The Best Ways to Make Money with your Blog

Blogging is a pastime that many have found to be very enjoyable. Having the ability to write about whatever subject in which a person finds interest has attracted a very large number of publishers to the online scene who would have never had a voice had blogging never become the phenomenon that it has turned out to be.

Many blog as a hobby or for recreation. Others blog out of a sense of duty or cause. Many businesses use blogs as a means to attract business as well as offer interesting and ongoing education and technical support to their clientele.

Whatever the reason for an individual or business setting up a blog, the fact that blogging is a means of effective and widespread publishing and communication holds true. Additionally, the various in-a-box blogging platforms that are commonly used today are extremely efficient at accomplishing their respective task of publishing. Many of the technical aspects of this trade or pastime are now streamlined so as to allow for more time to be directed towards the writing.

That being said, blogging can also be a great way to make money and monetizing a blog is now a streamlined process that is very easy to implement very quickly. Here are some of the ways that a blogger or webmaster can monetize their blog.

AdSense. With the establishment of Google AdSense as an advertisement publishing platform and Google AdWords as an advertisement design platform, the bringing together of targeted advertisers and publishers is an efficient and automated process. This automation is made possible through the spidering and classification of web-page content. Ads designed around specific keywords are conjugated with web pages that contain content relevant to those keywords. Adding AdSense ads to a website or blog is as simple as signing up for an AdSense account, designing the ad layout and inserting the AdSense JavaScript code into the header, footer or sidebar of a web page. Additionally, it can also be inserted into the content if that is the preference.

Traditional Advertising. If an SEO conscious blogger or webmaster owns a website that receives a large amount of organic search engine traffic and has proof of this level of traffic, that blogger can sell traditional advertising. This type of advertising may also take the form of a banner in the header, footer or sidebar, or it may be strategically planted into the content itself in the form of a text link. Many bloggers will offer a more subtle form of traditional advertising by posting a paid review of a product or service. This form of advertising is by no means limited to these types. Many bloggers offer these types of traditional advertising in addition to other, more creative types.

Affiliate Advertising. If you are a blogger, you probably have heard of affiliate programs. Some popular ones are Clickbank, Amazon and Commission Junction to name a few. In addition to these affiliate programs many large brick and mortar establishments as well as virtual ones offer affiliate programs directly as opposed to using a third party manager. Affiliates monetize their blogs by inserting affiliate text links or hop-links into their content with the intention of tempting visitors to click through. One thing that affiliates are always careful to do is protect the URL's of their hop-links. As a means to accomplish this, hop-links are generally cloaked. There are several ways to cloak affiliate links, but the simplest and most highly used method is a simple redirect. For example, if an affiliate is advertising a "product-or-service" then a sub-folder with the product or service would be set up as follows: "yousitename.com/product-or-service/index.html"

The index.html file would contain the HTML or PHP code that would effect a redirect from the link on the content page through the affiliate link to the landing page of the product or service. In the process, the link itself is protected from inspection and at the same time a cookie is deposited on the computer of the individual browsing the web as a means to track visits, sales and conversions thus ensuring that the affiliate gets credit for the sale.

This is by no means an exhausted list of ways to monetize a blog or website, but these are the most common ways.

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