Ricky Says

I often have friends, coworkers, and even business clients ask me how I make money online with my blog, and here are a few tips I've learned over the last couple of years.

I've actually learned more from my failures than anything else, but if you follow these tips you can avoid the mistakes I made early on, and can turn your blog into a money making machine.

Get Traffic

This is easier said then done, but is one of the most important aspects of monetizing your blog. Your chances of making money from your site increase as the number of visitors consistently increases (assuming you follow the other tips listed below).

Long term, steady, growing traffic comes from your articles finding their way higher up the search engine results, which happens when:

1. Your articles contain useful content that gets them listed high up on the search engines results.

2. Your articles are linked to from other sites that are high up on the search engine's results.

Bottom line, if your site isn't getting much traffic, then it won't make you much money either. Some blogs just weren't cut out for making money, and if your blog isn't getting a lot of traffic then don't bother trying to monetize it.

Get Bookmarked

The majority of my site traffic comes from Google search results, and from social networking sites that link to my articles (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Diigo, etc, etc)

Knowing that most of your long term traffic will come from search engine results and social bookmarking sites, why not jumpstart the process by submitting your own articles to these sites?

You can make it easier for yourself and your readers to bookmark your articles by using an AddThis script on each page. You can sign up for a free AddThis account at www.addthis.com and they'll give you the html for the AddThis script (you'll see it in the sidebar, and when you move your mouse over it, you'll see several sites where you can bookmark this article).

Search results from Yahoo! Answers pages are often near the top of Google search results, so spend some time answering questions on Yahoo! Answers (and include a link to your article in the Resourcs section of each answer you provide).

If your answer is rated as the best answer by other users, then that article pushes it's way up even higher on the Google search results, which drives even more traffic to your article because it's linked in the resources section (click the image below to see an example from a recent answer that won a Best Answer award).

Just be sure to follow the rules. Yahoo! Answers will ban you if you post a link directly in your answer, or if your answer sounds like a sales pitch and not an answer.

Rule of thumb: dump your sales pitch and just try to help people

In fact, that's the next main point about making money online:

Be Helpful (or at least entertaining)

Seriously. I burned through over 10 sites in 2007 and 2008 that were way to "salesy" and focused more on making money than on helping people.

If your goals are just to make money from your blog, then your readers will smell it a mile away and will run just as far.

Your main goal should be to provide value to the readers. You know they have choices, and so give them a reason to choose your blog over others.

Give them helpful advice, useful information, thought provoking dialogue, or entertaining stories. Whatever your audience is, focus on their needs and not your desires to make money.

One of my former bosses in a restaurant job back in college once told me: "Don't focus on tips. Focus on service, and the tips will follow." That was great advice that bumped my tips consistently up or over 20% at a time when 15% was fairly standard.

The same attitude will help you make money on your blog, by focusing on meeting the needs of your readers, instead of the money you'll make from them.

Don't Advertise (not right away)

Yes, I know - you can't make money if you don't advertise, but don't advertise right from the start. People see that and know what you're up to.

Advertising right away is THE most common MISTAKE people make.

Go for the value first - that's what will keep bringing people back. Wait for traffic to get up over a hundred a day before you introduce ads (still very small in the scheme of things, but enough to know you're on the right track).

Read that last paragraph again.

No, really. It took me almost 2 years to be willing to accept that truth, but it's solid truth, and if you don't aren't willing to wait before pulling the trigger on ads, then I'll give your site about a 5% chance of ever making more than a few hundred bucks a year (chump change when you consider what it could be bringin in).

Be Patient

You might write an article that doesn't get much attention for a few months, and then suddenly starts getting a few hundred hits a day.

Why? Because someone stumbled across your article while doing a google search, and decided to bookmark it on their favorite social networking site like Digg, Facebook, or StumbleUpon.

That's how it works, really. Don't waste your money on Google Adwords to try and drive traffic to your site. You'll end up spending about as much as you make, or more, and when you stop paying "the Goog" then your traffic will fall away almost immediately.

Don't use Sidebar Ads

How many sites do you visit that have flashy ads in the sidebar margins? Sucks, doesn't it? In fact, I bet you don't even look at them anymore do you?

I don't, and neither will visitors to your site. I've tested numerous combinations of image (banner) ads, text ads, and combinations of banner/text ads on this site with over 3000 hits a day, and have seen only a few measly clicks out of them.

These aren't the droids you're looking for!

Don't bother with sidebar ads. They just plain don't work, at least not nearly as effectively as inline text links or mid-article ads.

Use Inline Text Links or Mid-Article Ads

Once your site traffic gets up to over a hundred visitors a day (and I'd even wait until you get over 200 because then you know your money tree is starting to sprout), it's time to introduce ads.

First things first though. Here's the goal: to make it look like your site isn't running ads.

If one of your friends visits your site and says "I didn't see any ads", tell them "THANK YOU", because that's what you want it to look like.

How do you get that look? Use inline text links to start with

Text links are very non-intrusive and subtle. They're links to products or services that relate to the article you're writing about, that give you money when people buy something after clicking the link.

Here's what I mean.

Let's say you write an article about cycling, and mention a new riding shoe that's made with an ultra-lite carbon sole and sells for $129 from Performance Bike Shop. Better yet, let's say the shoe is on sale for $89.99.

Let's also say you're an affiliate for Performance Bike Shop through the Commission Junction program, and their commission payout is 20% per sale.

When you mention the new shoe, you include a link to the shoe that takes readers to the order page on Performance Bike Shop's website, and that link has a special code that identifies your site as the referring site.

Visitor clicks your link, buys the shoe, and you get $18 credited to your account with Commission Junction (CJ). Easy, right? All you had to do was write about something you know about or have experience with, and embed links in your article to a related affiliate product or service.

CJ gives you the html for the link, so all you have to do is wrap the keyword in your article with the html text link using an anchor tag.

Don't have an account yet with CJ? Click here to get your free CJ account and start making money with affiliate sales. It's like having a money tree in your back yard that keeps growing money even when you're on vacation.

Don't have articles that relate to products or services?

You can still monetize your blog using Google Adsense, which are ads that relate to the content in your articles or that are targetted to the kinds of people who typically read the things your article discusses.

Google is really smart when it comes to understanding what people like and don't like. They have that formula dialed in, trust me!

Once you sign up with Google Adsense, they'll give you an html script that you'll embed in each of your web pages. When your page loads, the script will read through the text of your page, and will display targetted ads in either text link or image formats.

When visitors click on those ads, you make a small amount of money per click. The amount is determined by publishing companies who have agreed to pay Google a certain amount each time someone clicks one of their ads (also known as Google Adwords)

I've found that the best place to display Google ads are in the top right corner of each article. Take a look at the top of this article and you'll see where I'm placing a Google Adsense block (probably text links, but you might see a banner image ad as well).

I have another Google ad block down below this article, just above the comments that makes only a fraction of what the top ad block makes. It's not as visible to readers, and doesn't get as many clicks.

Between these two Google ad blocks, I make about $20 a day from clicks, and that continues to grow a little each month (they were only averaging $5 a day about a year ago).

How much money will you make?

Now, let's say your cycling article gets bookmarked by a few people tomorrow, and you get a few hundred visitors reading about the new shoe, and let's say you get 50 clicks on that text link.

Chances are good that a few of those people will actually buy the shoe, which means another 18 bucks in your CJ account for each person who bought a pair of those shoes (which CJ pays directly to your checking account every month). You don't get paid for the clicks themselves. You only get paid when they buy something from the site that your link directed them to.

If you're getting the idea, you're probably already doing the math and realizing that the more articles you write and the more traffic you get to those articles, the more money you'll make.

It might start out with only $100 or $200 a month, initially. But as traffic builds to those articles, and as you write more and more articles, the chances of making a lot more money grow considerably.

Don't expect to make thousands overnight.

I was only making about $100 a month on this site about 2 years ago, and am now making about $2500 a month. That's a lot more than I'd make working part-time at Starbucks, but it isn't enough to quit my day job just yet.

But it keeps growing, and I hope to be making twice that by the end of 2009.

It started out very slow, and I just kept writing articles that I thought would be helpful for my readers. They bookmarked those articles on sites like Digg, and Technorati (and so did I), and that bumped traffic up considerably.

It started with one or two articles getting a few hundred visits a day, and then another one would get noticed and traffic would climb another notch higher. Then another, and another, and now I have articles that are literally getting between 500 to 1000 visitors every single day (and driving over 200 clicks a day).

I'm not paying a single penny for advertising. It's 99% profit (I'd say 100%, but I do have to pay $6.95 a month for the Hostmonster account that I run the site on). There, did you see how I used a text link just then?

And yes, if you decide to start a blog and are looking for a good web hosting service, please click that link to Hostmonster and sign up for a year of incredibly affordable web hosting.

I actually run over 15 domains on a single Hostmonster account, and pay $6.95 a month TOTAL for all of those sites. Hostmonster lets you add additional domains to the same account for free, and they give you your first domain free for life (well, for as long as your hosting with them).

Top Money-Making Programs for your Blog

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of advertising and affiliate companies that you could sign up for to help monetize your blog, but here are the ones that are working for me, in descending order of their monetizing awesomeness:

Commission Junction: This is my biggest money maker. I just cashed a check for $1,900 this month from CJ for last month's affiliate sales, and the majority of my affiliate links are CJ links.

All the major companies use CJ, including Adobe, Nike, Blockbuster, AT&T, Verizon, Best Buy, and thousands of others.

Google Adsense: As I mentioned above, this revenue source is consistently growing. It brought in $389 last month and will bring in about $500 this month.

With Adsense, I don't have to worry about writing something that relates to an affiliate product or service. I just write whatever I think will be helpful for my readers, and I let Google figure out which ads to display.

Regnow: This is strictly a software affiliate company, where software authors agree to pay affiliate like me a certain percentage of each sale I drive their way (similar to CJ's model, but only for software programs).

I also have a couple software programs I wrote about 10 years ago that continue to bring in a few hundred dollars a month, and I market them using Regnow, and pay other affiliates a percentage of sales they drive my way. They handle all my credit card orders as well, and I pay them a small commission for each credit card order

Between Regnow affiliate sales and regular software sales, I usually make a consistent $300 - $400 a month from Regnow.

Kontera: Do you see the occasional text link that has a double-underline? Notice how when you hover your mouse over that link, it pops up a small advertisement window?

That's all handled by a Kontera html script that I drop into each page. It works much like Google Adsense in that it read the content on each page, but it also underlines keywords that match ads in it's system (again, that publishers have agreed to pay money for clicks on those ads).

I don't make as much with Kontera as I think I should - only about $100 a month and growing. But it's an easy money source and I'm not complaining about an extra hundred bucks a month just for dropping an html script onto each page :-)

I recently signed up with a similar service called LinkWorth that claims to have a higher return on clicks. I just set it up today, so I'll post back in a while with comparison info, but it sounds more promising.

Amazon: Some of the products I advertise (erm, write about) on my site can't be found on CJ or Regnow, but almost everything can be found on Amazon.

Amazon pays less commission, starting at 4% per sale and climbing to 6% after a certain number of sales each month, but they also credit you with commissions on anything else that visitor buys that day.

I only make a few bucks a month on Amazon sales, but mainly because I only use Amazon links on a few articles where CJ links weren't available. If CJ links are available, I'll always use them instead because they bring in much higher commissions - up to 40% in some cases.

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Wrapping things up, if you're thinking about retiring early with the money you'll make on your new blog, then I hope this article was a reality check for you. It's very unlikely that you'll strike it rich overnight, despite what you might have read online about people making thousands from their blog.

Focus on providing value to your readers instead, and driving traffic to your site before you start thinking about monetizing your site.

Once you have a site with traffic, then start working in your CJ links and Adsense ads, and you should start to see that money tree begin to grow.

What's working or not working for your blog?

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