From its rather humble beginnings as a simple way to share information on webpages, blogging has now grown into an industry that is worth literally billions of Dollars. Anything from a small and simple product review blog, to websites with thousands of articles and readers is possible and even common in the blogging world.
For many bloggers and online marketers the question of how to monetize a website will arise sooner or later. In the next couple of paragraphs you will find information about the 5 best ways to create a revenue stream from your blogs.
1) Pay-Per-Click Advertising
One of the most common ways to generate income is by using pay-per-click advertising. You essentially sign up to an advertising service like Google AdSense, and different types of adverts are then displayed on your webpages when viewed by readers.
When someone clicks on one of those advertisements to find out more, you get compensated for that click. How much you get paid is entirely dependent on the advertisement with some only generating a couple of cents, while others pay several dollars.
2) Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing is another very common way to create a revenue stream. This involves signing up with an affiliate program and then promoting a certain product or service on your website. When someone uses the unique affiliate link on your site to buy the specific product, you then receive compensation which various from product to product.
This is an ideal way to make some really good earnings, and is very simple to set up. There are literally thousands of products that you can promote through affiliate programs like Amazon and Clickbank. Your earnings potential is simply limited by the amount of website traffic you have and how convincing you are in promoting the product.
3) Direct Advertising Sales
Selling advertisement space on your website works very differently to pay-per-click listed above. There are certain areas of a webpage that attract the focus of a viewer and if you have a large number of readers on a blog you can offer companies to hire space on the site.
It basically involves you contacting companies that offer products or services that are similar to what you are writing about on your site. Dependent on how many readers you have on a monthly basis you would charge an advertiser a certain amount per 1000 visitors, which can be quite a lucrative way of advertising revenue.
4) Ebooks
Especially if you have a large site with lots of information it can be a very good idea to collect all your blog posts into a tidy ebook format. Many people prefer reading information in an eReader, rather than browsing through multiple webpages. You can simply create a book out of all the information you have already posted, and offer it to new and existing readers of your blog.
5) Membership Programs
This is the ultimate way to generate a steady and recurring stream of income. You can have a certain amount of information available for free and then charge a premium for access to restricted info, or for the privilege to receive information before it is made freely available. Your imagination is the limit when it comes to developing a membership program.
As you can see there are numerous ways to monetize a blog and ensure a steady revenue stream. The best thing to do is to experiment and test different strategies to find out what works best for you.