A lot of bloggers are excellent writers but they don't have a business mentality. This means that, although they might produce great articles and have loyal readers, they still don't make any money off their blog.
Sound familiar?

I have worked in online marketing since the late 1990's, right when I graduated from law school. Instead of going the traditional path and working for a big law firm, I decided to hack my own way in the Dot Com boom by being an online marketer. Now I consult companies on how they can improve their sell their products, (like bloggers, people with great products don't always know how to sell them). I'm comparing the two most common ways of monetizing your blog so that you can figure out which one (if any, or both) is right for you:

Pay per click ads

When the internet was first starting, businesses would rent banner space on other websites and pay them a monthly fee. It didn't matter whether or not anybody actually clicked on the ad; you got paid just for putting it up there. Sometimes you would get paid for every thousand people who viewed your ad (PPM, since M is the roman numeral for one thousand). Eventually advertisers (the people advertising things to sell) realized that this wasn't profitable since not many people who see your ad click on it, so new models developed.
Pay per click ads, or PPC ads, are banner ads where the you the blogger gets paid each and every time someone clicks on one of your links. Some of them, like ads in Google search results, still combine pay per click with PPM ads but this is becoming less and less common. They work better on blogs with lots of readership. Google AdSense ads don't even need to be on blogs with a very narrow niche audience since Google inserts ads that are relevant to readers based on the page they're on and based on their Google search queries.

Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are when a publisher, such as a blogger, is paid a commission by a merchant for each item they sell or for each person they get to register as a lead (a lead is someone who's signed up for a trial or who has submitted their contact information and might later buy the product). But which blogs rake in more money with affiliate programs?
 
Let's say there's a blog that's about fitness, and there's another blog about weightlifting. Both are in the fitness niche but weightlifting is a narrow subset of fitness. Both blogs can successfully run pay per lead ads about people signing up for, say, a gym, or pay per sale ads for people signing up for fitness magazines. However, the weightlifting blog can run ads about weight sets or gym memberships for gyms with good weightrooms. The weight lifting blog will have a much higher conversion rate (so more people who click its ads will sign up as leads or buy products) on its weightlifting ad than the general fitness blog will have on its gym ads.

READ:HOW TO: Sell your Product for a Tweet or a Facebook share?


Since they're dependent on not only someone clicking a link but also on that person signing up or http://www.marketingprofessor.com/ buying a product, bloggers with blogs that aren't very targeted to a narrow niche aren't very good for many affiliate programs.

Learn more about blog monetization

By no means does this article cover all the ways you can make money with your blog; pay per click and affiliate marketing are only two of many ways that you can make money blogging. To learn more, find a few good books about content monetization and participate in my free content monetization webinar. My webinar is on Thursday, January 27^th and space is limited so sign up ASAP!

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach for a variety of clients, such as INTENTclick.