Blogging – Make Money with Ads

You’ve probably seen the ads. They exclaim:

“Get Paid to Blog!”

“Blog for Cash!”

“Earn $3000 a Month Blogging!”

Do these ads make you a little curious? What exactly is blogging and how do people make such good money doing it? Well good bloggers, the ones that consistently provide relevant and engaging content to a dedicated readership, make most of their money through advertising.

Blogging is, very simply, the act of writing for an online audience. A blog, a portmanteau of “web log”, is typically organized chronologically with the most current entries presented first. A person that writes and maintains a blog is called a blogger and the act of writing for a blog is called blogging. Originally meant to act as online journals, blogs have evolved into a legitimate form of media that threatens to overthrow archaic forms of print media. They’re also a great place to post pictures of your cat.

Of the many ways to monetize a blog, which are discussed in more detail here, advertising is the most diverse and successful way to make money with your blog.

Google AdSense

Since its introduction in 2005, the Google AdSense program has generated income for thousands of work at home bloggers. It’s by far the most popular source of advertising revenue for most blogs, regardless of content.

What is AdSense? Here’s the straight goods from Google:

Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to earn money by displaying targeted, unobtrusive Google ads on their websites. AdSense also allows you to provide Google search to your site users, while earning money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.

So how does AdSense work and how does it make you money? Basically, Google scours your site’s content and surrounds it with relevant text, image and video ads. When a visitor to your site clicks on one of these ads, you’ll receive payment for creating a lead. The amount you receive depends on the value of your site’s keywords and how much advertisers are willing to bid for ad placement.

It’s easy to understand why AdSense is so attractive to bloggers. The ads generated by AdSense are relevant, unobtrusive and offer fair compensation. Combine this with the fact that Google is such a large and trusted corporation and there’s no wonder why it’s the best in the business.

In-Text Ads

In-text advertising is exactly as it sounds: advertising within the text of your blog. It’s unique from most forms of web advertising in that it doesn’t frame or surround your blog’s content, it becomes a part of your blog’s content.

So how do in-text ads work and how can they make you money? Well first you register your blog with an in-text advertising network like Vibrant Media, Kontera or Infolinks. The network will scour your site’s content for keywords and link those keywords to relevant offers or promotions from advertisers. Links appear as a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, so readers aren’t mislead when clicking on them.

Like Google AdSense, you’ll receive payment for creating a lead whenever a reader clicks on one of these ads and the amount you receive depends on the value of your content’s keywords and the bidding price of advertisers.

Detractors of in-text advertising claim that if relied upon, writers will deliberately tailor their content around certain keywords, creating a tidal wave of replicated content that only serves to pay the writer. However, in most cases like this, readers realize pretty quickly that this site has no relevant content and will leave without clicking on any of the in-text ads.

When used correctly and targeted at the right audience, in-text ads can be an unobtrusive and lucrative form of advertising for your blog.

Affiliate Marketing

If Google AdSense is completely unobtrusive and in-text advertising is somewhat obtrusive, then affiliate marketing is completely obtrusive. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a legitimate and lucrative form of advertising for your blog, because it is.

What is affiliate marketing and how can it make you money? Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting products or services directly in your blog posts and receiving a commission or sponsorship. Many companies, the most prominent being Amazon, offer lucrative affiliate marketing programs that are definitely worth checking out. When you register with an affiliate marketing program you’ll be paid for writing about products or services that are relevant to your blog’s audience. The more people that read it and follow up, essentially the more leads you create, the higher your payout.

It’s important when registering your blog under an affiliate marketing program that you consider the kind of products and services you’ll be promoting. Are they in line with your site’s content? How will your readers react to it? You don’t want to risk compromising the integrity of your blog and risk alienating your readers just to make a quick buck, so make sure you actually stand behind what you’re promoting.

Banner ads

Banner ads are perhaps the oldest form of advertising on the web.

A banner ad is an image file embedded directly into a website, which links to an external website. Banner ads can be placed anywhere on a blog and come in all different shapes and sizes. Although banner ads are sometimes called different names depending on their size and position (half-banner, leaderboard, skyscraper, button, etc) for the sake of simplicity, we’ll consider all of these banner ads.

You can generate revenue from banner ads in two ways. The most traditional way is to sell or lease space on your website for advertisers to display their banner. You’ll receive a flat rate no matter how many people click on the ad and ad size and placement will determine how much you can charge. This technique is not nearly as prevalent as it used to be, as it usually benefits one side greatly over the other. The other more common way to generate revenue from banner ads is similar to the previous examples I outlined in this post, that is, payment based on click rate and lead generation.

Though banner ads once dominated the web, their effectiveness and popularity have waned in the past 10 years. Veteran web surfers have learned to ignore them and more sophisticated advertising methods like AdSense and in-text advertising are able to provide better targeted ads through search engine algorithms. However, a well placed, well designed and well targeted ad will always have a place in web advertising.

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