More ways to make money from your blog

Once you have established your blog and have at least a few readers a day then you can start to put some advertising on your blog. Yes you can get paid for putting those ads there yourself. There are at least 3 different types of advertising that you can get paid for on your blog. One is affiliate advertising, that type is when you put a banner ad or a clickable link that takes your reader to another site in order for that site to sell your reader something. You only get paid when the person that clicks through your ad actually buys something. You might get anything from a percent of the sale (often as low as 5 cents, to a high of several 100 dollars), so it varies and remember - no sale - no pay. I have a banner ad on this page to the right and it is something that I feel fits in with this blog and also with my personal feelings about the company. I am a member of shareasale.com and they are the ones I get my affiliate advertising offers from. It costs nothing to join any of the affiliate marketing groups and they always want new members. I do believe that affiliate banners work best on regular websites with related content simply because I would rather get paid to write my blog post content instead of just advertising.

Now a word of caution - not all affiliate advertising companies are the same. Some do and can cheat you. About 3 years ago I had someone buy something using one of my affiliate links to see if they really tracked the sale. I was suspicious of the company to begin with since my tracking software showed that they had a large amount of click thrus. Well she placed the sale and got her item about 5 weeks later (really slow shipping) and I never got a commission on the sale nor did she get a special discount that my link offer. Needless to say I removed all ads to that company from my site and went one step further and found other sites that had advertisements to that company and emailed all the webmasters. Those advertisements soon disappeared too. The company is still in business and it tackoutlet.com so you know. That brings us to ......

Getting paid to write a blog post. That to me is were the real money is at. I have in the past written blog posts about my hobbies. Those posts were about 4-5 paragraphs long and something I was passionate about. Add to that element 3 links to the same site selling dog coats or dog health insurance and walla! you have an advertiser that paid me $15.00 a post. I would rather get paid just to write and add a few links to that post than wait for someone to just click on a link hoping they will buy something or not so I could get paid. If you are interested in getting paid to blog about something you love writing about I have a sign-up link on the right side of this page.

The third way is to have a blog that is so popular that advertisers come to you with high priced ads and wanting you to write about them even if it is to slam them. One good example is Perez Hilton's blog. His blog started out as a fun thing to do and now he is a millionaire. He just wrote about what he found funny and his fascination with celebrities. Companies came to him to advertise on his blog.

So go out in the blog sphere, have fun and make some money on the side.