The best ways to monetize your blog
When we talk about making money blogging, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is selling advertising space, You’ve probably read about some 13-year-old kid who manages to make $5,000 a month from Adsense on his blog. However, while ads represent a major source of revenues, they are not the best way to monetize your blog.
1. Sell your own product or service
From my own experience, at least, the best way to make money from blogging is to sell your own product or service. If your blog is about PHP coding, for instance, naturally you’d use it to promote your book on PHP or programming service. I have used my blogs effectively to promote my web directory submission and search engine submission services.
People don’t visit commercial sites unless they have to. But they’ll visit blogs to find useful information from trusted individuals who know what they’re talking about. Therefore, your blog is ideal place to pre-sell a product or service related to your area of expertise.
2. Sell other people’s stuff
Don’t have your own product or service to sell?
Not to worry– you can make money by selling other people’s stuff. It’s called affiliate marketing. Sign with sites like ClickBank and Commission Junction, all you’ll find hundreds of products and services that you can sell on your blog. Aside from selling your own product, affiliate marketing represents the next best thing to monetize your blog.
Marketing affiliate products on your blog shouldn’t be limited to sticking affiliate links and ads on your sidebar. You should incorporate the affiliate links into the texts of your posts. You might write a review on a info product you’ve just bought through ClickBank. Of course, try to be objective and avoid blatantly hyping a product to make a sale, or you will risk losing credibility (remember, your job is to pre-sell a product; let the product’s sales page do the actual selling).
3. Sell ad space
The third best way to make money from a blog is to sell ad space. You may have noticed the plasters of 125 x 125 ads on your favorite blogs. You can sell ad space directly on your site by providing a Paypal link for advertisers to pay you. You can set your rates based on your traffic, niche, banner sizes, number of ads on your site, and so on. There is really no rule of thumb for deciding how much to charge. A technical blog, for instance, commands a much higher rate than a blog about your daily ramblings.
If you don’t have the traffic to sell ad space directly to advertisers, you can join the various blog advertising networks like Entrecard, CMF Ads, Adgitize, and Project Wonderful. I’ll talk a lot more about these services later.
4. Contextual ads
Contextual ads, particularly Adsense, remain a viable option to monetize your blog, but they’re hardly cash cows they used to be. Many people have grown accustomed to ignore them. You need a lot of traffic to make any money from Adsense at all. How much traffic? I support that depends on your niche. If you run a popular blog about the insurance industry, for instance, you may make a killing from those high-paying car insurance ads. If your blog is a place where people visit primarily to kill a few minutes of their time, on the other hand, don’t expect to make much money if you’ve managed to build a huge following.
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Comments
hmm’
dont have any own product to sell 
i just use adsense to monetize my blog also the review site 
thx 4 this post
1 and 2 can be sort of combined if you use Rapid Action’s Product marketplace…although you will still be selling other peoples products, you will earn 100% commissions which is just like selling your own products 
Good summary! Rody, see the segment to sell other people’s stuff on ClickBank and Commission Junction – you don’t have to sell your own stuff until you’re ready.
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