The REAL Way To Make Money Blogging
In the beginning…
Blogging really came to prominence in the late 1990s, primarily as a way for individuals to express their personal feelings, in a journal format, with the few other people on the web at the time . Similar to today, most of these blogs were read only by the writer’s family and friends. However, some of these blogs slowly started doing what is known today as “going viral”. As with anything on the Internet, a handful of these writers began to ask if there were any ways to monetize their blogs.
Enter Google AdSense. If you’re not familiar with AdSense, it’s a Google product where you opt in to have small advertisements that are supposedly unintrusive placed wherever you choose on your website or blog. Soon after, anyone who wanted to monetize their blogs was plastering Adsense ads all over their blogs.
Some bloggers actually made a bit of dough from this. Most, though, just ended up with spammy looking blogs and didn’t have a whole lot else that they gained from it.
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Netizens are much more savvy now than they were just a few years ago. If you can get 2% of your dedicated readers to click through, you are way ahead of the game.
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You have no input over what ads are shown to your readers. Do you really want to take a chance on having inappropriate ads displayed on your portfolio website?
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Ads make a blog look untrustworthy. They turn off your readers and make them question your intentions.
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Every time one of your hard won subscribers does click on an ad, they are being taken away from your blog. Is this what you really want?
There are much better ways to make money with your blog.
There is the method that seems to be very popular at the moment, which involves creating high quality information products such as e-books, webinars, and web courses. It seems like everyone in the blogosphere is doing it at the moment, and newcomers are seen a little bit as “me-tooers”. It requires a large time commitment, and there is quite a learning curve, but the payoff can be extraordinary.
Another method of making money with a blog is to put together a subscription site. This is amazing in that readers are actually paying YOU to log on to your site every month. Again, though, there is a large investment of time required, and your readers are going to expect an extremely high value level from you.
In addition, there are times where you can make money with their blogs for a third party website. In these types of schemes, you are usually a so-called company blogger, blogging on behalf of a ncompany on the topics that they give you.
All of these have their good points and their drawbacks. However, they are all infinitely more effective than plastering ads all over your precious blog. If you really want to become an expert in how to make money with a blog, you should investigate each of these opportunities carefully.