How and When You Can Monetize Your Blog

This question comes up a lot with people/companies that have blogs. How do you know when to monetize your blog and how do you do it? Let’s get right into it.

The first thing we need to do is to look at the different ways you can monetize your blog.

Adsense Ads

This is probably one of the most popular approaches to go after, adsense ads are google sponsored ads that you see on the right hand sides of search results or on many web pages. All you have to do is create an account with google adsense, get approved, and then copy and paste some code into your site. Adsense ads usually work on any type of site but work especially well for high trafficked sites. With adsense ads you get paid every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your page, the amount you get can vary but it’s usually a few cents let’s say .5-.50 cents (but it fluctuates widely).

Contextual Ads

These ads work much like the google adsense ads except they appear in-text. Adsense ads usually have their own little designated box/space where they go on your site, contextual ads appear within the text by hyperlinking/changing the color of a particular piece of text, this piece of text is the ad. These ads are less obtrusive and may deliver a higher conversion rate since they within the text. Again, the more traffic you get the more successful these ads can be.

Affiliate Ads

In order to show affiliate ad/products/links you need to sign up with companies such as commission junction or shareasale. What this allows you to do is show ads/products/links from other companies on your site, if someone takes some sort of action on the ads (such as purchases a product) you collect a commission fee, usually around 7-20% of the product price. My brother has a site which is an excellent example of affiliate links/products, it’s a gas scooter website and every product on the site comes from gas scooter company. My brother makes a commission for every scooter that someone purchases from his site. He doesn’t get THAT much traffic but he has had a good amount of scooter sales that get him around $30-$75 per sale. You can also include affiliate links to products that you review, such as books.

Leads and Business Opportunities

To me this is probably the most important way to monetize a blog. By consistently churning out quality content readers begin to respect and trust you as an authority in a particular topic. By being an authority in a particular topic you cosnsitently get asked to help out on projects. Take this blog for example, I don’t have ads of any kind on here yet I do get asked to help out on various projects. This is favorite way to moneitze because I actually get to contribute on various projects while building relationships. One client will far surpass the amount of money that can be made from types of advertising withing a 6month-1year period. A lot of people neglect to talk about this type of monetization and that’s a mistake.

So how do you know when to monetize?

Well this is a tough question to answer and there aren’t any rules out there either. In my opinion I would refrain from any type of advertsing if your site is brand new, you want to wait before you have some solid traffic before intoducing ads. If you start displaying ads too early then you may lose your readers. Once your blog had been around for at least 6 months-1 year and you are noticing solid traffic increases you can slowly begin inserting ads. Make sure you don’t turn your site into a giant spam site, what I mean by this is don’t try to go for as much advertising as you can be selective and be tasteful.

Perhaps you start off with some adsense ads on the right hand side of your page, then you can include a few banner ads, perhaps a contextual ad every now and then, and a product/affiliate ad where relevant (especially if you are doing reviews of product/services). But again, my favorite way to monetize a blog is thorugh clients who read the blog and want help on various projects.

I hope this gives you some insight into how you can monetize a blog and when you should monetize a blog. Do you have any other tips/ideas/advice for how/when to monetize a blog?