Make Money Blogging in Nigeria: Part 5

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links which may earn us a commission when you click on them.

Posted by Felix Okoli on Saturday October 23, 2010 at 13:21:30:

How do I Monetize?
When it comes to making money online with a blog, one expects to make money easily while just focusing on his blogging activity. In as much as there are various ways to monetize a blog, selecting the type that best suits your blog or will give you the maximum satisfaction could be a major challenge. At times , selecting a combination of revenue streams could still give you what you really need. Before we go further, let's take a quick look at various ways of making money from a blog.

Monetizing a blog could be done by using:
- Pay Per Click Ads
- Impression Based Ads
- Time based ads
- Donations
- Subscriptions
- Direct Selling
- Affiliate Ads

Pay Per Click Ads
This has to do with making money or getting credited whenever visitors click on an advert shown on your blog. There are many advertising networks in this category with the Biggest being Google Adsense and then others like Adbrite, Tribalfusion, Chitika and Bidvertiser. All these internet companies can pay the publisher or blogger as much as $0.5 to $2 per click depending on how much targeted traffic they can convert and how well a blog is ranked in an ad category.
The good thing about this kind of ads for a blogger is that you don't need to wait for a sale to be made but as long as you are converting traffic, you get paid, it is that easy.

Impression Based Ads
These are ads that pays blogs whenever they are displayed. It is that easy. As long as your blog has a lot of traffic, you can earn money by just allowing ads that are displayed on your blog. However earning from it is not that easy as you may have to display about a thousand impressions to get a dollar.
This kind of ads are of better use and make more money for a blog that has large traffic which may not necessarily be a buying audience. It is most importantly beneficial for large forums and blogs having a huge traffic. Google adsense offers this kind of ads in conjunction with its PPC ads and they pay based on the CPM. Another online advertising network that offers impression based ads is Adbrite in the form of full page interstitial ads that loads up on your entire page after the page loads. While Google ads are displayed on ads post online, Adbrite displays on the entire page and can be ignored by visitors. Adbrite's full page ads are the best paying for publishers who have large traffic but still find it hard to make money from traffic.

Time Based Ads
These are money making ads that are based on time. They are mostly ads you can sell yourself or by using a selling platform like Adbrite or others and attach a time limit to it. All you need to do to get this up and running is by indicating the allowable sizes, pricing and duration. You can start selling this in the form of text links or banner ads for as low as $5 per week or month. You can choose to sell ads per month, yearly or weeks.
The good thing about selling this kind of ads is that you set the price yourself and leverage better on your blog's ability to make money. It may even be much more profitable for you than if you were using Google adsense. The only disadvantage is that you might spend more time selling your own ads than actually blogging but you can counter this by managing your ad sales with a third party that still allows you to set the pricing and other features.

Donations
One other relatively easy way to monetize a website is by including donation buttons. Donation buttons can come in various forms and are used by few bloggers and websites to accept financial support from satisfied readers and visitors who may want to contribute to their efforts. Some bloggers use buttons like Buy me a beer or drink, support this site, donate and so on to rake in support from people. However this kind of monetization is not that successful in blogs that don't appeal to people but it is more profitable for websites and blogs that have no other means of income and yet support humanity. Blogs that deal with natural disasters, global warming, religion and politics can do well with this kind of money making buttons.
How effective donations are on blogs may also depend on how personal or trusting a blogger is before his readers and the loyalty that he enjoys.
Donation buttons are mainly used in conjunction with an online payment system such as Paypal, Alertpay, Liberty Reserve or even bank wires to lead contributors on how to make a financial support to that site.

Subscriptions
Offering subscriptions is also another way to make money blogging as it offers you an easy way to rake in money just by distributing content from your blog. You may publish a news letter periodically or a series of posts at different times of the year but they are not available on your website. How you then make money from it is by letting people subscribe to your reports while you have a system that adds them to an email list and delivers to paying clients. This would give readers the ability to access a wider and more special report from you which will ordinarily not be available on your blog. You can also sell subscriptions to membership sites or even an online forum for a low fee. Now imagine if you have 1000 members who have subscribed monthly for $5 to be closer to you via the forum? That's a whooping $5000 per month and it keeps recurring until they opt out. One good way of selling subscriptions is by using a Paypal subscription button and integrating it to your site.

Direct Selling
Time based ads is a form of direct selling but Direct selling goes more than time based ads. It involves selling something on your blog, whether tangible or not.
A couple of bloggers who are not satisfied with their Google adsense income or other ad sales have found out that they could make more money if they were selling stuff they own on their blogs
To be successful at doing this kind of activity you would need to be able to develop a product or service of your own.

What Product?
This should be something you can sell easily anddelivering online like mp3s, ringtones, pictures or even your own e-books. Bloggers who have a couple of thousand readers and subscribers ahve found out that writing and selling hteir own e-books is actually more profitable when compared toe the effort you put into it. You just have to publish one e-book once and sell it for more thant a million times for a token amount. All they need do is devleop the product and integrate it to a payment and automatic delivery platform like Amazon, Paypal, Barnes and Nobles and so on.
Paypal has been more effective in helping bloggers sell online as it is much cheaper and provides and Instant Payment Notification that will trigger a download for the buyer. Alertpay also offers IPN and can be used for selling instantly online as all you need to do when using this payment systems is an IPN handler to handle the transaction. If it would be too complex for a blogger, he can always sell his items or product using a third party platform like Amazon or others.

What Service?
So you are thinking of making money online with your blog, then you can also sell a service which may not be necessarily selling ads. You can sell your skills such as consulting, product or blog reviews and others. I've seen a Medical website which had Medical Doctors in its employment and it allows people to consult by asking questions for a fee.
You could also sell blog reviews on your website for as much as $10 per review and you may decide to do the review yourself or allow a guest review. You should let the buyer know the terms of your reviews such as accepting the outcome and number of words(e.g. 200 - 500 words) or for how many days it would be featured on your home page.
So selling reviews can be a good way to make money from a blog but it works well for high ranking and respected blogs that could prompt potential buyers to really want to do business with you.

Affiliate Ads
This involves signing up as a sales affiliate with advertising companies and promoting sales using affiliate ads. Affiliate ads come attached with your affiliate id such that when genuine buyers make a purchase through you, you earn a commission. Some ad networks accepting affiliates include Amazon.com, Bluehost, Netfirms, Enom, Godaddy, Google Adsense Affiliate Network and so on.

Conclusion
So if you are into blogging, there are several ways to choose to monetize your blog. While using PPC ads is good for some bloggers, others prefer selling directly and so whatever you choose, learn how to optimize it and keep your readers in mind.

Comments: