“Passion Precedes Payment in the Blogging Business”

– Aderemi Ojikutu

“Until you first build a formidable followership on the web, your prospect of earning a respectable income from your website or blog is nil”

– Aderemi Ojikutu

I already declared to you on the post on SEO, with its spillover to the post on web visitor traffic generation, are the most important post in this “BLOGGING FOR MONEY” e-course.

From now on, I would only concentrate on practical application of the wonderful concepts taught in chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4.

HOW BLOGS MAKE MONEY
There are almost infinite ways by which a problogger could make money with his or her blog. Once you have a steady and growing stream of new and returning visitors to your blog, then your blog is ripe for monetization.

You can know this by tracking visitors with your sitemeter. As soon as your unique visitor crosses the 200 daily mark, this is always a proof that your blog has capacity to grow to a 1,000-visitor mark and even become a launch pad for mega traffic to your blog or website. This also means that you can begin to experience trickles of earnings online, if your blog is monetized at this point.

i. Selling Ads Space
The most popular method of generating income with a blog is that of selling contextual advertisement space to organizations who desire to have a slice of your visitors’ attention.

There are hundreds, if not over a thousand advertising networks (including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) who seek partnership with content providers and publishers like you and I, through our blogs and websites, for placement of third party advertisements on little spaces on our sites.

These popular advertising networks have hordes of advertisers who subscribed to their services. The networks in turn splash the ads on partner websites and blogs like yours and mine, targeting the attention of our visitors.

We the publishers (bloggers and website owners) are then rewarded either through a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) system. This means that for every visitor that clicks the ads, which would naturally lead them to the advertisers’ landing page (or website).

The partner networks like Google AdSense, YPN, etc syndicating the adverts then remunerate us. At times, a click could earn us as much as $2+ or as little as two cents. It all depends on what type of industry, niche, or even geo-location you belong. The internet industry average is about ten to twenty cents per click.

There are industries/niches that pay very high amount per click, like the healthcare, pharmaceutical, mortgage, insurance, aviation etc

The CPM system operates by the number of unique pageviews or impressions generated by your visitors on your website or blog. For every 1,000 impression (or pageviews) generated by visitors on your blog or website, you could earn between one to ten dollars. Meaning a website with 5,000 daily pageviews may be earning as much as much as $50 daily from such impressions. However, the internet industry average is $2 to $3 per thousand impressions.

ii. Selling Ads Links
This is another way of generating income with your blogs and websites. Some advertisement networks seek partnership with bloggers and website owners who would in turn place the text links advertisement at visible spots on their blog or websites.

The remuneration differs from site to site. Some text link ads earn as much as $750 per link per month for the website owner or blogger. While some links earn as low as $15 per link per month. You can place up to a maximum number of ten links on a blog or website.

What determines the worth of sold links are the usual metrics, which I have already mentioned in chapters 3 and 4: Alexa rank, Page rank, Technorati rank, RSS subscriber count, traffic and duration statistics, etc.