Because the blogosphere keep growing at a rapid rate, bloggers can't stand to explore the potential of their blog to make money. There is really nothing wrong to use a blog to generate income. More and more people are seeing this great opportunities and setting up their own blog to get into the blogosphere for profit.
It is excited when you are able to turn a much loved pastime into cash. Bloggers who are enjoying sharing their favourite topic can double their satisfaction when they know how they can use their blog to earn money.
Below are some common ways for blogs to generate online revenue:
1. Advertising
All online business owners and e-entrepreneurs need promotion and advertising. They must reach their marketing messages to their target prospect first before they can effectively sell their product or service in the market. For a blog that gained high volume of traffic, selling ad spaces directly to these online companies and e-entrepreneurs will be a great source of income. The types of ads you can offer for sale on your blog are banner ad and text links.
Even a low traffic blog can take advantage of advertising. There are well known program like Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network that let you display their contextual ads and earn ad revenue for each ad click.
There are also networks that help bloggers to find advertisers. Advertising networks like AdBrite and Text Link Ads provide a marketplace where bloggers can add their blog or site with details on their advertising offers into the marketplace. The interested advertisers will find the blogs and pay for displaying a text link ad or a contextual ad on the blogs.
2. Affiliate Programs
Blog is also ideal for promoting affiliate products or services. You can place affiliate banner ads or text links on your blog sidebars to market your affiliate programs. While this isn't a very effective way of generating affiliate commission but you can possibly get one or few sales each month with this easy technique if you get consistent blog traffic.
Another way you can market your affiliate programs is by publishing product review or recommendation posts on your blog. Review posts work very well in generating affiliate sales when you have built your image as a reliable and well liked blogger with many loyal readers.
3. Sponsored Posts
After trying to sell ads and promote affiliate programs on your blog, if you still not satisfying with the amount of money you made, you can think about posting sponsored or review posts.
There are not strict requirements to get started with sponsored posts. You don't have to get much traffic either. All you need is a blog that is older than 3 months and indexed by Google to participate into the sponsored post networks such as Payperpost and Sponsored Review. In these networks you will find advertisers willing to pay you at least $5 for writing and publishing a blog post about their product, service or website.
There are people posting sponsored posts regularly on their blog and making over $1,000 per month. However, the drawbacks of posting sponsored post regularly are that you will lose lot of traffic because readers don't like sponsored post and Google will soon find out and penalized your blog for posting too many sponsored posts.
Thus, if your goal is to build up your blog and establish a reputation, definitely you shouldn't write sponsor posts on a regular basis. But publishing a few sponsored posts each month would hurt your blog and will earn you extra money.