There are 5 ways to make money with your blog (or website). Might be others – I’m open for suggestions: 

1. Sell ad space on your blog
2. Write articles for other companies/blogs/individuals
3. Syndicate your blog posts to other blogs/Sell Blog Subscriptions
4. Sell your own things on your blog
5. Sell third party goods online

1. Sell ad space on your blog

One of the most popular ads is GoogleAds: https://www.google.com/adsense (although they pay you only when someone actually clicks on the ad) and the Yahoo Publisher Network https://publisher.yahoo.com/portal/login.php

Selling ad space is fairly easy to do; just create a section on your blog that describes the benefit for companies/individuals to place an ad on your blog. 

One word of advice though: When you start this adventure, do not fill your blog to the gills with ads – it will not look very professional. Your readers need to see what you can offer first before they will buy anything from you or off your blog. 

You can spot a newbie, right-away by the imense number of ads running on his/her site, trying desperately to make some dough. People do not respond well and they will leave your site fairly quick before you can even write about your expertise. 

Here’s an example from the highly acclaimed blog called doshdosh (http://www.doshdosh.com/advertise) 

Dosh Dosh Advertising Page

Same can be done for a website. The more traffic you have the more you can charge. 

If your blog has low traffic you can always go to TextLinkAds or TextLinkBrokers. Even better connect with your network in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and let them know you are offering ad space on your blog for a minimum of $XX amount per month. You will be surprised of the response you get. 

2. Write Articles for other companies/blogs/individuals

This usually frightens some people but you don’t have to be an expert in a particular field.

You’ll have to show proof that you: 

 - are a creative blogger
 - have articles you wrote and published on your blog, ezines or squidoo lenses
 - comment and are active on other blogs as well
 - are proficient using social media, plug-ins and add-ons
 - have a basic understanding of simple SEO rules

The best way of all is to show that you are a pro is creating, maintaining and actively contributing on your own blog. You should have at least 3-4 months under your belt and a minimum of 30-50 good articles consisting of 250-500 words each .

The core subject or theme of your blog does not matter as long as you write frequently and professionally. Obviously check for grammar. Write well and write often. 

3. Syndicate your blog posts to other blogs/Sell Blog Subscriptions

If the information posted on your blog is in high demand you might want to think about syndicating your blog.

You can accomplish this through 3 easy steps:

 a. Find out what your blog’s feed is (it should look like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/your-blog-name-here)
 b. Customize your feed through the feed dashboard
 c. Finally – publicize your feed to your readers.

Others have started blogging and got so popular that know they sell subscriptions. See problogger.com 

Again, based on how popular your blog is, the amount of money you can charge can vary. Initially start small and as you add more value you can increase the dollar amount you can charge.

4. Sell Your Own Things

In the fortunate even that you already have something to sell on your own, you’ll have to have some additional tools along side your blog: 

 - If you are selling digital assets (e-books, art, photos, music, etc.) you’ll need an ecommerce shopping cart and a PayPal account.

The alternative is http://www.payloadz.com or http://www.payloadz.com

 - If you are selling physical, tangible products you’ll need all of the above, a FedEx account and…lots of boxes.

The majority of bloggers sell their ebooks and books, usually directly from their blog using a simple PayPal account.

5. Sell third party goods online

This is the part where beginners make the mistake of selecting products that they enjoy disregarding their reader’s likes and dislikes. Chose the products your reader base enjoy and look for. If your site is about web design don’t post ads for MP3 players or mortgage adverts. 

People that come to your site seek your advice in whatever you are writing about so offer them the things that augment your articles and the entire theme of your blog. 

Look for products to sell by signing up as an affiliate. For instance I host my blog with JustHost. I love their customer service and I think it brings a lot of value to every webmaster out there; I therefore promote their company on my site, of course getting a little money for that. 

Other sources where you might find good affiliate programs: 

Clickbank: http://www.clickbank.com 
Commission Junction: http://www.cj.com 
Hydra Network: http://www.hydranetwork.com 

Once you set this up, you’ll need to promote your blog so it increases in traffic and thus your chances of selling directly from your site. How can you do that? See below a list of articles talking about that. 

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• Generate Revenue Online With Top Blogging Websites *** (franklinbishop.net)
• How to Start a Blog in 5 Easy Steps (defactomind.com)
• How To Make Money Online (untreatableonline.com)

Create Traffic to Your Website

How To Get Free Website Traffic

This is part 2 of the “How to Make Money Online Series“.

As I mentioned before, there are two ways to get traffic to your website:

Paid traffic (Google adwords) and free traffic. I will tell you how to get free website traffic. I understand that most people that start an online business, don’t have the budget for expensive Google ads. You need free traffic and lots of it. I will cut to the chase and tell you my top ways to get free website traffic.

Top ways to get free traffic:

1. Write Lots of Keyword Rich Articles
   You can write a bunch of articles on your niche and publish it on article directories like Ezinearticles or CopyBlogger.com. You can put links to your articles pointing to your site and this way you will get free website traffic that is targeted as well.

2. Go Viral & Submit Your Videos to All Video Sites
   You can use Camtasia (or Camstudio is free) or other video tools to make loads of videos and upload them to various video sites with one click using Tubemogul. Put a link to your site in the video’s description and see your free website traffic skyrocket!

3. Use Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.)
   Nothing is easier than to start a free profile with Facebook, Myspace, or whatever other social media you  choose. On Facebook you can start money making groups, post links on your and other people’s groups and also update your status with links to your site. This is a great way to build trust, a steady following to your sites or products and of course to get free website traffic. Same goes for LinkedIn and MySpace. be active and show your true potential.

4. Use Social-bookmarking
   Submit all your articles and web pages to the biggest social bookmarking sites like, digg, stumbleupon, propellor, reddit, delicious, buzz etc. Addthis is a very helpful tool to add to your pages, where you and other people can add the articles to all these sites with the press of one button. This works really well, in the short term and also builds up back links to your site. It’s definitely one of the best ways to get free website traffic, especially in the short term.

5. Become a Twitter Expert
   The new social media and micro-blogging site is becoming very popular and is one of the best ways to get thousands of people to see links and descriptions of your sites. You can get hundreds of free hits every day if you build a big Twitter following. To make this easier, you can use an automated way to get thousands of followers with The Twitter Online system or Twitter Traffic Machine. This way is potentially one of the easiest and best way to get free website traffic on autopilot.

6. Be Active in Forums
   Join a few popular forms in your niche and make a lot of interesting posts and comments. Make sure to have your link in your signature. This will also build some nice back links for free website traffic.

7. Email Marketing
   You should definitely get a good auto responder, like Aweber, and build yourself a list. In a matter of months you can have a huge list of potential customers that you can mail at will with your offers. This could bring you a lot of extra sales.

8. Create a Blog
   Create a blog at Blogspot or use WordPress to write about every product that you promote and comment on other blogs as well. Get free website traffic when you use all your links in these blogs. Blogs tend to rank up pretty high with Google, so it gives you good back links.

9. Use Viral Marketing
   This can really get you a lot of free traffic if you start to promote your link a bit. It’s pretty easy to do. Most sites require you to view a few sites to get started and you then promote your link. All the people that you referred, have to view your site as well and the people that they refer and so, for many levels deep. So if you refer 3 people, and they refer 3 people and so on and so on, you can actually get thousands of hits and get free website traffic easily. I can recommend Million Ez Hits, if you want to try viral traffic.

10. Traffic Exchange sites
    You can get an unlimited amount of free hits to your website with this kind of free website traffic, you are only limited by the time you put in. You have to surf different people’s sites and get credits for doing so. These credits are used to “buy” views for your website, banners or text ads. So, for instance, you view 100 sites, 100 people will view your site. It’s best to use a good splash page for this traffic to get the surfer’s attention. Sign up pages work well. The top Traffic exchanges I can recommend would be Easy Hits 4u, Traffic Splash and Traffic Taxis. Use all 3 at the same time, taking turns surfing the sites, you will build credits quickly.

There are many other ways to get free website traffic, and with experience you will find which ones work best for you. If you are considering using paid advertising, like Adwords, I recommend you get a good guide like The Commission BluePrint , to help you step by step to setup profitable campaigns and make huge commissions. If you don’t you could lose a lot of money very fast.

For other valuable insights to the Web Marketing Business see the column to the right or go back to part 1 of this series:”How to Make Money Online Series“.