Monetize A Blog

Up until now I have been giving you the reader a few of the various ways you can monetize a blog (don’t worry, there will be many more ways coming daily). Now it is my intention to discuss something equally as important. Driving traffic to your site, after all what good are well placed ads if nobody ever sees them?

I could type all day long and still not cover every tactic to bring more traffic to your site so I will just cover a few and leave you, the readers, free to comment or join the forums to discuss even more ways you have found.

Social Networking Sites – whether you use Myspace, Twitter, FaceBook, or one of the many other social networking sites, the people you can almost always get to read your blog are your close friends. Target them!

Blog Directories – There are literally hundreds if not more of these around, use your favorite search engine and look for them. Register your blog in the appropriate category and be sure to check back often for new directories.

Other Blogs – Read other blogs and be sure to comment on articles you like.Make sure your comment is relevant to the topic at hand and above all  Do Not Spam! If you haven’t read the article do not post a comment, it will only end up deleted and be a waste of your time.

Forums – Forums can be a wealth of traffic for you. If your blog niche is on Clowns, search your favorite search engine again for Clown Forums. There are literally forums for just about any niche you can imagine. Become a member of the forums that pertain to your blog niche but once again, Do Not Spam! At Best you would end up attacked verbally by the community and at worst you would end up with an I.P. Ban. Instead I want you to make relevant posts to threads in the forums never mentioning your blog, just be sure you have its url coded into your signature.  Sooner or later you will start pulling traffic from your signature link.

There you have it, just a few places and ways you can drive traffic towards your blog. Feel free to drop a comment or join our forums if you would like to learn more ways to either get traffic to your blog or to monetize a blog.

Happy Blogging!

The really great thing about the next thing I want to tell my readers about is you can set your own prices with it. It is called Adify and it can be a publishers best friend as long as they know their targeted traffic and can accurately predict how much an ad on their site should go for. The more traffic you are pulling the more you can set your rate at and successfully get it each and every time.

ReviewMe is a very nice way to make a little easy cash from your blog. After your site is approved by ReviewMe, you will become eligible to review products or services and the payout per review starts at $20 and can go as high as $200 per review. This method worked very well for me in the past and I could see myself using it on future projects as well. I highly recommend ReviewMe to anyone trying to monetize a blog that wants a decent payout at a pretty decent pace.

Kontera has never been one of my favorite ways to place ads on my site however I would be lying if I said I didn’t use them in my earlier days of blogging. They do pay out if you can get past how annoying they can be when you are actually trying to read a post. It is my opinion that using Kontera to monetize a blog will do more harm than good as your readers hit the back button to get away from these ads that seem to pop up whenever you accidentally drag your mouse anyplace near the link.

As I said when I started this blog, I will be honest about what I have found that pays you, my readers. I will also be just as honest about my personal beliefs on using each of these ways to monetize a blog. It is up to you in the end to decide what you can and can not live with.