Making Money with Blogs: Technologies, Features and Nuances

2015.04.30

Nancy Ryan

(7 votes, average: 4.43 out of 5)

Blog and website earnings have much in common, but there are essential differences which cannot be neglected.

Blog is a site that the owner uses to share his thoughts, arguments and all the fact that he cares with visitors. Blog owner is called a blogger. Blog is characterized by the possibility of leaving feedback, comments, and communicating with author. So, blog is a form of the site. Today, the term “blog” means website, filled by one person, and that express the author’s opinion/personal attitude to the exciting and important issues.

Thus, blog is actually an opportunity to have income from sharing thoughts with readers. Since the main blog difference is the authorship of published materials, it becomes illogical to purchase content. In most cases blogger regularly spend time maintaining his blog not to lose his visitors.

The success of the blog, as well as its income, largely depends on the author qualities. Each blogger is a person that should arouse interest among readers. From the authority of the blogger (level of interest, ability to express thoughts clearly and to help visitors, etc.) depends the possibility of blog development. That is why some blogs are visited by thousands of readers, while others are eventually closed.

Types of blogs

Types of blogs according to different criteria:

1. Topic.

Politics. This topic can be considered as the lading one, although in terms of making money from a blog website it is perhaps not the most successful. In addition, political blog can always be displeasing to the authorities, and in this case at least it will be closed.
Travelling. This theme is expedient to travelers and people who love outdoor activities. You can illuminate the blog by uploading photos and videos and earnings may come from advertising of travel companies.
Health and beauty. Fitness, weight loss, and everything connected with it is very popular as health is the trend of XXI century. You can earn by advertising corresponding goods and services.
Family and children. It offers a wide range of issues like visitors opinion which can be expressed in the blog, incidentally earning by advertising the related topics.
Sports. Sports-themed blog is appropriate for those who interested in sports and able to make predictions on the outcome of matches.
Earnings and investments. Quite popular blog topics today, in which authors usually share their secrets of investing money and earning online. Its pages are often lead by traders and investors, and even those who invest in HYIPs. Income from such blog is one of the most appreciable: the ad here is expensive and there are good opportunities for earnings on affiliate programs.
Web design and SEO. In fact, it’s a blog about blogging. There are a lot SEO blogs and they are all similar, but best of them, however, are showing good results and bring profit.
Fashion. Certain categories of women are constantly interested in fashion trends, so the blog owner will never be without readers and will be able to earn on the blog advertising of fashion stores.
Auto. Similarly, among men there is a category that is constantly interested in cars, and they may be the target audience for auto-blog. Income from the auto blog can be very significant, as the thematic advertising is rather expensive.

2. Content type.

Text blogs. Internet resources with the content in text form. Probably it’s the most promising type.
Photo blogs. Such blogs focus on graphics, in particular, on the author photo. In terms of income photo blogs are not very perspective: graphics placement requires large amounts of space on the host, which costs a lot of money. So in most cases photo blogs are beside the purpose.
Video blogs. Resources with the prevailing video content. The same as previous theme: if you’re shooting videos that are popular, you can simply use Youtube and monetize your feed.

3. Content character.

Author blogs. It is definitely the best option for earning, because unique content is better to understand for search engines, and attracts more visitors to the page.
Monitoring blogs. Resources which are built on the following principle: the author refers to some news, comments it, expressing his own opinion. This kind of blog is typically related to political issues.

4. Platform type.

Based on unfamiliar domains. In this case income is limited by the service possibilities.
Based on author’s own domain. It can be paid and free.

Making money with blogs: income sources

Making money with blogs

Contextual advertising. Its essence is simple: articles contain links to other resources, but the advertising text completely or at least partially corresponds to the subject of the article. Earnings on contextual advertising provided from the advertiser who pays for the number of clicks on sponsored ads. Earnings can be calculated taking into account the percentage holds for mediation. As such sites must correspond on many complicated requirements, the resources that are already accepted are initially better than ones that are not appropriate for the system.
Articles exchanges. Posted links on such services are “regular”. It means they are natural to human eye and placed on a regular basis.
Banner networks. Earnings described often implemented together with the placement of banner advertising. Click cost on a banner is lower than that on the content, but the banner networks have thoughtful targeting that prevents unwanted banners and competitor’s banners.
File exchange systems. You download files on the exchange, and get paid for the number of downloads. Naturally, in order to have your files downloaded, you have to link to them. But it’s not enough: you should also make postings on forums, microblogs and wherever possible.
Affiliate programs. Monetization of the site can also be done through earnings on affiliate programs. Most of the above mentioned services are willing to pay for the involved people, so the important aspect is the correct and timely dispatch of partner links. Such income is desirable to be considered as the long term (it takes time to spread your links at attract referrals).
Direct cooperation with advertisers. The most time-consuming method. But good site can attract attention of generous advertisers who are willing to pay a lot of money.
Donations. Visitors are invited to promote the resource development by the donation of money. Collecting donations may be one of the options to recoup the owner’s costs. Depending on the content of the site and its audience you can gather a sum sufficient to pay all costs. This approach is practiced by “Wikipedia”, “Mozilla” and some other world-known companies. Donations can be obtained in three ways:
- By SMS-messages. This method is perfect for resources with the audience, quite distant from the world of modern technology. Almost all people have mobile phones (opposed to accounts in payment systems) today. Sending SMS is not time consuming and does not require any special knowledge. Since user does not want to commit complex actions, such method decreases the likelihood that the user will change his mind during the procedure. The disadvantage of SMS-messages lies is that the great percent of transferred money is held by mobile operators. Sometimes it stops maecenas who simply do not want to “feed intermediary”.
- Using one of the payment systems. You can simply specify the donation account number which belongs to one of the popular payment systems. But it is difficult to predict what payment system will be the most useful. So, better register at several different payment systems.
- Using specialized projects. This method allows to accept donations in any suitable for the user form. Some of such projects (Crowdrise, Jumo, Causes) are already working for more than a decade.
Automated way of monetization

There are some special plugins that automate the monetization process. One of them is Website Monetization Plugin by MageNet, which is WordPress plugin for selling contextual ads and receiving payments with PayPal. It has a number of advantages, such as offering relevant contextual ads, easy withdraw, full control of pages available for advertising and ads prices, etc. All you need is to upload plugin, activate it, sign up at http://www.magenet.com, get MageNet Key and save it.

Making money from your blog: avoiding mistakes

The development strategy must be predetermined initially. You should think in advance about the ways of getting the income. Contextual ads sale, for example, may be incompatible with affiliate programs. Here are some advices:
- Do not rush to the exchanges at start. Before contextual ads placement your site should strengthen its confidence (which in turn will raise the ads price).
- High ad price is not the best choice, especially in the beginning. You can ask for better price only after the positive effects of cooperation will be really tangible to advertisers.
- Only topical ads. Information content should be combined with the text displayed on banners.
- Avoid empty advertising space.
Blogging is very competitive today, especially among those who seek to earn. The blogosphere is still considered as a large-scale platform for advertising. Making money as a blogger is possible, although it requires time and efforts.