How to Make Money from your Website/Blog?

Do you have a website or blog that you wish was making you money? Maybe you don’t have a website yet, but you have seen thousands of “bloggers” making money from websites. Wouldn’t it be nice to supplement your full-time income or even replace it with revenue generated from your own website?

Although this idea may seem far-fetched, you may be surprised to learn how many people make a respectable living simply from websites about topics that interest them. How to Get Your Blog to Pay Your Bills is an excellent example of how to implement this fun and profitable strategy.

Traffic, Lots of it

The most important part of any website monetization strategy is traffic. Without traffic, your website could have the best content in the world that nobody knows about. Most website owners spend more time figuring out new ways to generate traffic than any other activity related to the site.

If you are not familiar with website traffic, it simply refers to the number of unique visitors a website receives. Typically, this is determined on a monthly basis although many tools allow website owners to view daily statistics. This is helpful when you post new content and want to monitor how many people view your recent postings.

Once you have created a website, how do you actually generate traffic to your website?

Although there are numerous effective methods, the most popular traffic generation methods include:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO refers to optimizing your website for major search engines such as Google. A large percentage of website traffic (sometimes as much as 75%) will come from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other popular search engines.

To successfully earn revenue from your website, you need to tailor your website to search engines. This allows readers to find your content amidst thousands or even millions of other websites.

Proper SEO is a tricky and dynamic component. Many websites could care less about their readers; instead focusing on search engine optimization only. Google and other search providers periodically change their search algorithms to penalize these websites and award those websites providing genuine information to Internet users.

Basic SEO best practices include a website that is easily navigable, content that is fresh and valuable, and a healthy community of readers who actively participate in group discussions on your website.

Social Media

The popularity of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter has made an active social media presence a necessity for driving new traffic to your website. Not only should your website have easily accessible links that allow readers to “share” content via Facebook, but your website should also have an active Facebook page that is appealing to readers and promotes engagement from other social media users.

Facebook marketing has taken off in the last couple of years and represents an entirely new angle that can often reach readers and potential customers that are difficult to find using conventional marketing techniques and SEO best practices alone.

YouTube

Many successful websites have also realized the power of marketing on the popular video sharing website YouTube. As a website owner, you can create interesting and helpful videos that potential readers can watch and share with others. The goal is to entice these readers to visit your website based on the content you have shared via YouTube.

Making Money from All This Traffic

Once you have successfully started driving traffic to your website, you can actually begin to make money. Advertising is by far the best way to generate revenue from your website. Some advertising campaigns pay you just for the number of visitors coming to your site while others require that the visitor perform some action (such as make a purchase or click on a link) for you to get paid.

Google AdSense

As the biggest name in search engines, Google is a great place to start earning money from your website. The AdSense campaign is free to join and places advertisements on your website based on the type of content you provide.

For instance, if you own a website about traveling to Europe, Google AdSense will automatically place ads related to traveling. When users click on these links, you are paid. This is known as a pay-per-click or PPC campaign. Although the amount you get paid for each click may only be a few cents, if you have a large amount of traffic coming to your website, these clicks quickly add up to a respectable paycheck.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you advertise specific products on your website and receive a commission each time they sell. This model works well for informational products such as e-books as well as physical products from major retailers.

When you’re first starting out, there are a variety of sites that allow you to offer affiliate products without directly contacting the company selling the products. As your website grows in popularity and you become more experienced, you may decide to reach out to major retailers directly for affiliate opportunities.

The key to effective affiliate marketing is to make sure any affiliate opportunities you offer on your site are related in some way to the content you are providing your readers. Using the travel example again, affiliate offers that let people save money on airline tickets, for instance, could result in a substantial passive income stream from affiliate marketing.

Selling Your Own Informational Products

You may realize that you have built a strong reader base who is genuinely interested in what you have to say. If so, consider creating your own informational product. E-books are a great way to generate passive income from your website and can represent a sizable portion of your monthly revenue.

Of course, creating your own informational product requires detailed knowledge of the topic and some degree of writing skills. Alternatively, you can outsource the writing to an experienced writer for better results. 

For a small one-time fee, visitors are able to purchase and download your informational product and you immediately reap the benefits of this income stream.  Learn more

There are hundreds of other ways to make money from your website. Millions of websites generate revenue every day using the techniques described above as well as a variety of others. Remember that the key to successfully monetizing your website is traffic.The more website traffic you have, the more income opportunities will be presented to you. Focus on creating unique, valuable content and traffic will follow.

Once you begin making money from your website, you will wonder why you didn’t think of this sooner. So get out there and join the millions of other people making a living from their websites!

How much can you earn from blogging

The Highest Earning Blogs Online

Original article from Here

These are the top ten earning blogs online. They have all used their own methods of generating that income, but most are advertising banners, Pay Per Click (PPC), or CPM advertising.

1. The Huffington Post ≈ $21.82 million value ($29,896 daily)
2. Mashable ≈ $11.52 million value ($15,781 daily)
3. Techcrunch ≈ $10.82 million   ($14,816 daily)
4. Engadget –  $7.2 million ($9,861 daily)
5. Smashing Magazine –  $4.66 million ($6,382 daily)
6. Tuts+ ≈ $3.7 million ($5,068 daily)
7. Life Hacker ≈ $3.52 million ($4,821 daily)
8. Gizmodo ≈ $2.86 million ($3,918 daily)
9. Perez Hilton ≈ $2.66 million ($3,645 daily)
10. Joystiq AOL ≈ $1.28 million ($1,752 daily)

They are also all companies, more or less. Or they have become companies under the leadership of their original blogger (Arianna Huffington and Perez Hilton, for example). Independent bloggers have also managed to generate a profit, such as Joel Comm ($55,408 worth through affiliate sales), and John Chow ($405,242, also through affiliate sales).

It shows that any blog can have earning potential, as long as you find the most profitable means of advertising, sales or promotion.

When You Should Begin Monetizing Your Blog

When you are planning on having a profitable site, you can technically begin monetizing it right away. You can certainly start a PPC or similar campaign, though keep in mind you need people there to click on the links.

But the most successful independent blogs focus on gaining a following, then start to add in monetization tactics once they have steady traffic and dedicated readers. Being stable on that front increase your opportunities, including those than come from companies and brands wanting you to try and review their products/services.

How You Can Begin Monetizing Your Blog

Start with the obvious, though generally less profitable, options such as Adsense. Will you make a whole lot there? Probably not, but you will make something. Through the year, it may be enough to cover the hosting and other registration fees necessary for running your blog. Which means your blog will be sustainable, and any additional money made will be profit.

Next, begin looking into what option works best for you. PPC? Traditional advertising? CPM? Affiliate marketing? The last is usually a good option for new bloggers, or those who are running an independent site. You can start to make money daily, which adds up to a decent monthly amount.

I’ve found affiliate marketing most successful for niche and local blogging. Using local directories it’s easy to find local businesses that are looking for ways to establish online presence. So just be pro-active and approach them with your offer. I’ve seen people find life-time partnerships this way…

While you can use a combination of those methods, try not to speak yourself too thin. Time spent focusing on several marketing techniques means time taken away from cultivating any single one. One or two should suffice.

Once you have started those campaigns and have an Adsense account. Start considering indirect, but related, money making ventures. Speaking at events, lectures, or doing video interviews. Hosting webinars or online classes about your area of expertise. Ebooks, including taking advantage of perks offered through platforms like Kindle (they have an author program that could benefit you, and Amazon Associates).

Cotributing may be a way to both increase visibility and get a little something extra for it. Sites like Listverse and Cracked pay around $100 per article, and offer a byline. Or you can check out blogs in your industry that pay a bit.

What you are really looking for is exposure, so try and find the highest profile guest posting opportunities possible. The more successful your blog becomes, the easier it will be to do that.

Once you have gained some standing, you may want to consider starting a membership program. Sites like Moz have a paid program that is separate from their blog. A number of sites have started to do that. Just make sure you have something unique and worth paying for, and never charge for your actual blog posts. That is a shady practice that has been seen before, and backfired spectacularly.

Consultancy is one more option, though this becomes a matter of your popularity when you begin monetizing. You have to be a well known name in your industry to begin trading on that reputation and targeting professionals or businesses that might be helped by your expertise. But a blog is a great platform for launching that kind of career, if that is a dream you have for the future. You might as well start now.

Finally, you have private ads and sponsorships, which you can offer on your site for a fee (either monthly or one-time to cover a certain period). But this is one of the last resorts; sure, it works. But it has become less popular as companies realize they can get more traction through content and engagement than stagnant ads on even well known sites. They would rather pay for a review that talks up their service than for an ad the majority of visitors will ignore.

Conclusion

There is no one answer for the question of how much bloggers make. But there is one that should be reassuring for anyone who is planning on earning an income from their own: the sky is the limit, it just depends on you.

Monetizing your blog is a good way to earn a passive income. So get started; the sooner you begin, the sooner you will start to see profits.

Google Adsense: The secret

Adsense: monetizing your blog

Monetizing is one of those topics that almost always comes up when you have a blog, a website or a forum. How can I make some cash from it?! If everybody can, why can’t I?

Google AdSense is one of the most common ways to monetize, though I’ll warn you now: 

AdSense is NOT a tree of money. In fact, it can take a really, really long time to make some money. But it can also pay off big if you know the secrets ;).

AdSense: what is this?

AdSense is a program that allows bloggers and website owners to make money by displaying ads from Google. You’ve probably seen the ads all over some blogs, websites, including in Google search results. Google gets the largest cut and you get a small percentage (sucks huh) and there are two ways to make money from AdSense:

• Impressions – this is based on the number of pageviews of pages or posts with ads
• Clicks – this is based on how many people click on the ads.

To make it as simple as possible, you sign up for an AdSense account and add the code to your blog or website basically. You can choose how your ads look, where they show up, and even what kind of ads you’ll accept. Once you get to over threshold of $100, Google will either send you a paper check or make a direct deposit into your bank account.

Who can do it?

If you’re a Blogger, you can use the Monetize tab to set up and manage an AdSense account.

If you use self-hosted WordPress, you go to the AdSense website and apply for an account. You’ll receive a code that you can place in your website, or you can use a plugin to help with placement.

*If you use free WordPress, you cannot use AdSense, but you can always use WordAds if you have your own custom domain. 

How Much Can I Make?

As I told you before, you will not get rich quick using AdSense. It took me 9 months to make $5 (yes, five dollars) on my personal finance blog. However, I made $100 last month. That’s still low compared to many blogs – some people can earn a full-time income from AdSense alone. But it takes a LONG LONG time to be in that situation, and you have to have a lot of traffic.

Some ads are worth more money than others. This is also affected by the amount of traffic you get, the keywords the person searched for, the percentage of visitors who click on a particular ad, etc. There are a LOT of factors that determine how much you’ll make, but a rule of thumb is that newer blogs simply won’t make as much money.

My personal finance blog is about 14 months old. Some days, I don’t get any ad clicks at all and I might still make 10 cents or so just from impressions. Sometimes every click is worth $2 or more. Yesterday the clicks were worth a whopping 26 cents each.

Many people get impatient when they’ve had the code up for a month or two and haven’t made more than a few pennies. If you’re looking for something that will pay TODAY, AdSense may not be for you. And to be honest, I don’t know of anything instant – if I did, you can bet I’d be using it!

How Can I Make More from AdSense?

Basically, your best bet for ad clicks is increasing your search traffic. Remember the other day when we talked about why your blog needs SEO? When people are trying to solve a problem, they usually turn to search engines like Google or Bing. If you have a post that solves that problem, using SEO will help your post rank well in search results. SEO will also help AdSense serve up relevant ads, so when people click on your blog post, the ads may answer the exact question they’re asking. Result? Ad clicks!

IMPORTANT!

There are a few things you need to know about AdSense before you ever put the code on your blog.

1. Never, ever click your own ads. In case you aren’t aware, Google pretty much knows everything. And they can tell if you’re clicking your own ads. It’s very tempting to click about 50 times and make some money, but all it will do is result in being banned.

2. Never, ever encourage friends or family to click your ads. Same as above. You can and will be banned from AdSense, and don’t ever think Google won’t figure it out. I don’t know how they do it, but I have seen it happen to people I know. JUST DON’T.

3. Pay attention to your ad clicks. If you average 2 clicks a month and you suddenly get 100 in a day, chances are that something is wrong. If you’ve pissed someone off and they decide to fight back by clicking all over the place, you can get banned even though you didn’t do anything.

4. Never rely on AdSense as your sole income source. Even if you get really good at SEO and you have 100 websites making thousands of dollars each month in AdSense, you never know when something could happen to trigger Google’s no-no sensors. You can make good money with AdSense, but you should also use other monetization strategies just in case.

5. Don’t use more than 3 ad blocks on a single page. Google allows up to 3 ad blocks on a page. So if you have one in your header, one in your sidebar, and one at the end of your post, that’s the limit for that page. Also, don’t plaster ads all over the place and annoy your regular readers! There are ways to implement the ads without making your site ugly.

I welcome any question considering Google Adsense.

I hope you enjoyed my post about Adsense and gave you a small door to internet earnings.

See you next time.