So if you are looking to monetize blogs what are your options? I’ve only got experience with a couple of methods of making money with blogs so that’s what I’m going to talk about here and to be honest its all you need to get started. The thing is that you can choose to monetize your blog in a huge variety of ways but you’ll figure this stuff out for yourself as you go along and different needs crop up.

Deciding how to make money from your blog with regards to what monetization method to use pails into insignificance when compared to the important stuff such as choosing profitable keywords, search engine optimization through intelligent linkbuilding and ultimately getting the traffic which you can convert into cash. Get these things right then you can start having fun trying to work out which is the most profitable way to generate money.

Right off the bat most people who are trying to make money online from blogs or websites add Adsense to pages and hope that visitors will see something on one of the Adsense ads that catches their eye. If the visitor clicks on an ad Google will ship some money to your account. There are plenty of other similar advertising programs out there, if you are interested enough you can do your own research but Adsense is the daddy and the best place for to start.

Google Adsense has the advantages of being extremely easy to use and can be implemented successfully with a huge number of niches due to the number of advertisers who pay to have their ads displayed in the system.

Negatives of Adsense are that the Ads in some niches will pay you a very little per click so to make a lot of money you’ll have to get many visitors to your pages and get a good click through rate.

Affiliate Programs

Another way to monetize blog is to become an affiliate for one of the vast array of companies with products and services to sell who offer such possibilities. When you are doing affiliate marketing you are basically a partner of the retailer and work to promote their goods and services, you’re rewarded whenever you send a visitor to a site who goes on to make a purchase.

Obviously the affiliate system differs from Adsense due to the fact that your visitor actually has to buy something when they click on to someone else’s site. You get paid less often than with Adsense but have the potential to make more money as affiliate programs pay a percentage of the value of the sale. Work in a niche that concentrates on expensive products or services and you could make a living from a small amount of traffic in comparison to regular advertising programs.

Where To Find An Affiliate Program

Whenever I’m on the lookout for a company to partner up with for a particular niche I’ll simply go to Google and search for “My niche + affiliate” or “A particular product + affiliate” to see what comes up. You’ll usually find something that suits your site that you can push to your visitors. Of course, there is always the opportunity to become an amazon or Ebay affiliate. I’ve had some success with Amazon recently although many people moan about the small percentage you get from sales but for some niches it works well. I haven’t tried Ebay affiliates yet but plan to sign up for an account in the near future and give it a shot. I’ve heard good things about the Ebay Partner Network so I’ll report back when I get some experience.

Clickbank.com is another popular place to find products to sell to the “guests” on your niche blog or website. With high percentage payouts per sale you can make some great money using these products although some of them won’t sell well and many are of dubious quality. Still money is money in the battle to monetize blog.

If you were reading this post hoping to find the definitive guide to how to Make Money Online from blogging with various methods of monetization you may be disappointed I haven’t covered all the possibilities. But the reality is there are more important things you need to do to earn cash online than monetize blogs with the perfect advertising program or affiliate product. Work on the big stuff to get more traffic to your blog then you can worry about searching for the best way to make money from that traffic.

The truth is that this post was a bit of an experiment on my part to try and get a post to rank in the search engine results pages for the term “monetize blog”. I’ve tried to impart a little knowledge for anyone new to earning money online along the way so I hope you have found something useful. And if you found this post by typing the phrase “monetize your blog” or something similar into Google or some other search engine leave a comment and let me know so we can see if the experiment worked.

By the way I have installed the KeywordLuv and Dofollow plugin on this blog so if you leave a contextual comment you’ll get a free “dofollow” link back to your blog to help with your search engine optimization efforts. You can’t say any fairer than that!

Why Do We Need To Get Backlinks?

If you’re trying to make money online then you need to either get traffic to whatever it is your trying to sell, or sell traffic to someone else that has a product or service they’re selling. If you’re attempting to make money with Adsense then you are basically just a middle man funneling traffic to other people with a product that needs buyers. So in the Internet marketing world traffic is money and those who have the most traffic are generally making the most money.

You might be struggling to see what relevance this has to the topic on hand but to get the most web site traffic we need to get our sites as high up on Google as possible because Google is the big boss when it comes to controlling Internet traffic. We need to convince the world’s best search engine that we are worthy of their respect in order that they will send us a nice steady stream of visitors for us to convert into cash in whatever way we choose. This is the game know as search engine optimization.

The battle to get to the top of Google is like a giant popularity contest where the most popular site gets to sit at the top of the Google castle and scoop up 40% of the traffic for a particular keyword. Backlinks are the key to the popularity contest in that they are the way that we collect votes in our favor from the rest of the Internet community. When someone with another blog or website links to your site they’re telling Google that they think you’re one of the coolest kids in school. Collect the most votes and Google is going to start taking notice of your site and send you to the top of the SERPs.

Another, equally important aspect of backlinks is their ability to signal to Google what your site is about. For example if I link to this site with the text Make Money Online than Google knows that this is a site about making money online and will take that into consideration when deciding where to put me in the search engines.

The words you use to link to your site is known as anchor text and its vitally important if you are to make the most of your backlinks that you take so much effort to find. A mistake that many beginners make when they are building backlinks to their domains is to use anchor text that bares no relation to the subject covered in the site.

If you leave comments in blogs for a backlink with your name as an anchor link what are you telling the search engines about your site that is of any value? Do you want Google to rank you highly for the word “George” or “Susan”? Probably not! At the same time using anchor text such as “click here” as a link to your site at the end of articles is a waste of your energy.

When getting friends to link back to this site I will get them to use anchor text such as “Make Money With Adsense”, “Make Money Online” and “Adsense Make Money” because thats one of the best ways to let the search engines know what subjects I’m covering. Hopefully it will also let them know that my site is respected for the content that covers that topic though if you’ve read much of my content you’ll realise that the respect is misplaced, but that’s another story.

So get into the habit of having all your back links to be keyword rich anchor text that is related to you blog. On that point make sure you mix the anchor text up or you might be penalized for Google bombing.

What Is Google Bombing?

Google bombing is a method of manipulating the search engine results by using a specific keyword relentlessly as your anchor text in order to get ranked highly for that word or phrase. Google has cottoned on to this practice and now punishes sites whose anchor text links look unnatural. The remedy for this is to vary your anchor text between a large number of related keywords for which you would like your site to rank. This is the reason that I don’t always use one specific keyword such as “make money with google” in the resource box of any articles I write.

Now you know the importance of being able to get links and making sure your anchor text backlinks are relevant to the subject of your content to further your SEO efforts. Next time I’m going to talk about another element of your links that is important and how to get yourself the very best quality backlinks available.

What really matters in the battle for good search engine rankings is off page optimization. After all, good on-page work only tells Google that you can optimize a web page. But get a barrow load of sites from all over the Internet pointing to your domain and Google is going to really sit up an take notice, believing that the information or service you provide must be of value.

So, to get your website further up the search engine results pages you need to find ways to get backlinks that are of a good quality to your pages. This is definitely something that is easier said than done but it is imperative to your success if your aim is to make money online.

Next post I’m going to talk about the best ways to get backlinks that will make a real difference to your search engine rankings.

How do we go about getting backlinks to our websites?

There are a few ways to get backlinks to your site, the traditional way and the method that is preferred by Google is to build a site that is so awesome that people all over the Internet will love your content so much that they will link to your pages. This technique has the main advantages of being free but it also rocks due to the fact that you don’t have to do the backlink building work yourself. Unfortunately it does rely on you creating a place on the Web that’s so good that links to it appear by magic and this is an extremely difficult, time-consuming task.

Option number two in the backlinking toolbox is to get out there and beg, steal and borrow links from wherever you see the opportunity. The most popular and successful ways to do this are as follows:

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a very simple way to get some links which only costs a little of your time. Sign up for an account with an article publication site such as Ezine Articles and they will allow you to publish a short article on your chosen subject with a couple of links back to your own site.

Set up some free blogs

There are a huge number of sites out there who will give your own free space on the Internet where you can publish your own content. Publish a blog with a few short articles on it, get it indexed by Google and you can use it to get free links back to your money sites. The best place to get started with this method is at Blogger.com which is Google’s own free blogging platform.

Create Hubpages

Hubpages.com is another place where you can publish your own content and get backlinks to your sites. With their easy to use system you can quickly get content up on their server and use it to build links. Hubpages has an advantage over other options such as blogger blogs and squidoo due to the fact that they are held in high regard by Google, at least for now. Because of this, links from the hubpages domain can be a real powerful force in improving your own domains in the eyes of Google.

Link Exchanges

Creating loads of original content to fill up blogger blogs, hubpages and article directories can be a tough job so it can help to have other weapons in your arsenal which aren’t so draining. One way to get great links from quality sites is to email fellow bloggers in your niches and ask if they would be willing to place a link to your site in exchange for one to theirs.

Buying links

This is a big one that pretty much everyone in the super competitive niches such as loans and credit cards seems to use. Google have serious problems with this one for obvious reasons. If you buy a link you’re basically faking your popularity and manipulating the search engine results. Its not something I have ever done due to the fact that I don’t know enough about it, but I’d advise anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing to stay well clear. Get caught doing this and your site is in danger of getting deindexed from Google.

If your sites aren’t ranking as well as you would like then you are going to have to work on getting more backlinks. Its not a glamorous job and quite frankly its a pain in the arse much of the time but building links will make a world of difference to the amount of traffic you get.

There are a few other ways to get links that make things a bit easier but I’ll go into them more in a future post.

We have to take advantage of the fact that Google has a virtual monopoly on the search market by building our sites in a manner that Google likes to encourage it to put us closer to the top of the SERPs. You can go this in two ways, the first is the black hat method which attempts to trick the Google algorithm into believing our site is more relevant and important than it is. I don’t recommend taking this course of action if you want to be making money online over the long haul because the people working for Google are pretty clever and if you can’t keep ahead of the game they are going to catch you eventually and punish you for your insubordination

The way most professionals approach search engine optimization is generally from a white hat perspective with a little bit of gray thrown in for good measure. In an ideal world we would be able to follow the Google guidelines for getting sites ranked better and the best site would win. Unfortunately, in the real world this doesn’t work because no one else is playing by the rules, so we have to bend them a little ourselves if we are to keep up.

Regardless of how you do it, making Google love your sites is the key to getting the traffic which in turns puts the moneys in your account.

The most important thing I’ve come to realize is that there are no keys to riches, which is funny really because all the “Internet Marketing Gurus” spend their days selling us books which supposedly contain these non-existent keys.

Of course the gurus will harp on constantly about the secrets of making money online as if they know something no one else does. You’ll part with $47 time and again for a useless pdf that contains nothing but empty waffle. If your a total newbie you’ll think you’ve learned something of value and you’ll probably put it into practice hoping for instant riches.

You be slightly pissed off when you realize that the guru’s system isn’t going to make you more than a few peanuts for your hours of hard labor but you’ll suck it up and move on to the next pretender who promises that his new book is all you need for the success you desire. One day on the future after you’ve spend $100s if not $1000s you’ll decide that its impossible to make money online and that anyone that says otherwise is a liar and an idiot.

Not to worry though because for every person like you that gives up on the dream there will be two more along to take your place to throw their money away.

Well I’m here to tell you that the vast majority of the Internet Marketers do a have a filthy little secret and it one that they’ll never be revealing in a $47 e-book. Its a secret that anyone who’s been around this scam for a while eventually starts to realize if they haven’t given up in despair.

Most of the so-called “gurus” make all their money from telling you how to make money online. Many of the cocks selling make money online books wouldn’t have a fucking clue where to start if they had to make their Internet riches the hard way.

I was one of these people trying in vain to find the secret keys to Internet wealth. Thankfully didn’t spend too much money on the crappy products because I’m a tight Scottish Bastard and am naturally skeptical about get rich quick schemes. If you’re reading this blog you’re probably in the same position yourself. Lets be honest, why in gods name would anyone be reading my inane ramblings if they weren’t trying unsuccessfully to make money online.

But I believe I’m starting to see the light as far as making money online goes. There are secrets involved I suppose but not many people talk about what’s required because it involves an unpleasant thought. The secret is persistent hard work, focused in your chosen direction.

There are many ways to make money online, find one that suits your personality and pour your soul into it consistently for 6 months and see where it gets you. Stop reading about every new method from the blood sucking Internet Marketing pricks, you don’t need them.

Remove the bookmark in your browser for the Warrior forum and never visit the place again….I’M FUCKING SEROUS! The warrior forum if ground zero for the “Gurus”. Sure there is occasionally a morsel of half decent information, but you’ll have to give most of the posters $27 if you want them to finish their thoughts and many of their latest e books will say pretty much the same thing as all the other ones you’ve read.

Find the less well known places on the web that disseminate quality information for free and start educating yourself in Search Engine Optimization techniques. When you learn to get the traffic the money will follow!

Quality Making Money Online Websites

1. Read Griz’s Make Money Online For Beginners Blog – If you’ve been around Internet Marketing for a while don’t turn your nose up at the Beginners tag, the information on this site is pure gold and not understood by many IM “experts”. Work your way through all the posts on this site and you’ll massively expand you’re knowledge on what is required to make money online. The site is a hub for other successful webmaster’s so you’ll find enough here and on the linked sites to last you 6 months.

2. Check out Blogger Unleashed - I haven’t looked too deeply into using Vic’s techniques myself but he definitely knows his stuff and his methods may be right for you. His videos are worth watching for comedy value alone.

3. The Keyword Academy’s make money online Course – You’ll have to pay if you want to become a member at the keyword academy. Its definitely worth the cost but don’t worry if you don’t want to spend any money, just read Griz’s Blog instead its got all you need to get you on your way.

Come back here in 6 months and tell me how you’re getting on.