Now that you have chosen your domain name and hosting, you are going to want to start getting ready to monetize your blog. There are many different ways to monetize your blog and I am not going to cover them all. I will just cover the ways that will make you the most money with the least effort. Let's start making money blogging!
Google Adsense
Adsense is the easiest to set up and will make you money without having to sell anything. Adsense will pay you for impressions of their ads on your site. Basically, every time an Adsense ad loads for one of your viewers, you make a small amount. You will make more money if the ad is actually clicked and if items are actually purchased, but there isn't too much you can do about getting people to do that on your site. It is like the Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come" the more hits your site gets, the more it will happen. A lot of blogs make really good money on Adsense alone, but they are getting tons of hits (which I will teach you how to do) so <strong>don't be discouraged</strong> if your earnings sit at $0.45 for a while. To set up adsense, just go to www.google.com/adsense and fill out the required forms. Once it is all set up, you can make ads that can be placed anywhere on your page. The Wordpress plugin I use for adsense is <a rel="nofo llow" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link/4421769']);" href="http://www.linewbie.com/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-adsense-and-ypn">All-In-One Adsense and YPN.</a> I tell it what ad sizes I want and based on that, it randomly inserts adsense throughout my page. It is totally customizable and has worked great so far.
ClickBank
ClickBank is where a lot of people are making tons of money right now. It allows you to create an account, find products related to your niche and promote them. Some of the ads pay as much as 75% commission per sale. For beginners, all you have to do is find a product you like and click promote. Clickbank will create a customized link with your affiliate id in it so it can track when someone buys a product from your link. A lot of products have their own affiliate section, where you can log in and find premade banner ads, twitter responses, and emails to help you sell the product. You can choose to use those or write your own, either way, <strong>you'll be making a lot of money!</strong>
Commission Junction
Commission Junction works pretty much the same way Clickbank does, it just offers different items. Clickbank has more digital items and Commission Junction has more tangible items. Commission Junction has a lot of recognizable brand names like GoDaddy, Carbonite, 1-800-Contacts, but generally offers lower commission percentages. It can even out though, because the brand names have more recognition and are perceived as more trustworthy because of their recognition. So someone may be more likely to click your ad. So I like to mix it up and promote from both sites.
Amazon
While it is a little, different, it is worth mentioning that amazon also pays commission for referring people who buy products. They even allow a way to set up a store where you own the website, but when someone clicks buy, it takes them to Amazon to handle the shipping and credit cards and everything. You make 4%-15% of the sale price, using a performance based sliding scale. The more you sell, the bigger your commission. This can be useful if there is a particular item that is relevant to your blog. For example if you wrote a running blog, you could create an ad for each individual item. The reader could then go to Amazon and purchase that item and you would get credit for the sale. This method is not as commonly used in blogging, it is more often used when creating niche stores (which I will explain in another post.)
No Leakage
Michael Dunlop at The Income Diary has a "No Leakage Rule." This rule means that any link leaving your site should make you money. Never link to a product unless you make commission from it. While getting your site linked on other blogs can get you traffic, a lot of times they are direct competitors so be careful.
Summary
Now you have a few good ideas for starting to make money from your blog. You don't have to choose only one of these and I would recommend you do not limit yourself like that. I would recommend you get a few good products from each and start promoting. Wait until you have about 100 clicks on each product before you decide it doesn't work and move on to another. Eventually, when your blog becomes popular and is consistently getting thousands of hits a day, advertisers will want to pay you directly for your ad space. But for now, just focus on creating new, valuable content that will keep users coming back.
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