How to make money blogging – Monetize Your Blog (Part 3)

You have chosen your niche market and you understand who your audience will be and what they are looking for. You’ve chosen a great domain name and created an awesome looking blog. Wow. That was alot of work, wasn’t it? Well, we are just getting started! Now, for the meat of your blog.

Write Your Anchor Content

Now that you have your blog up and running, the first thing you will want to do is write as many posts as you can possible manage. Look around at other blogs like yours and see what the most popular posts are. To find these , there is often a widget on the side that will say “Popular Posts”. Now, please DO NOT copy their ideas or titles, but get an idea of what your market wants to read about. Then you will want to write a minimum of 2-3 anchor articles. These will be your most popular articles (hopefully). Put some effort into these articles and give away some of your most valuable information. These will be the articles that draw people to your blog.

Adsense

Some people don’t like Adsense for one reason or another, so they choose to monetize in other ways. However, there is a great deal of revenue to be made if you do it right.  If you already have an Adsense account, you can simply log in and get your code and insert it into your blog. If you don’t have an account, it’s easy to apply. Simply go to https://www.google.com/adsense and follow the yellow brick road. It takes about a week to get approved. Be sure to read their terms and conditions, and know up front that Google will ban you from their program if you or your friends click your ads even a little too much. NEVER, ever, ( click your own ads, and if they notice the same people (friends, well meaning relatives) are consistently clicking your ads, you will be sliced irreparably from the program. No mercy. So beware.

There is an art to placing these ads on your site. Websites like Homeschool.com make over $30,000 per month on just Adsense. (reliable heresay) If you want to learn more about it, I would recommend finding an ebook on Clickbank or there are several good books on Amazon, too. The reason I recommend an ebook is because it’s difficult to find a published book on Amazon that isn’t outdated by the time it makes it to press. Google changes it’s terms rapidly, so the newer the information the better. I recommend Clickbank because there are so many scammers out there and Clickbank is reliable to weed out the garbage and will give you a full refund troublefree is you find it’s not what you thought it was. Information is power.

Affiliate Programs

The other main way you will make money on your blog is to sign up for some affiliate programs. Linkshare and Commission Junction are two of the top networks you will want to apply to. There are many others and you can read more about this in our post: The Top 10 Affiliate Networks.

Clickbank

If the internet is the information super highway, then Clickbank is the #1 truckstop. Like I mentioned above, Clickbank has a level of integrity to maintain so they are meticulous about not accepting junk. It’s also a tremendous source of useful information about almost any subject you could imagine. It’s easy to use and navigate. You can sign up for free to sell any product. If you want to sell your own product, it costs a one time $50 registration fee. But I don’t think you are quite there yet. Once you have your Clickbank ID, you will find creating links for any of their products very easy.

There are other ways to make money on your blog, but you will want to get a little more established first. Also, you don’t want to put too many ads on your site, or many potential readers will click away in a nano-second.

So now you are up and running, keep posting quality content 2-5 times per week and you will find that within 6 months you are doing better than you ever thought you could. There are a number of ways to tweak your blog, and of course, generating traffic will be your next hurdle.

Marketing Your Blog

We are only going to briefly touch on this because it’s an entire series of posts all by itself. We used to have a category called “Marketing” but decided it deviated too far from our intended focus. There are many ways to market your blog, but here are our top seven:

1. Comment on other blogs (like ours) similar to yours and leave a back link
2. Guest post on popular blogs (like ours! just email us with your post)
3. Start a Facebook Fan page
4. Start a Twitter profile and add others like yourself
5. Register and use Delicious, Stumble on, Digg,  Reddit,  Technorati, and others like it. Download Alexa’s toolbar. You’ll know at a glance the best sites.
6. Start a newsletter-sign up with AWeber or Constant Contact.(60 day free trial)
7. Post really interesting stuff, top 10 lists are HOT

Well, that is it for our series, but we have much more free tools and tips on this blog to help you succeed.  What kind of advice can you offer our readers that will help them get started? Thanks!

More From HomeschoolEntrepreneur

• 3 Ways To Test Your Business Idea
• How To Make Money Blogging – Choose Your Niche (Part 1)
• How To Make Money Blogging- Choosing Your Platform (Part 2)

Ask HomeschoolEntrepreneur To Recommend Your Posts