Wel­come to my new “How To Blog” series! In this series, I’ll try to put my knowl­edge to good use and shed some light on the basic of blog­ging. You will learn how to set up a self-hosted blog, what are the must-have plu­g­ins, how to attract read­ers, how to mon­e­tize your blog etc. I’ll pub­lish a new “How To Blog” post every Saturday.

Got a blog but no cash? Today, we will see what you can do to mon­e­tize your blog!

I spend about a year being ad-free on my Blog­ger blog but even­tu­ally, real­ity caught up. I was happy to see my blog was getting—just a bit—popular, but I also put a lot of work into it. So I decided to move to a more professional-looking self-hosted Word­Press and to mon­e­tize my blog. Since I would need to buy a domain name and pay host­ing fees, it sounded fair.

I had read a lot about mon­e­tiz­ing a blog. Some claimed to make thou­sands a month (I’d have been happy with a cou­ple of hun­dreds!), some were dis­play­ing more ads than con­tent, some were com­plain­ing about scams pro­grams that wouldn’t pay them. Phew. Where was I sup­posed to start? And by the way, did I men­tion I’m not a mar­ket­ing per­son, that I absolutely hate com­mer­cials and ads, and that Naomie Klein’s No Logo was my favourite book?

But I put my lit­tle red flag in my bag and inves­ti­gated how I could make money. Indeed, there are sev­eral options:

• Pay-per-click pro­grams: ads are dis­played on the blog, and you get paid each time a reader click on one of them. For exam­ple, Google’s Adsense,
• Pay-per-display pro­grams: adver­tis­ers pay to dis­play an ad on your blog, no mat­ter who clicks on it. For exam­ple, Project Won­der­ful.
• Sell­ing link words: adver­tis­ers buy a spe­cific key­word on you blog, which they link to their page. For exam­ple, Text Link Ads.
• Spon­sored reviews: adver­tis­ers pay for you to blog about a spe­cific products/ web­site. For exam­ple, Pay-Per-Post.

There are a few meth­ods I haven’t men­tioned here, such as affil­i­ate, sell­ing ser­vices or prod­ucts because I haven’t expe­ri­enced them first hand.

I was per­son­ally very much against spon­sored reviews. First of all, I found that there was very lit­tle choice of prod­ucts to blog about if I wanted to stick to my main theme (immi­gra­tion, Canada, pol­i­tics etc.). I didn’t want to write per­sonal posts about Canada and next thing be seen blog­ging about a new sweeper! I also found that spon­sored reviews can eas­ily “kill” a blog. Some­times, the temp­ta­tion is too big to write paid posts after paid and there’s no con­tent left… I unsub­scribed from too many blogs that fell into that trap.

That left me with the other options… and a few advices for you.

Adsense: I signed up with Adsense seven months ago. And I’m not ashamed to say I’m very far from the $100 pay­out thresh­old. True, I didn’t put ads units every­where (I want read­ers to focus on what I write… yeah, I’m that vain) but I still expected a bit more. But any­way, not that many peo­ple click on the ads and I only make a few cents each time read­ers do (but it’s much appre­ci­ated!). I make about $5.00/ month with Adsense… not exactly what I thought I would make when I signed up.

Project Won­der­ful: PW is a bit orig­i­nal. You set up an account, dis­play a code wher­ever you want the ad to be and adver­tis­ers bid to dis­play their web­site on your blog. The first few months, I actu­ally made a bit of money thanks to that sys­tem. The income was also much stead­ier than with Adsense… I also like the square-ad design I chose and found the ads dis­played on my blog to blend in. Lately, I noticed bids slowed down.

Text Links Ads: Text Links Ads is basi­cally a mid­dle­man between the blog­ger and the adver­tiser and they sell key­words for you. For exam­ple, let’s say you wrote a post about a trip to Paris. Some­one may be inter­ested in buy­ing the key­word “Paris” and link it to a hotel. You will get paid for that: the price will depend mostly on your blog’s Page Rank. With a Page Rank 4, I usu­ally sell my key­words between $10-$30 per month. There’s not min­i­mum pay­ment and every month, I get my money through Pay­pal. Text Link Ad con­tacts you when you have new ads to approve (you can also set to auto-approval) and you basi­cally don’t have to do any­thing. It took me a cou­ple of months to get a decent pay­ment, but I now get a few new links every month and it adds up pretty quickly. So far, for me, it’s the best way to (no, this is not a spon­sored review!).

So far, I get most of my blog­ging income from Text Link Ad, fol­lowed closely by Project Won­der­ful and Adsense.

So, how will you do bet­ter than me? Make more money than this blog?

Well, first of all, the more traf­fic you get, the more likely you are to sell your ads at a pre­mium rate. This blog cur­rently gets about 700 hits/ day and 200 unique hits/ day, which is I guess still aver­age (but I’m work­ing on that!).

Then, mon­e­tiz­ing a blog takes time. First, you have to build good con­tent. Yes, just sign­ing up for a blog isn’t enough. These two days old blogs full of ads but still with the default “wel­come” mes­sage always makes me laugh. Yeah, I wish it was that easy.…! You also have to some­how mas­ter the basic of SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) to be found on search engines. And finally, you have to inves­ti­gate the best ways to make money on your blog. You can prob­a­bly strike good deals if you deal with adver­tis­ers directly. For exam­ple, the Dig­i­tal Point forum has a good buy, sell or trade sec­tion and so does Blog­geries. Mid­dle­men are not always needed, but you need to invest time.

And finally, like we will see next week, each blog has a rank­ing. Your page rank, your back links, your RSS sub­scrip­tions, all that matter.

Moral of the story… it is pos­si­ble to mon­e­tize a blog but don’t expect too much, at least at first. Some peo­ple are extremely suc­cess­ful and brag about it end­lessly but truth is, only good blogs get rewarded on the long term and mon­e­tiz­ing a blog can be a slow process.

Mean­while, you will have to make sure you don’t irri­tate your read­ers in the process. Nobody likes to read spon­sored reviews in lieu of a fun blog post, have to close ten pop-ups to open a blog and being forced to scan through ads to spot a post! Watch out for that… there is a fine line between a mon­e­tized blog and a splog.

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Please, note that although this post was by no mean spon­sored, I used my refer­ral ID to link to the Text Link Ad home­page. If you’re inter­ested in sign­ing up with the pro­gram, please con­sider using it. Thank you!
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Related arti­cles:

1. Must Have On Your Blog (5÷10)
2. Tweak Your Blog (6÷10)
3. 20+ Tools For Your Blog (9÷10)
4. All About Blog­ging: Blog Mon­e­tiz­ing, What Works Best?
5. All About Blog­ging: 5 Blogs Turn-Offs or Why I Stopped Read­ing Your Blog