Making money by blogging is the goal of many bloggers. There are many people out there in the blogosphere that make quite a substantial amount of income doing nothing more than blogging. A couple notables are John Chow, Shoemoney, and Problogger. There are many more out there, but these are the ones that come to mind. These are guys (or groups) that make a substantial amount of money every month with their blogs. There are no ’secrets’ to blogging, but there are techniques that can help you maximize your blogs income. Before you start, you need to decide if producing income from your blog is your intention. If you want, and expect, to make income with your blog, it takes work. Blogs are not some magic money tree that you just throw on a host and the money starts rolling in. Think of them more like a garden, that needs tended regularly and requires attention if you expect output. Some people have no intention or are only mildly interested in making money with their blog. If that is your intention, the time, effort and sometimes aggrivation that goes into setting up the various processes to get your blog rolling in the right direction might not be worth it to you. But if you have already decided that blogging is how you want to make some income, or you just want to get your already established website making a little extra cheese for you, the following information will be helpful to you.

 So lets get started!…

1. Contextual Advertising - What a shock! Yes, contextual advertising, such as GoogleAdsense is by far the most popular way to monetize a blog or website. The success of GoogleAdsense with niche sites and blogs has made contextual advertising a first priority when trying to create income with a blog. While GoogleAdsense is very effective on the majority of sites, it is by no means the only game in town, and quite honestly there are some contextual programs that may indeed work better for you. Some of the other contextual programs you may want to check out are; Clicksor, Yahoo Publisher Network, and Ad Sonar. Because contextual adveritising is so popular, both with advertisers and publishers, don’t be suprised as more of these networks pop-up that may be even better for your particular site, it never hurts to test new CA sites. However, it is my suggestion that you really only want to use 1 contextual network. You can get away with 2 depending on the ad format, but if you flood your site with contextual ads, hoping to make piles of money, you’ll end up with a billboard that has no room for any content (and content is what brings ‘em in) and a page that will be too busy and confusing for most people to put any time or effort into reading. Less is more.

2. Targeted Advertising - This is probably the most coveted type of adveritsing for active blogs. Targeted adveritising is when specific advertisers pay to advertise on your blog, because of your content. For instance, say you have a blog about camping. With a targeted advertising in place, and enough traffic to make it worth the advertiser’s money, companies that are associated with camping, camping gear, camping sites..etc will pay to advertise on your site, because well, your traffic is their demographic. Many people think that targeted advertising is wishful thinking, those are usually people that don’t have content that is interesting enough to get the traffic, or high enough traffic numbers to interest a potential advertiser. When you get a regular user base and consistently have good traffic, plus have content that is going a specific direct, targeted advertising is very much a possibility. However, be advised that targeted adveritsing requires more work on your part. With contextual advertising, the advertisers come to you via the contextual ad network. With targeted advertising, YOU are doing all the work the ad network would do. You have to make it obvious to potential advertisers why they would benefit from paying you to put their ad on your site. To get started, you’ll probably need:

* Popular and leading content and a nice professional design
* Links on your site that say something like ‘Advertise on this Blog’ to let people know that you are available for ads
* Create a ‘media kit’. Basically make a page that displays stats on your site, demographics of users, examples of ad     formats that are available, etc.
*  Be creative. You’re making a sale, you may need to lower your price to get your advertisers to meet their goals. It’s your site, you can price or adjust how you want.
     Once your blog or site is set up, and you have info available for prospective advertisers, approach other site owners and businesses. Your content will obviously dictate who will be most likely to be interested in advertising on your site. For instance if your blog is local in nature, your ad sales may not even come from the internet, but local mom and pop businesses.

3. Display Advertising - Like I said, contextual ads may not be the road you want to take if you have a niche site. That doesnt mean that you can’t generate some advertising revenue with your site with display ads. When you use display ads, you dont necessarily need the reader to click on anything. Just the fact that they are your traffic and have viewed the ad will get you paid. This type of advertising works well with sites that have content that is off the beaten path, or may not be something that is very friendly to contextual ads.

4. Text Link Ads  - Text link ads are good for publishers for a couple of reasons. They don’t really clutter up your page. No big flashing banners, no recycling content, just nice clean little links. They are easy to implement, and require virtually no upkeep. On the downside, you need to have substantial traffic for text link ads to be worth your while for income.

5. Selling your content  - If you have content that is popular, and strong, its may be a good idea to package up your content and sell it. The quickest way is through .pdf format with something like adobe acrobat. However, with the availability today of things like DVD and even books, its entirely within the grasp of most people to use more tangible publishing paths to resell their information. Many people have content that is good, and with just a little bit of editing and some creative writing, they can easily create a very sellable paperback book that makes an income stream. Video format is also an excellent way to get your content out and with the ease of creating videos as well as the 1000’s of video hosting sites, a little ‘teaser’ video with your information that points back to your website will boost traffic and sales at the same time.

6. Affiliate Links - Affiliate links are one of the oldest promotion tools on the net, and they are just as viable now as when they first hit the scene. If you have a good solid userbase and you know the demographics that go with your content, chances are there are other sites out there that also want to tap that well of consumers. Reviewing content or products from like minded sites, and providing an affiliate link back to the originating site can not only generate income on the back end through sales, but can also drive traffic into your site. The catch here is obviously the demographic. If your site is about flyfishing, most likely taking up space on your site with links about tomato growing will probably not be benficial to you. But if you partner up with a site that sells fishing supplies, and you do a few honest reviews, not only will this increase income from sales at the partner site (usually a small percentage) but it will also most likely get you free stuff to review. Again, a decent amount of traffic is required for this to be advantageous to you.

7. Donations - Donations aren’t quite as popular as they used to be for income. Years ago, donations were a pretty standard way for site owners to generate a little income to atleast pay for operating costs of their site. However lately, donations have kind of dropped off because of use of the above income generators. People seem to view donations as being greedy and it turns them off. So if you’re a little guy getting started, donations could very well help you get rolling. But once you’re making substantial income, it may hurt more than it helps, so use sparringly.

8. Selling Products - Besides information, you can sell real products. T-shirts, hats, bumper stickers. One of the better known sites online for promotional products like these is Cafepress. Cafepress will allow you to upload your design and put it on everything from ballcaps to coffee mugs and at no cost to you. There is no inventory to keep and they only charge a marginal fee for setup. If you have a catchy logo or an eye for design, this is a great thing, because really…who doesnt like  a cool t-shirt?

9. Consulting - If you are especially versed in your site’s content, consulting could be the way to go for a little extra green. It isn’t hard to set up a page and let people know that you are the man (or woman) to come to for consultation and charge an hourly fee for it.

10. Sell your blog - This is an extreme way to make income, but definately viable. If you arent really attatched to your blog, and its got the traffic, there are more than a few people that will buy it off you sort of like any other turn key business. How much you make annually will most likely dictate your price. Sites usually go for 10-25 times the monthly revenue of the site. If this sounds good to you, the best place to put the information out there is ebay or sitepoint marketplace.

     Basically, there are quite a few ways that making income can be done, it just takes a little creativity. But like has been stated before it will take work on your part, nothing is for free and the income opportunities don’t come looking for you.

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