How to make money with your blog

Self-Publishing

It's a new year, which means it's time to clean out the Firefox tabs that have been hanging around too long. The first one on the list is a blog money making article from InsideCRM. The article was published in December of last year, which means it's been sitting in my tabs for a year.

Anyway, the article lays out 101 ways you can make money with your blog. Everything from the standard adsense to direct ad sales is covered.

They detail four options that I have tried, so I thought I would relate my experience with them:

Affiliate sales: The only affiliate sales I do are through Amazon. While it worked well on the one site targeted I felt Amazon was really screwing me. You don't get a ton of money, but you are constantly shoving Amazon products on folks. Now, I do understand that if you hyper target the affiliate sales for things like money making, etc. you can make some nice money. The good thing about affiliate sales is that it tends to not piss off people.

Adsense: I love it. It's a staple money maker for me on all my sites and Google does a good job showing the ads. While the money you make is dependent on the invisible laws Google puts in place, it does pay well enough to cover the bills. What I like best about Adsense is that it's reliable. The ads are always targetedand they always pay on time. What I don't like about Adsense is the secrecy. They won't tell you your cut of the ad revenue and they intriduce something called Smart Pricing when unknown variables are met.

Pay blogging: I did this for a while through PayPerPost and I still feel dirty. While I didn't think there was anything necessarily wrong with it, I did think that it was taking advantage of a huge loophole in the indexing of Google. They did a decent job of paying, but many times the support was just the pits. When Google start whacking sites in the program I dropped it and haven't done it since. Nowadays they go by a different name, but it's still the same game. The company might want the exposure, but when you get down to it they are looking for a boost in the search engines. How do I know this? The offers are based on a formula that takes in account your page rank.

Selling your blog: This by far pays the most and is the easiest. Since 1999 I've sold about ten sites total. Some with a ton of content and some with hardly any. If you use a reputable payment process that involves escrow you never have any problems. The upside is you make a ton of money right away, the downside is you lose a family member. One of the sites I sold in 2000 I started in 1995. While I received close to five figures for it there are still days I wish I had the site.

I think the bottom line with making money in blogs is setting your goals properly. You're not going to make 6 figure income, but you can make enough to cover expenses and have a little extra spending money.