Making Money With A Blog

A lot of people are blogging out there, everyday I see more blogs with some major traffic and large numbers for their page rank.

Some of these sites are getting so popular they are worth some money.

I looked into buying one site that the owner stopped paying the domain name registration on.  By the time I ran down the owner they said it was too late and they didn't want to mess with it anymore, I offered them $20 but they were not interested.

The extra traffic I figured was worth the $20 probably more.  The site had every domain name grabber after it and it was auctioned off for $4900.

Guess I should have offered $25 since it turned out to be worth a little more than I thought.

Here are a few other ways to make some money off your blog in case I don't get around to offering you $20 bucks for it.

Google Adsense

This is a free service that is really cool, some people are making over a million bucks a year from this, so it works.

The best thing about it is it's free to sign up, no investment.  So you can just take a shot and see what happens, that's what I did.

If they would have charged me $20 I doubt I would have ever signed up for it, but for free why not.  Then a couple months go by and you rack up .18 cents well that's .18 you didn't have before and it didn't cost you anything to get it.

Just so you know you have to hit $100 before they will send you a check.

Google also analyzes your page and give you ads that match your content which means a more people will click on the ads and that's more money for you.

Blog Ads

Blog Ads is another free option, where you can make some money.  The difference is that you have a little more control.  

You set your own prices, and approve your own advertisers but realistically if you just starting out and your trying to get your traffic up to the point it at least matches the number of hits from you looking at it. Then no one is really going to want to buy an ad from you so you better stick with Google Adsense.

Once you have some volume then you can start demanding things and commanding your price, and on the up sited you just rent out a space for the month your not tied down to the number of clicks like with Adsense.

Mr. Blog Ads will ask for 20% of what ever you get for their service.

Affiliate Programs

There are a ton of these you can sign up for type in your key works and affiliate in Google and see what pops up.

Some companies have sprung up who handle the affiliate programs for other companies who don't want to deal with it, this give you a little protection also since they have to deposit your affiliate money when they sign up, so you know your going to get paid when something gets sold through your site.

Commission Junction (www.cj.com) is an example of such a company, you can go there and look through hundreds of company affiliate programs.  

The down side to this option is that you almost always have to sell something to the person who clicks through before you get anything, so if their site is not converting your traffic into sales then you don't get paid.

Sell Stuff Yourself

Go print up some t-shirts, seems like everyone buys those, or you can go to CafePress.com and work through their service I think you can get coffee cups there also.

You really need something that's brandable for this to work. Acme Website probably isn't going to sell much. But who knows, sell a couple t-shirts with you logo on them and the next thing cable will want to start up a reality show about you then before you know it your outselling Orange County Choppers, and your making millions off your
cable show too.

Begging for Dollars

You can always put up the little pay pal donation button and then try and make your readers feel guilty enough to donate some money to you. Some people claim they get some sizeable donations every month.

Amazon also has a donation option, I think you can use it to buy books, I am not sure if Amazon will give you cash or not?

I am not overly thrilled with this option anyway so I probably will never check myself.