Make Money Blogging

Do you want to make money blogging? If you do – you’re not alone. More and more bloggers are finding that blogging is a profitable medium. Whether it be to earn a few extra dollars a week to feed their coffee habit, or making enough money to stop them having to get a part time job to get through college, or whether they’ve got it to a point where they are able to make a full time living from their blogging – there are tens of thousands of bloggers making money from blogging.

In this page I want to share some information for beginners on making money from their blogs.

I will start by sharing my own top Money Making Methods (updated regularly) but below that point you to some great resources and teaching on how to increase your income from blogging.

What follows is a quick summary of my main income streams from blogging. Before you read it though – keep in mind that every blog is unique in how it can make money. Some of the following income streams will work on some blogs a lot better than others – the key is to experiment with as many as possible and see what works best for you.

The following income streams (from a number of blogs) have helped me to earn a six figure income each year for the last three years from blogging. I’ve ranked them from highest to lowest.

I hope you find it useful to see the mix and variety of ways that I earn a living from blogging.

1. AdSense

Despite not using it here at ProBlogger any more (here’s why) I continue to use AdSense with amazing effect on my other blogs. I have them all set to show image and text based ads and find that 250×300 pixel ads work best (usually with a blended design). I don’t have much luck with their ‘referrals’ program but their normal ads work a treat and continue to be the biggest earner for me.

2. Chitika

Chitka continues to be a great performer for me on my blogs. They work best on product related blogs although their recent announcement of their Premium ad unit is exciting as they now offer ads with a non product focus that I’m hearing great conversions on (I have one reader who is getting $28 CPM on this ad unit).Chitika offers a range of ad units that I experiment with. I find their eMiniMalls work best and that Related Product Units are also good. Their Shoplincs product isn’t performing as well as it once did for me – mainly because I’ve been promoting it less and have driven less traffic to it. Over the time I’ve been using Chitika they’ve now earned me over a quarter of a million dollars – I can’t recommend them enough!

3. Private Ad Sales/Sponsorships

Private ad sales directly to advertisers have continued to grow over the last few months and as a result they’re now my third highest income stream. I expect them to overtake both Chitika and AdSense in the coming months. This includes ad sales of the 125 x 125 ads here at ProBlogger as well as a campaign or two at Digital Photography School.

4. Amazon Associates

Amazon’s affiliate program has been one of my big movers in the last 12 months. I used to make a few odd dollars from it – however in recent times it has become a significant earner for me (as I’ve shared previously). This quarter it grew even more than previously as a result of continued growth of DPS where I recommend books, software and cameras.

5. Miscellaneous Affiliate Programs

I run a variety of affiliate programs on my blogs – most of which bring in smaller amounts of money that don’t really justify a category of their own. These include – - Digital Photography Secrets (a camera technique series), Pro Photo Secrets (a great photoshop product) , Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program (about to open the doors again), SEO Book (Aaron’s legendary resource) and the excellent Teaching Sells course (which just continues to grow in what it offers to it’s members in terms of content).

The great thing about many of these programs is that they are of such high quality that they sell themselves and I am being emailed from readers who sign up to them thanking me for the recommendation!

6. Shopzilla

As I wrote recently – Shopzilla has really impressed me with how it’s performed over the last few weeks. It’s actually doing well enough to debut in this list at #6. The ads are similar to Chitika but the click values have been higher for me to this point. They don’t offer quite as many options as Chitika does in terms of types of ads but for a new ad network there’s definitely promising signs. I’m looking forward to seeing how they continue to develop!

7. ProBlogger Job Boards

The job boards here at ProBlogger continue to grow each month in the number of advertisements that are being bought. This enabled me to invest most of the money that they’d earned a while back into getting a new back end for the boards and to redesign them. It hit me today that the boards are now bringing in around $1000 a month in revenue which is pretty nice considering that they are so low maintenance to run. They also offer a service to readers and add value to the overall blog.

The only problem that I face with the job boards is that there are so many bloggers looking for work that the demand for jobs far exceeds the supply. On the good side of things is that advertisers are reporting getting amazing quality of applications.

8. WidgetBucks

Another newcomer to this list is WidgetBucks – another ad network that ProBlogger readers will be familiar with.

WidgetBucks is similar to Chitika and Shopzilla in many respects and works well on product related sites. It does best on sites with US traffic (the reason I’ve not used it as much as I get a lot of international traffic) so if you have a product related site with a US audience it’d be a no brainer to try out WidgetBucks. I’m hoping they’ll continue to expand their offerings in terms of ad types and visitor location.

Disclaimer – WidgetBucks are an advertiser on ProBlogger

9. Miscellaneous Advertising Programs

I also play with a number of other ad networks. Some I run as tests to see if I should review them here – and some are just advertising that run in the background on some of my smaller blogs. These include ShoppingAds, Feedburner RSS ads, Vizu (a poll advertising system), Kontera and Bidvertiser. Together these don’t add up to major earnings for me – not because they are not good, but because I don’t use them heavily (a blog can only run so many ads on it).

I think that that covers most of it although it’s worth mentioning that last time I did this list I also included TextLinkAds which used to be every bloggers favorite way to make money blogging by selling text links. I’ve stopped using them due to Google cracking down on them (read more about this here) but it’s worth noting that many bloggers still use them successfully – I advise to proceed with caution. Disclaimer – TLA are an advertiser on ProBlogger

Useful Resources for Bloggers Wanting to Make Money Blogging

A lot has been written on the topic of making money online from blogs. There is a lot of wonderful information out there – but also a lot of hype and sometimes dangerous information.

Below are a number of articles that I’ve written exploring some of the different ways that bloggers make money.

To read more from Darren go to his site.  http://www.problogger.net/make-money-blogging/

Blogging for Self-Discovery

I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool—specifically as a marketing tool—for my website Alltop and my book, Reality Check. If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

1. Forget the “influentials.” You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you. This defies the common wisdom that a handful of “influentials” shape what the rest of us try and what we adopt. In the online world, these influentials include Mike “I can go a week without Twitter” Arrington, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, and to some extent me.Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.

   This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.” But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies. The most somebodies can usually do for you is a one day bump in traffic.

   One more point: if enough nobodies like what you do, the somebodies will have no choice but to write about you. In this way, the buzz of nobodies begets the attention of somebodies and not vice versa.

2. Defocus your efforts. The goal is to get to masses of people because you don’t know who can and will help you. (If you knew exactly who they were and what they can do for you, then you’d focus on them—then we’d be back to focusing on influentials—albeit less known ones.) The catch is that defocusing isn’t actionable unless there’s an inexpensive, easy, and instant answer to reach massive amounts of people, and per dollar there’s nothing better than Twitter to do this.
3. Get as many followers as you can. I recently explained what I do to get more followers. Click here to read about my methods. Ignore people who tell you that it’s the quality of your followers not the quantity. They’re trying to make friends, not use Twitter as a tool. And, truth be told, there are only two kinds of Twitter users: those that want more followers and those that lie. You can follow me here.The reason you want more followers is the law of big numbers: the more followers, the more people talking about what you do, the more you can reach the tipping point. If you think you “know” exactly who can and will help you, you are deluding yourself.

   You will face the issue of whether your Twitter name should be the company’s name or your name. I have Guy kawasaki and Alltop because you should try to get both much like preventing domain name squatting. My theory is people are more likely to follow a person than a company, so 99% of my attention goes to my Guy kawasaki account. Also, someday you may sell your company, and the company account will probably go with the acquirer. However, if you go with your name, you need to not tweet only about your company—indeed, you have the moral obligation to tweet informative posts that have nothing to do with your company. You can see what I do here.

4. Monitor what people are saying about you, your company, and your product. You can do this here with the search features of Twitter. Be sure that you bookmark your search so that you won’t have to reenter terms. Or, you use a product like Tweetdeck to create a search. For example, I monitor this search [guykawasaki OR “Guy Kawasaki” OR Alltop] to follow what people are saying about me and Alltop. Searches like [how to Alltop] where you substitute your company or product name for “Alltop” are also useful to find tweets about using your product or service. You can also use Twilert.com to receive email notification of search results much like Google Alerts. When you find such tweets, take these actions:
   

   People are pissed: help them out

   People are confused: help them out

   People who have questions: help them out

   People are happy: ask them to spread the word

   You will find that people are delighted by contact with the company and that no matter how rocky the relationship started out, they usually become fans and evangelists. By simply monitoring what people are saying about you, you’re using Twitter better than 95% of the companies out there.

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   Can I tell you a funny story? I once spoke to a group of large company social media folks. One was from United Parcel Service, and she said that her Twitter searches were inefficient because the string “UPS” is in so many words (“startups,” “meetups,” etc.) Undaunted, I searched for “UPS” in front of the group, and the first tweet that I found was a complaint about a UPS delivery! That brought a howl from the audience.

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5. Ask for help. Don’t be shy about asking people on Twitter to spread the word for you. If they like what you do, they will. If they don’t, they won’t. It’s as simple and transparent as that. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for some of us), most people don’t have the chutzpah to ask for help.Alltop would not be anything close to what it is without the Twitter community. Twitter users suggest new topics as well as sites and blogs to include on those topics. Many have gone so far as to suggest a topic and compile a collection of feeds for the topic. And then they help us market the site too. Holy kaw!
6. Make it easy to tweet on your behalf. Twitterfeed is a service where any RSS feed can automatically appear as your own tweets. Bloggers do this, for example, so that their blog posts automatically appear as their tweets.I took it to the next level by asking Mario Menti, the Twitterfeed creator, to make a special webpage where people could sign up to allow us to automatically post Alltop news as their tweets (click here if you’d visit the webpage). Approximately 177 people did so.

   I want to make sure you understand what this means: 177 people agreed to repost all Alltop news as their own tweets. This took automated tweeting to a historical new high—or low depending on who you asked.

   Then my new book, Reality Check, came out, and I made an offer of a free copy of it to anyone who signed up for the Alltop Twitterfeed. Another 280 people signed up—bringing the total to approximately 450 people.

   We counted, and these 450 people had a total of 140,000 followers. This meant that whenever we announced a new topic, the 140,000 followers of 450 people received notification. These 450 people had followers in common, so their tweets didn’t reach 140,000 different people (see next section), but this was the Mother of Retweeting.

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   Right about now you should be asking yourself, “Why would people help Guy like this?” The answer is that these Alltop evangelists see spreading the news about Alltop as a service for their followers. They believe that Alltop’s information is good and useful and will help their followers access information on the web. Thus, the primary motivation is not a $30 book, but the satisfaction of helping others. This is a very important lesson: people must believe that what you’re marketing is great for their followers, and they must trust you. Here’s a guideline for creating something great. Here’s how to build trust. Here’s a complete explanation of evangelism.

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7. Create an email list. One issue with 450 people tweeting 140,000 followers: if people followed some of the same 450 people, they got duplicate announcements. I started receiving about five complaints a day—still, the math was good: five complaints from 140,000 exposures? I can deal with complaints but, in a sense, my idea worked too well.What I could not deal with was the unintended consequences of automated tweeting. For example, Republican members of the 450 people probably didn’t appreciate the Obama.alltop announcement. I was afraid that someday a pastor (and her followers) would wonder why she tweeted about Hunting.alltop, Buddhism.alltop, and Pregnancy.alltop.

   Clearly, some of the people needed to choose which topics they tweeted and how the tweets were worded. Also, some of the 450 started to lose followers because of the frequency of Alltop updates (we often announce three to four new topics per day). I certainly didn’t want these people to lose followers because of me—if there’s anyone in the world who understands the trauma of losing followers, it’s me.

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   Can I tell you another funny story? Yes, some of the 450 people lost followers because of the Alltop tweets, but many told me that their followers found the Alltop tweets more interesting than their own tweets, so that they had more interaction with their followers because of the Alltop tweets!

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   To fix these issues, we created the Alltop news and announcements email list. Through this list, we announce every new topic, and we let the recipients decide if they want to tweet it (or email it) to others. Also, they can obviousy edit and create their own tweet or message.

   We told the 450 people using Twitterfeed about it, so that they could drop the Twitterfeed mechanism and use the email notification instead. We opened up the email list on the night before Thanksgiving and in six days approximately 600 people signed up for it. That was surprisingly high, but what’s even more interesting is that only fifty of the 450 Twitterfeed folks stopped doing it.

   I thought the majority of people would drop Twitterfeed and disappear completely or switch to the email list. You’ve heard that synergy is when 2 + 2 = 5. This is Twitter synergy where 450 – 50 = 1,000 because we signed up more people by offering an alternative. With the email list, we must have tapped people who were hesitant to entrust their feeds to us but wanted to help in some other way. Thank you God.

8. Make it easy to “post to Twitter.” One day I met with Rashmi Sinha, the CEO of Slideshare. We got to talking about how she increased her traffic, and she told me that a “Post to Twitter” link was the most effective mechanism. When people are viewing a Slideshare page like this hilarious one about getting old, they can click on the “Post to Twitter” link under the frame and a window opens with a preconfigured tweet to send to followers.According to her, this was much more effective than the various sharing and email forwarding schemes. I thought her idea was absolutely fabulous and copied it. Now there is a “Post to Twitter” button on every Alltop topic page. Approximately twenty people a day do this. On average they have 350 followers, so this provides us with another 7,000 or so impressions per day. More is less when it comes to offering people multiple ways to spread the word by clicking on rating services like Digg, Delicious, and Yahoo Buzz, pick one and be done with it. I pick Twitter because it doesn’t involve a popularity contest to get on any front page—instead, all your followers will get the tweet.
9. Offer advice deals to Twitter users. This is something that I don’t do, but I would if I ran an ecommerce company. You can Twitter to offer special deals to your followers—for example, check out what Amazon does by clicking here and what Whole Foods does by clicking here. Also, check out the stream of Twitter deals here. You’ll see offers from companies using Twitter as well as the deals that Twitter users have found (probably including company employees acting as “regular” Twitter users). How can you not love something like Twitter that is fast, free, and far-reaching for pushing out special offers? (Power tip: if you need to enable several people to tweet and to schedule your tweets, check out a service called Brightkit.)
10. Tell the complainers where to go. Some people will disagree with this use of Twitter. Don’t let this worry you because at some point everyone pisses off someone on Twitter. Therefore, letting a vocal few limit your use of Twitter is a big mistake. If they don’t like what you’re doing, tell them to stop following you: end of discussion. And rest assured that “Twitter spam” is an oxymoron because following you is completely opt-in.

This is how to use Twitter as a tool. I hope the Twitter community helps you as much as it has helped Alltop and me. With some effort, you may come to view Twitter as I do: the best new marketing twool of this century. Tweet long and prosper.

These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth. Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn”t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you”ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn”t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles.

Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I”ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won”t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link: