I’ve talked a bit before about monetizing a website.
While you can certainly do the same thing with a blog, putting ads on the blog, that often turns people off. A blog is most effective if you provide quality content that makes people want to return to read more. Monetizing a blog can be a bad move, especially at first, when you’re just starting out.
It’s best to start the blog without ads, and build up a relationship with your readers. Give them quality content and make them feel comfortable coming back for more. This is your period of time to promote your blog to build traffic (more on this later). Once you have a readership base, then you can think about making money with your blog.
When you get to that point, there is an alternative to putting advertisements on your blog. Your blog must be three months old and have regular posts to qualify. So if you don’t have a blog yet, go start one and come back in three months.
Back already? Go to PayPerPost.com, and sign up as a blogger. What will happen is that advertisers will post offers (called “opportunities”) to pay a blogger to write a blog post about a specific topic, and link to the advertiser’s website.
For example, an offer may be to write a review of a particular product, with a link to the company’s website. In exchange for writing the post and putting it on your blog, you get paid a little money. This works best if you only take those offers that match what you’d write about in your blog anyway. After all, you don’t want to suddenly alienate your readership by posting something different than what you’ve been writing about all along.
This isn’t the way to make the most money from your blog, but it’s a little extra for writing the sort of posts you’d have written anyway.
I made the mistake of monotizing my blog to soon. I had all of the right stuff on it but no traffic and the traffic that I was getting was not returning. I learned my lesson and made a plan to build my content first, get traffic, and then monotize. I am thinking that this would help me out a lot better. I hope.
You’ll find people advising both sides of early monetization. I think leaving the ads off a site early on lets you focus more on content and building readership, and less on tweaking ad placement to get a few more cents out of them each month. Plenty of time for that when you have enough readership to actually make something substantial.