How to monetize your blog

I presume that you have a blog that has sufficient content, valuable readers, and decent traffic. If you do not have all these, then first you need to create this. Creating Traffic to your blog is explained in my previous posts so I am not going to talk about that in this post.

1. Pay per click programs - This is the first option that you should start off with and I would recommend Google Adsense for this as this is the only work which worked good for me. I used Bidvertiser (Gave me good income earlier), Ads For Indians, Tyroo

2. Selling Private Ads - Selling private ads are the best income generator. We can see the blogs with high traffic, go for private ads than pay per click programs as they get paid for impressions or monthly tenancy. You can get customers for this only if you have good traffic and loyal visitors

3. Job Postings - I have seen this in Darren’s Blog, Problogger, he has a blogging job board. This is a good revenue generator

4. Donations - This something which can be done and there is nothing wrong in this. You do provide good content and if the visitor has got some help out of your website, then he can in return help you by making a donation. There are many WordPress plugins available for this like the “Buy me a beer”

Don’ts

1. Paid links - Don’t go for any link trading as popular search engines like Google and against this and it can result in losing your pagerank and ultimately lose in traffic. This has happened to many top bloggers like JohnChow who was penalised by google for paid links.

2. Paid Reviews - Again this is bad for your search engine ranking. Google is penalizing blogs which offer this service. If you are doing this, you should use the rel=nofollow tag.

If you are blogging for money then you should find the right product that you can sell using your blog and your blog visitors. Some blog for fun, some for money and some for both.

Is revenue sharing allowed with Google Adsense Program

Few months back, I wanted to introduced a revenue sharing model for one of my bookmarking sites. I did some googling on this and confirmed that Google do allow this, even though they have not made it clear that its not allowed. The webmaster do not have the risk of click fraud if any member tries to do it. If any member tries to work against the guidelines, then the account of the member is terminated and not the site owner’s.

There are many popular plugins and extensions available for popular content management systems like Wordpress , Drupal , Joomla which manages the revenue sharing task taking care of the Google Adsense Terms of service. The most important point to be noted is that one page should not show ads from two different account. For example in the header part if you display an ad which belongs to the site and the sidebar ad belongs to a member, then its violation of Google Terms and conditions and you have good chance to get your account banned. I have listed some popular sites where you can sign-up as a member and earn from Google Adsense.

There are lots of sites which work on the Google Adsense Revenue sharing model. You can earn from Google Adsense without even having a website.

How to manage organize your affiliate programs

I have signed up for many affiliate programs and I often get confused with the login information, login URL etc. When you have a blog, one of the biggest income generator other than private sales of ads is affiliate program. For example, I am an affiliate of Shaadi.Com and I did a post to promote few days back. I am an affiliate of different affiliate programs and to keep track of the earnings, promotion, banners are difficult if things are not organized well.

Ok let me explain to you, how I manage all these things. I am bit choosy while signing up for affiliate programs so I am not having much to manage, but I do it in an organized way. I will be in a stage when I will be promoting many affiliate programs using my blog and the traffic to my blog.

Tools I use for managing the affiliate programs and private sales of advertisements

Advertisements - I do sell advertisement space other than using Google Adsense. I have good number of websites with enough traffic. I am happy to say  that my traffic is growing everyday and I am working hard on that. 85% of my traffic are from search engines and some from referring sites. I have a very small budget for advertisements  and I usually use Google Adwords.

Let me come to the point now, to manage my Advertisers, I use OpenAds, hosted on my dedicated server and its working fine. I sell space on CPM basis and the advertiser need to buy minimum 10,000 impressions and the ads run till the purchased impressions are over. In fact I have already applied for an invitation for Google Ad Manager, if I get an account, the I could try that. The advantage of using Google Ad Manager will the the efficiency in delivering ads.

Affiliate Programs - To manage my affiliate programs, I again use openads. The ads are rotated along with other paid ads and I get to make some income from my the affiliate programs which I promote. I also have my in house ads running along with these paid ads.

I create a campaign for each affiliate program I promote and add up all the information about the program to the campaign details. I may have different login details for different affiliate programs, so to avoid any confusions, I keep these information updated in the comments column of the campaign.

In this way, by using OpenAds, now known as openX, is good and efficient. There are lots of reporting tools available which can help you in monitoring the performance of your ads and affiliate programs.

OpenX is a opensource program, which can be downloaded for free.