How to Make Money Blogging?

Do you want to make money blogging? If you do – you’re not alone. More and more bloggers are finding that blogging is a profitable medium. Whether it be to earn a few extra dollars a week to feed their coffee habit, or making enough money to stop them having to get a part time job to get through college, or whether they’ve got it to a point where they are able to make a full time living from their blogging – there are tens of thousands of bloggers who make money blogging.
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In this page I want to share some information for beginners on how to make money blogging. For a very quick and broad visual intro – check out this Make Money Blogging MindMap which visualizes just SOME of the ways bloggers make money blogging.

First – let me start by sharing my own top Money Making Methods (updated regularly) but below that point you to some great resources and teaching on how to increase your income from blogging.

hat follows is a quick summary of my main income streams from blogging. Before you read it though – keep in mind that every blog is unique in how it can make money. Some of the following income streams will work on some blogs a lot better than others – the key is to experiment with as many as possible and see what works best for you.

The following income streams (from a number of blogs) have helped me to earn a six figure income each year for the last 5 years from blogging. I’ve ranked them from highest to lowest.

I hope you find it useful to see the mix and variety of ways that I earn a living from blogging.

1. AdSense

Despite not using it here at ProBlogger any more (here’s why) I continue to use AdSense with amazing effect on my other blogs. I have them all set to show image and text based ads and find that 250×300 pixel ads work best (usually with a blended design). I don’t have much luck with their ‘referrals’ program but their normal ads work a treat and continue to be the biggest earner for me.

2. Affiliate Programs

I run a variety of affiliate programs on my blogs – most of which bring in smaller amounts of money that don’t really justify a category of their own (but which certainly add up).

These include recommending quality products like these here on ProBlogger: Thesis WordPress theme, Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Coaching Program and How to Launch the F*** out of your E-Book (and others) as well as some great products on my photography blog including 123 of Digital Imaging, David DuChemin’s amazing Photography E-Books and Mitchell Kanashkevich’s great ebooks.

The great thing about many of these programs is that they are of such high quality that they sell themselves and I am being emailed from readers who sign up to them thanking me for the recommendation!

3. E-Book Sales

Last time I did a wrap up of how I make money blogging this category did not exist for me – I didn’t really have any of my own products to sell at all. However in the last year or so I’ve released 3 E-books – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography and Photo Nuts and Bolts: Know Your Camera and Take Better Photos. While these products all only sell for under $20 they certainly add up and some months this has been my biggest category of income. The reason they were only ranking at #3 in the last month was that I didn’t do a product launch (I wrote about one launch which brought in $72,000 in a week here). This is an income stream I see growing as I add more E-books to my range (expect 3 in the coming few months). Click Here!

4. Continuity Programs

This is another newer category for me but one that continues to grow.

A continuity program is a site where you earn a recurring income from people who subscribe to a service you offer.

For me this includes two sites – ProBlogger.com and Third Tribe Marketing. Both programs are membership sites and generate monthly income from the thousands of members that they have as a part of them.

5. Private Ad Sales/Sponsorships

Private ad sales directly to advertisers have fallen for me in the last year (they previously ranked #3 on this list). This is partly due to a change in my own focus but also partly due to the economy as it is. I should note that this area does vary a little from month to month depending upon the campaigns we’re asked to run – we’ve had a couple of months where it actually ranked #2 in the last year.

This includes ad sales of the 125 x 125 ads here at ProBlogger as well as a campaign or two at Digital Photography School. Click Here!

6. Chitika

Chitka continues to be a great performer for me on my blogs. They traditionally have worked best on product related blogs although their Premium ad units now convert well on a larger range of blogs.

While I’ve focused a little less on Chitika in the last 6 months (mainly as I’ve released my own products and moved a little away from advertising) they do continue to perform well where I use them and over the time I’ve been using Chitika they’ve now earned me over a quarter of a million dollars – as a result I can’t recommend them enough!

7. Amazon Associates

Amazon’s affiliate program has been one of my big movers in the last 12 months. I used to make a few odd dollars from it – however in recent times it has become a significant earner for me (in fact it’s now earned me over $100,000 since I started using it). Christmas time (and the lead up to it) is a particularly good time for Amazon – last December it would have ranked #2 on this list.

8. ProBlogger Job Boards

The job boards here at ProBlogger continue to grow each month in the number of advertisements that are being bought. This enabled me to invest most of the money that they’d earned a while back into getting a new back end for the boards and to redesign them. These job boards now bring in over $1000 a month in revenue which is pretty nice considering that they are so low maintenance to run. They also offer a service to readers and add value to the overall blog.

The only problem that I face with the job boards is that there are so many bloggers looking for work that the demand for jobs far exceeds the supply. On the good side of things is that advertisers are reporting getting amazing quality of applications.

9. Speaking Fees

I get asked to do a lot of speaking and increasingly they are paid opportunities. I’m not able to do as many as I would like (mainly because I live in Australia and most of what I’m asked to do is overseas and I only travel 2-3 times a year) – however in April I did a couple of events and the income was enough to include in this list. Click Here!

Other Income

In addition to all of the above there are many smaller incomes. Many of these are from smaller advertising programs that I test but none are big enough to really rate a mention here.

The other income stream that there was no actual money from in April was book royalties from the ProBlogger Book. These are only paid every 6 or so months (not in April). It’s probably also worth mentioning that authors don’t tend to make a whole lot of money on book royalties – you don’t write books to get rich (unless you sell a lot of them).

Useful Resources for Bloggers Wanting to Make Money Blogging

A lot has been written on the topic of making money online from blogs. There is a lot of wonderful information out there – but also a lot of hype and sometimes dangerous information.

Below are a number of articles that I’ve written exploring some of the different ways that bloggers make money.

Click Here!


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Why Blog Commenting Is Great For SEO?

There are several off-site SEO methods that you can utilize to increase your search engine rankings and entice quality traffic to your website – blog commenting is one of them. Consistent commenting on relevant blogs will help you with building backlinks to your wesite, as well as increase your online presense within the online blogging community.

As you may already know, anytime you post a comment on a person’s blog, you’ll usually have an opportunity to add your desired anchor text in the name field of the comment section. It’s essential to contribute something insightful to the post/ article with quality comments indicating you’ve read the post you’re commenting on, or that you’ve followed the conversation thread. In doing this you’re showing the owner of the blog that you’re not a spammer, and they won’t mind that you left a link in your comment or signature.

Two Key Things to Look For When Choosing A Blog To Comment On For Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings

1. Relevancy: Find and leave comments on blogs that are related to your own topic or niche, and regularly comment on them. Don’t spend a substantial amount of your time trying to find blogs with the highest PR. Since page rank is becoming less important over time in regards to search engine rankings, your primary focus should be on the relevance of the potential backlink page first.

2. Dofollow: These blogs have certain link attribute qualities that basically allow search engines to crawl from the linking page to your website, therefore counting the link from that site as backlink. On the other hand, nofollow blogs tell Google and other search engines not to give any credit or page rank to an outbound link, making it worthless from an SEO point of view.

Many blogs became nofollow because of blog spammers who abused the system, before it was widely known that commenting on blogs was useful for increasing search engine rankings. Previously, they were able to get PR to their websites from blogs by effectively stealing backlinks from blogs that were legitimate. Commenting on nofollow blogs does not go unrewarded because it can still be useful for networking with other blog owners, as well as building your online presence or brand. They just won’t give you the desired link juice to increase your SERP’s unlike dofollow blogs. The more comments you post, the more people will have the chance to get to know you. They’ll want to dig deeper to find out more about you and want to visit your site. You’ll begin to build relationships which can lead to new readers, blog owners may want you to guest post, and maybe a mention here and there on their site.

Backlinks accrued by blog commenting are valid for the life of the blog. Whenever a post that you commented on gets new traffic, your comment has a chance of being read leading to new targeted traffic to your site. So therefore, the more you comment, the more potential traffic/customers your blog will receive.

You’ll need to find blogs that get you links and give you link juice in the SERPS. A variety of blogs have CommentLuv or KeywordLuv enabled and they are dofollow plugins, you can do a search for blogs that have these plugins. Another method you could use is a Firefox extension that’s named NoDoFollow. After enabling it in your Firefox browser, when you’re on a site, the plugin highlights dofollow links in purple and nofollow links in pink.

Alternatively, DofollowPro will make your job much easier by doing all these tasks in one swoop. You even let you decide which anchor text you want to use for backlinks. It’s as easy as typing your desired keyword into the program’s search bar, and in a matter of seconds a list of dofollow blogs with their page rank will be listed for you. That way you can find relevant, high pagerank internal comment pages with ease.

Add blog commenting to your daily tasks by spending at least 30 minutes a day on it. Be sure to vary the anchor text you place in the url field of your comments. By doing this you’ll build links to several pages within your site, as well as improve your SEO. A blog with twenty links from twenty different blog comments has the likelihood of getting more love by search engines, than a blog with twenty links from just one blog.

Why Blogging Help you with SEO?

Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.

Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.

What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.

Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.

Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.

To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.
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You've Got Facebook why blog?

I got a really good question last week via twitter/email and after yesterday's twitter problems, it's appropriate to address this now. Here's what I was asked:

From your perspective on blogging, what's the advantage of actually doing a blog, over having a well-developed page on Facebook--where you not only share regularly updated status reports, but can also post Notes (where I imagine what would have been posted to a blog would be posted on Facebook), can easily share media, engage people in conversation and relationships, and organically have your updates propagated to other friends' pages, etc.?

It's an excellent question and one that does come up in some form when I speak and teach.

First, let's look at what happened on Twitter. Yesterday, with no explanation for nearly 4 hours, hundreds of thousands of legitimate twitter accounts were suspended citing "suspicious activity." People on Facebook, FriendFeed and blogs went nuts.

OMG! We can't communicate with our followers!

I admit that I got a bit freaked out too when I discovered my account had been suspended when I tried to retweet a client's blog post and got a big warning message. That was before I knew that so many other accounts were suspended. Once it became apparent that it wasn't just me, I calmed down. Within about four hours most accounts had been restored and all was good again in the world ;-)

But what if this happened on Facebook? I have many colleagues whose accounts have been shut down with no warning or explanation. It took weeks to get a response and get their accounts reinstated.

This is why I "preach" that your blog is your hub. It's your home base. It's where you want to drive all that social traffic ... to a space on the web you own and control. Yes, of course something could happen to your server and shut down your site, but at least you're in control.

You are not in control of what happens on Facebook and twitter. Those sites do not belong to you and you are at their mercy. What if you had spent tons of time building a fan page, posting content via the Notes app, building your list of friends and fans, etc. and one day Facebook shuts down? Now what? You may have lost everything if that's you're only home on the web.

Many smart people call social networking sites "satellites" or "outposts." Chris Brogan has an excellent post outlining what he calls "a simple presence framework" where he talks about using your outposts to socialize and connect and then gently guide people back to your home base (blog!).

Ultimately, my goal is to have content that is so attractive that people will want to trade their email address for a free report, video course, etc. I connect socially on Facebook and twitter (and I have a presence on many other social networking sites as well) having conversations and sharing links to my content. Occasionally I promote a teleclass or new product or use an affiliate link to promote something a colleague is offering.

I drive people back to one of my blogs where I can get more intimate and share more information in depth. This helps prospective clients get to "know, like and trust" me, which may entice them to go to the next level and request my free report or buy my product. Once they do that, they're on my email list. They've said "yes, I want to know/get more from you."

New people find out about me every day on Facebook and Twitter, and as they watch, listen and interact, they decide whether or not to follow me home (to my blog). If Facebook or twitter were to disappear, poof! -- without a blog and an email list, all my friends and followers would be gone. But because my primary connection points are via my blogs and I frequently offer valuable content and programs, I would not suffer (too much!) if Facebook or twitter disappeared forever.

As Mari Smith says in her post about lessons learned from the twitter incident:

Twitter [and Facebook] is only one platform for visibility, branding, community building and connecting. It’s vital to your social media success to be diversified and have a) a built-out Facebook profile (unless you’re choosing to only use your profile for close personal friends/family), b) a built-out Facebook Fan Page, c) an active blog with increasing subscribers, d) an active account on LinkedIn with increasing contacts e) an active channel on YouTube, f) an active, built-out account on FriendFeed… and many, many more platforms.

And here's a two minute video where I talk about your blog being the hub of your online activity.

Why do I need to blog for my site?

Amazingly enough, I can’t tell you how many glazed over looks I still receive when I tell people that social media is not about how many networks you can list, nor is it about throwing up a profile on a social network like you did with your website 12 years ago. It’s not necessarily about building your own social network either.

Whether anyone likes it or not, social media engagement is really about blogs.

I’m not saying you or your company must have a blog, but building relationships with relevant bloggers and understanding how blogs work is essential to any social media strategy.

What social media engagement really requires is a fundamental shift in how companies approach mass communication. Without this shift — even if it comes about gradually, any attempts at throwing up outposts on Facebook or anyplace else on the web will basically be a waste of time.

The key is not to create a social media check-list with names of social networks or tools that dictates you have a Facebook page and a MySpace page.

Most of the time, companies are filling these spaces with all the same old content they already have on their website. Depending on your objectives, that may be okay, but it’s always better to research and identify ways those spaces, and others, can be used to engage the people who are already there and empower them with the ability to share your message — maybe even reward them for doing so.

To reap benefits of engagement, even those spaces should promote a level of call and response as well as some kind of takeaway for consumers to share within their own corner of the social web. This keeps people interested in what you have to offer.

The monologue is now a dialogue
I know a lot of us keep saying this, but believe me, it bears repeating.

Sure, a good understanding of how these technologies work will come in handy, but companies are better served by understanding how information travels along the social web. Whether anyone likes it or not, information no longer travels in a straight shot from company to journalist to public.

Instead, it bounces back and forth between all three. It’s just as possible for information to swell up from the public to the journalist to the company, or from the public to the company to the journalist. Or from the journalist to the company to the public and back again.

You don’t have time to write a press release and get key messages ready for every little statement companies will be demanded upon to make. Ignoring this will simply make your company look like it’s either out of touch or worse — that it doesn’t care.

People within organizations need to be empowered to have conversations with others on the social web. Does this have the potential to get messy? You bet. Does it end there? Not at all.

The nature of a dialogue is that there are ample chances to clarify and correct your position as you go along. Admitting errors quickly and moving on is a quality we tend to admire in other human beings — we respect this quality in companies, too.

As a side note, I’ve used this example before, but if you need a good visual for how information travels along the social web, check out David Armano‘s Influence Ripples. I like it so much, I even carry around one of his business cards with the image on the back just so I can it to show people at parties.

What may be shocking to some (especially those in the technology sector) is that in many industries, companies still don’t think blogs are important.

Q Who reads blogs?
A Journalists

If for no other reason, companies should pay attention to blogs simply because journalists do.

More than three quarters of journalists see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles, and insight into the tone of an issue, according to a study conducted last year by Brodeur, a unit of of Omnicom Group in conjunction with Marketwire. I found out about this study from a post Valeria Maltoni wrote on her blog.

This fact proves that information journalists receive from blogs helps them know what questions to ask, what are the hot-button issues, anecdotal evidence of consumer attitude, etc.

If you don’t think this is important, you’re not seeing the big picture.

Another item to consider is that blogs, by their very nature of regular updates, incoming and outgoing links, are very search engine friendly.

Q Who uses search? (i.e. Google, Yahoo!)
A Just about everybody… but also journalists

The most commonly referenced figure is 92 percent. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project March 2007 report, 92 percent of journalists use search engines to research story ideas. This means that they are not searching their inboxes looking for your press release. They know how to find information on their own.

What does search have to do with blogs?

Blogs automatically archive old material, they’re regularly updated, chock full of content as well as incoming and outgoing links. These qualities make blog posts downright irresistible to search engines like Google.

Back to relationships
Add to all these great facts about readership and search the passion that people who blog about your company have for what you do.

People who take the time to write about your company — even if it’s an angry diatribe that curses your product or your company’s very existence — care enough to write about your company. If you work to turn the situation around, treat them like they matter, they’ll care that much more.

In the future they will likely turn to you for answers during a crisis out of respect for the person within your company who addressed their experience. They will no longer be content to grouse around on the Internet complaining to anyone who will listen because now they have you — not your brand, but a human relationship with someone inside the organization.

Back to search
Information doesn’t travel in a linear way and neither does this post.

If a journalist searches for your company, and blogs are inherently search engine friendly, would you rather they happen along a blogger who feels they have a personal relationship with someone inside the company, or a stranger in search of an audience?

Stop worrying about whether this or that blogger has a large enough following to warrant a response or whether or not the person fits into the right bucket and simply acknowledge them. With technology, this really can be done.

As usual, I care a lot about what you think and appreciate your feedback. Maybe you think I’m overestimating the power of blogs or, maybe you think there’s a better way to prove why blogs matter. If so, please let me know in the comments or write your own blog post in response and link back to me. After all, isn’t that how this conversation thing is supposed to work?
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