You've chosen a platform for your blog, customized a theme, and started putting content up, and now you can consider the possibility of running your blog for profit. The audience is certainly there, as Trendhunter reports that the largest blogging site in the US, Blogger, has more than 46 million unique visitors every month. Monetizing your blog isn't easy, but if you follow these tips, you may start to see a real influx of income from your blog.
Advertise
Advertising is perhaps the best way to monetize your blog. Advertisements such as banner ads is the most common type of advertising on blogs, but programs such as pay-per-click and affiliate marketing are popular as well. Affiliate advertising is when an advertiser pays a blogger to promote services or products on their blog, and can be very lucrative for bloggers who can authoritatively write positive reviews on products and services. Common resources used by bloggers to find advertiser programs include Google AdSense (Google.com/adsense), Pay-Per-Post (Payperpost.com), and Amazon Associates (Affiliate-program.amazon.com).
An interesting new form of advertising on your blog comes from Consignd. Rather than running your site as an affiliate, Consignd allows you to create a personalized storefront for your site with a wide variety of products. Consignd allows you to pin items from Pinterest, which Business Insider reports for 23 percent of e-commerce sales generated from social media.
Merchandise
Creating and offering merchandise of your own to sell through your blog is another simple way to monetize your content. The easiest way to create and sell blog-related merchandise is through a service such as CafePress (Cafepress.com) or Zazzle (Zazzle.com), and running on a reliable Internet service from Verizon or another provider. Both sites make it easy to create your own T-shirts, mugs and other products with your logo or designs on them.
If you have your own products to sell, such as ebooks or custom fabrication work, things are a little more difficult. You will firstly need a payment gateway, such as PayPal, so that people can actually pay for your products. Additionally, a cart system and e-commerce service such as E-Junkie (e-junkie.com) will allow your readers to shop your products and fill a digital cart. E-Junkie can allow you to sell MP3's, fonts, software, icons, tickets to events, CDs, books, ebooks, posters, and much more. Thinking outside the box will help you to create unique merchandise to sell through your blog. If you are writing a blog about car repair, consider recording a series of basic tutorial videos to sell as a package to those just entering the DIY car repair world.
Donations
Some of the most excellent blogs are visitor-supported. Adding a donation button to your blog and asking users to donate is a common practice, and many bloggers solicit donations with phrases such as, “Like my Blog? Why not buy me a beer?” Clicking on the phrase links the visitor to the blogger's Paypal account where it is easy to make a donation. This is especially effective for personal or informative blogs, but commercial blogs should avoid soliciting donations from readers, as it can seem greedy when a blog has many alternate revenue streams.
For those writing a particularly niche blog, donations are a valid and powerful way to support your writing. In a particularly small niche, you might be one of the only content providers available, and what starts as a donation-supported blog can flourish over time into something successful and commercial.