, and basically answers the where, when and what ads are clicked. With this information, you'll be able to develop strategies to optimize your blog content and ads design and position.
• Use alternative ads - There may comes a time when Public Service Announcement (PSA) ads, that doesn't add to your revenue, are served on your blog. Get something more profitable to appear instead. In Adsense page, you can select alternative ads to be served, such as Amazon or other affiliate ads program.

Note: Here's a more compact tips on Adsense optimization based on an article by Sharon Housley at About.com. There are some additional infos not covered in this article.

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This post was written based on some of the major facts of Adsense optimization presented by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net (Alexa ranking: 3321). I've summarized his post, with some additional infos, into a more compact form to let you grasp all the important points within a quick read. The original post by Darren is 6922 words, cut 65% less down to 2425 words, with all the important facts remain intact.

Adsense vs. BidVertiser - Which is the Best?

Rafael Enriquez wrote the pros and cons about using BidVertiser and compares it with Adsense to see which one is the best money-making contextual advertisement program online. Because BidVertiser ads are similar to Adsense ads, both of them cannot be run at the same time on the same page.

Using BidVertiser: Pros

• Adsense pays using check but BidVertiser pays through Paypal, which is faster.
• Adsense’s minimum payout is $100 but BidVertiser’s minimum payout is $10, which is quicker.
• BidVertiser allows you to choose the ads to open in a new window, which lets your web/blog stays open and hopefully to have visitors come back easily to your site.
• You can approve ads manually with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
• You can test to see the final ads template with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
• You can choose to display eBay auction ads with BidVertiser, but not with Adsense.
• With BidVertiser, you can see the amount of money advertisers are bidding on the ads that will be displayed on your site. With Adsense, you have to use other system (e.g. AdWords) which is not as easy.

Using BidVertiser: Cons

• There are complaints of slow page loads using BidVertiser, not with Adsense. This creates major problems for users.
• Adsense ads are more relevant and thus get higher click-throughs. This is because Adsense has more advertisers in their pool to offer the right ads for any keywords.
• Because there are more advertisers competing in Adsense, chances are ads in Adsense pays more per click.
• There complaints that BidVertiser doesn’t pay on time after reaching the min payout of $10. Adsense reputation in payment is better.

The decision which is better to use is left for individuals to take.

Photo by Helico.

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This post is a summary of an original post by Rafael Enriquez at AssociatedContent.com (Alexa rank: 2638). The original length of 578 words has been cut down to 294 words (50% less).

How to Reduce Ad-Blindness

Skellie gave out some tips to prevent ad-blindness – the tendency to overlook the ads after frequent visits. Reducing ad-blindness increases your click-through-rate (CTR) and brings more revenues to your blog. Here’s the gist of her tips.

We, the readers, don’t go through a blog’s page inch by inch. Things get bypassed including those ads. So how do we reduce this bypassing and to increase CTR?

Many people think that to get higher CTR, they need to:

• Put up more ads.
• Make ads bigger.

This is not true. It’s more likely to cause the ads look clustered and obstructive - and thus gets filtered away.

Here are tips to get more attention to your ads:

• Put elements of high interest nearer to the ads – your readers’ may stumble upon the ads too. But don’t put too close to trick your readers to accidentally click the ads. It's is simply irritating.
• Put fewer and smaller ads. Readers may actually look at the ads because they stand out more and not many of them to cluster the page.

The real key is to experiment with ad-placement, number of units, sizes, and colors as well for a week before making any changes to see real results.

The bottom line is, clickers are readers – they’ll click only when they mean to do it after thinking about it. To let them have the chance to think about it is to allow them proper attention, both to the content and to the ads – and the best way to do this is not to clutter the page by having too many ads covering too much space.

Photo by brtsergio.

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This is a summarized and adapted version of an original post by Skellie at DailyBlogTips.com (Alexa rank: 14,599) with a length of 546 words. It’s been cut by 52% to 264 words.