There are numerous ways that a well written blog that attracts a lot of readers (traffic) can make money. The key to attracting readers is generating well written, informative, original posts on a regular basis. So new bloggers really need to concentrate on generating content. But once you have had your blog up and running for a while, you can start to explore various methods of generating revenue.
Although there are numerous methods for generating revenue, these are extremely popular:
Advertising Programs - Almost all web pages have some type of adverting now and blogs are no exception. The most well known contextual ad program is Google Adsense. Since Google owns Blogger as well as Adsense, it is extremely easy to integrate Google Adsense ads into a blog hosted on Blogger. Other popular ad programs are DoubleClickTribal Fusion, Clicksor, Adgenta, Azoogle Ads, Peak Click, AVN and Kanoodle (to name but a few). But you don't want to clutter up your blog with too many ads and risk driving off readers because your blog looks like it exists only to make money. So start out with just Google Adsense and see how it goes.
Affiliate Programs - These are programs which pay you for referring your blog readers to other sites where they purchase goods or services. Usually you are paid a commission on what the customers buy by following the links displayed on your web site to the affiliate's site. One of the largest programs (and easiest to join and manage) is Amazon Associates (from Amazon.com). Other large affiliate programs such as Commission Junction, Linkshare and Clickbank provide you with opportunities to direct customers to a wide variety of merchants. But there are many other smaller affiliate programs which you can use on your site. Affiliate programs are often used in conjunction with specific posts. For instance, if you are running a blog that reviews new digital equipment and you create a post about a new digital camera, you may want to provide a link through the Amazon Associates program to allow your readers to buy the cameras at Amazon.com.
Paid to Blog Programs - People with products and services to sell have discovered that bloggers are more than willing to write posts about their companies in return for compensation. PayPerPost is the grandaddy of all the paid blogging services. Other sites that pay you to blog are PayU2Blog, Blogitive, Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch, V7N, and Smorty. You need to have an established blog site (usually at least 90 days old) with a minimum number of posts to have your blog approved for posting opportunities. After it is approved, you are presented with opportunities and given guidelines for writing posts about products or services. Compensation ranges from $5 for simple 100 to 150 word posts up to hundreds of dollars for posts that include originally produced video. Many of the higher dollar opportunities require you to have a certain Google page rank to participate, but there are many $5 to $20 opportunities for sites without a high page rank.
Please click the button to join PayPerPost as my affiliate.
Donations - Readers appreciate a well written blog and some readers will show their appreciation by making a donation to support your blog. Paypal tip jars or donation buttons make it quick and easy for loyal readers to give you a couple of their hard earned dollars.
Sponsored Ads - In addition to advertising programs such as Google Adsense, many companies are paying bloggers to directly advertise on their sites (usually through buttons or banners). Although this is not something that usually happens to beginning bloggers, it is a goal to aim for when your blog garners a respectable amount of traffic (visitors) and a decent Google page rank.
Although there are many other ways bloggers can make money, these ideas should keep beginning bloggers busy for a while.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
How Bloggers Make Money
Marketing Your Blog 1: Get Indexed in Search Engines
You can write the most brilliant blog ever created. And it won't do you a bit of good if no one can find it! You need to find ways to allow potential readers to find your blog. In this post, we'll discuss the first step you should take...getting your blog indexed by search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an emerging science the goal of which is to increase the number of visitors (volume of traffic) that a blog (or website) receives from search engine results. Search engine results are the equivalent of billboards along the highway. Just as billboards direct people to a product or service, links in search engine results drive people to relevant blogs (or websites). All search engines use different proprietary methods to analyze the contents and keywords of blogs for purposes of generating search results. Google, the big Kahuna of search engines, gives every web page a rank (called page rank) and pages with a high rank appear in search results before lower ranked pages. Many factors go into generating a web page's rank score such as key words, relevance to search terms (which is based on key words) and quality of links to the site from other pages. Most experts agree that your page rank will eventually increase as your visibility on the Internet increases.
Therefore, having your site linked to by other websites (preferably ones with a high page rank) and indexed by a variety of search engines will help your site become more visible. As a starting point, you should submit your URL to a number of search engines to increase the chances that a search engine will index your site. Most search engines do not guarantee that they will list your site (or that it will rank highly in search results). But by submitting your URL to the search engine, you ensure that the search engines' automated agents that crawl the web looking for sites to index should eventually locate your site.
You only need to submit the main URL of your blog, not the URL for each individual blog posting that you have. For instance, when submitting this blog for indexing, we only submitted the URL http://bloggingacrosscurriculum.blogspot.com.
Below is a listing of links to search engine submission pages. You certainly don't need to submit your URL to every site on the list. But the top 4 are an absolute minimum.
List of Search Engine Submission Links (List obtained from Tips for New Bloggers)
Advanced Lesson 1: Adding More Page Element Options to Your Template
In Basic Lesson 7, you saw how easy it was to add page elements to the right hand (or left hand) column of your blog or to add elements at the end of the blog. But what if you want to add an element below the header (such as our Firefox link on this blog) or before your blog posts? As shown below, most standard Blogger templates don't offer the option to add elements in these places.
You can remedy this situation by following the simple instructions at the Tips for New Bloggers blog site. This requires editing the HTML code of your Blogger template, which is very easy to do (you don't need to know HTML coding...just follow the directions).
To make changes to your Blogger template, click on Layout for your blog on the Blogger Dashboard. This puts you on the Template tab. Click the Edit HTML sub-tab to display the HTML of your template. The top of this screen will look like this:
Before making modifications to your template's HTML code, it is always a good idea to back up your existing template. This enables you to go back to your original template if you muck up editing the HTML code. Click the link to save a copy of your template to your hard drive.
Just follow the step-by-step instructions at the Tips for New Bloggers site. After making the HTML modifications, clicking your Page Elements sub-tab should give you a screen that looks similar to this:
You now have more places where you can add content!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Basic Lesson 9: Adding Lists of Web Links to Your Blog
In the course of web surfing, you probably run across web sites that readers of your blog might find useful. Adding a list of useful links to your blog is easy. Go to Template tab of your blog and select the Page Elements sub-tab. Click on one of the Add a Page Element links.
The Choose a New Page Element dialog box (shown below) is now displayed. Find the element called Link List and click on Add to Blog button below it.
The Configure Link List dialog box (below) is now displayed. First, type in a title for your link list. Then enter the URL for the first web site. Enter a name for the site as you want it to appear on the link list. Then click the Add Link button to add the web site to the Link List. When you have added all of your links, click the orange Save Changes button. You can always come back later and add more links or delete existing links.
The Link List you entered is now displayed on your blog.
Basic Lesson 8: Adjusting Your Blog Settings
The settings section of your blog is very important as it controls a lot of the functionality by which your readers interface with your blog. As you can see from the image below, the Settings tab is divided into 8 sub-tabs. The default settings on most options will suffice but we will point out a few you should consider changing.
The Basic Sub-Tab
Filling in the Description section on this sub-tab gives you a sub-title for your blog that falls right below the title. This is a great place to give a description of what your blog is about as readers will see this immediately.
E-mail post links are turned off by default. When turned on, a little envelope icon appears beneath each of the posts on your blog. Readers can click this icon to easily e-mail another person a link to your post. Since you want readers to spread the word about your blog, turning this tool on is a great idea.
The Formatting Sub-Tab
The default number of posts displayed on the front page of your blog is seven. You can change this to a higher or lower number or even change the option to displaying a certain number of days worth of posts. We find 7 posts is a reasonable number, but feel free to change it to suit your taste.
The Comments Sub-Tab
If you want readers to be able to leave comments on your posts, make sure the Show Comments option is on. You have three choices regarding who can leave comments on your blog. The most restrictive is "Only Members of This Blog". You can assign membership to a blog, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a free and open exchange of ideas. "Only Registered Users" is a good choice as only people who have signed up for a Blogger account can post comments. This will help cut down (but not eliminate) spam comments. The most risky option is allowing "Anyone" to comment. This can lead to bad spam problems if moderation is not enabled.
If you decide to show comments (and thereby allow people to leave comments), you should enable moderation. This requires you to enter an e-mail address. Whenever a non-member leaves a comment, you will receive an e-mail. You will need to check the comments frequently to ensure they are valid (not spam) or are not offensive to you or your readers. You can delete comments you don't like. Showing word verification for comments is a great way to cut down on spam. To leave a comment, a person has to key in the letters shown on screen in a small box. This foils automated software agents that are often used to leave spam comments.
The Permissions Sub-Tab
On this sub-tab, you can assign other people the ability to create posts on your blog. This is especially useful for student group blog projects or for maintaining a blog with fellow faculty members. To assign more authors, just click the blue Add Authors button.
The dialog box below is now displayed. Just enter the e-mail addresses (separated by commas) of the people you wish to invite. Then click the orange Invite button. When they receive your e-mail invitation, they will be able to register on Blogger (if they don't already have an account) and become an author on your blog.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Basic Lesson 7: Organizing Your Blog By Topic (Labels)
Most people find it easier to search a blog by topic. Fortunately, Blogger has included a feature called labels that make it easy to provide a list of postings by topic.
At the bottom of the post window is a section called "Labels for this post". In this box, you can enter any terms you think will help categorize your posts. Labels can contain more than one word. If you are using multiple labels for a posting, make sure to separate each label with a comma.
If you find it hard to remember the labels being used on your blog, just click on the show all link. This will display all the labels currently being used on the blog. Just click the "Hide all" link to hide the labels again.
Once you've assigned labels to all your posts, you need to display a clickable index of those labels on your blog so that readers can display all posts related to that particular topic. To add an index of your labels, you must insert a new page element on your blog layout.
In the blog editing mode, click on the Template tab. Then click on the Page Elements sub-tab. Click on the Add a Page Element link to display the list of possible page elements that can be added to your blog.
From the list of elements in the Choose a New Page Element dialog box, click Add to Blog under the element Labels. 
The Configure Labels dialog box now appears. Change the title for the archive list to something obvious like Blog Topics. Chose to sort the topics alphabetically or by frequency (number of postings in that topic). Click the orange Save Changes button to add the topic archive to your blog.
When you click on View Blog, you will notice that the topic archive is now displayed on your blog. Every time you assign labels to a blog posting and publish the post, this list will be updated.
Basic Lesson 6: Layout of a Blog Explained & Modifying Your Profile
The layout of the default blog is pretty much the same for all of the standard templates provided by Blogger. There are two columns. One contains your posts and the other contains useful elements that provide functionality to your readers. The two default elements that will appear in a basic blog are the Blog Archive and the Author Profile (About Me). In subsequent lessons, we'll discuss other elements that you might want to add to your blog layout, but for the rest of this post we'll discuss the two default elements.
The Blog Archive provides a listing of your posts grouped by month (you can change this to other periods) in reverse chronological order. This helps readers find past posts in your blog that they may want to read and provides an easy way to navigate to them. But chronological archives aren't always the best way to navigate a blog. Grouping postings by topics if often much more useful. See Lesson 7 to learn how to organize your blog by topic.
The about me section provides you with an opportunity to list details about yourself on your blog. This blog element brings in information from you Profile. You can reveal as little or as much information in your profile as you wish. To edit your profile click on View My Complete Profile (in the About Me section) and then click on the Edit Your Profile button that appears on the next page.
Explore the profile at your leisure and decide what you wish to reveal. If you don't feel comfortable revealing some piece of information (even your name)...then don't put it in the profile! Remember...
