One of the best-known ways to make money from your blog, if you’re specifically producing content and not trying to use it to sell anything, is AdSense. This Google program lets web sites earn revenue by allowing the search engine to place relevant text ads on their pages. Your content must be acceptable; Google provides a long list of rules which a web site must follow to be approved for AdSense. You’ll still have to promote your site on your own to get enough views and click-throughs on AdSense ads for this to make money for you.
There are also affiliate programs. Practically everybody knows about Amazon.com’s program; it was launched back in 1996, making it perhaps the oldest such program on the web. Three of our sister sites regularly run items with affiliate links to Amazon. If you’re an avid reviewer, this might be a way for you to make a little income on the side. Once again, though, you’ll have to promote your own web site.
If you’re not averse to promoting advertisers within your blog, you might want to look at Pay Per Post. The Pay Per Post business model matches advertisers with bloggers, letting advertisers sponsor specific blog entries if the entry’s content meets with their approval. The blogger then gets paid.
It’s a little more complicated than that; every Pay Per Post blogger is expected to follow a code of ethics under which they are required, among other things, to reveal when their post has been sponsored by an advertiser. The amount of money a “Postie” makes varies depending on the opportunities they choose to accept, whether their posts are accepted, and many other factors. Top posties can make $2,000 or more in a month, but the average seems to be closer to $200 or less for casual bloggers.
Associated Content offers an interesting business model. It encourages bloggers to write on any topic and submit the post to its “yield management system.” It then pays the writer an up-front fee that usually runs between $4.00 and $20.00. Contributors get another $1.50 for every thousand page views their post receives. AC puts the post on its own web site, and also distributes it directly to specific web sites in its network. AC will also put out “calls for content;” a recent check of the site revealed 83 of them for subjects ranging from celebrity gossip to health issues (such as appropriate exercises for multiple sclerosis).
There is some controversy surrounding Pay Per Post and Associated Content. Some complain that these kinds of companies reduce the quality of content online. Others say that paying bloggers for content, especially the way Pay Per Post does, may cause them to be dishonest in the opinions they express, thus causing problems with the online signal-to-noise ratio. At least one blogger has accused Associated Content of unethical business practices.
Be that as it may, a number of professionals have observed that a good writer can make more money writing their own blog for their own purposes than they can if they write for Pay Per Post or Associated Content. In the next section, I’ll talk about some of the things to keep in mind if you’re using your blog to sell.
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