News Notion

Here is a list of 18 Blog Revenue Programs I haven’t tried yet. Let me know if you have!

AdGenta
AdGenta is an easy and powerful way for you to unlock the revenue potential of your website or blog. AdGenta is a unique way for you to embed ads anywhere you can place a picture – in your blog post, on your website, in your RSS feed. Because you choose the keywords for your post, you are in control of the ad your website visitors see – it is no longer bound to the content, but to your knowledge of your readers and what you are writing.

CrispAds
Leading U.S. and International Affiliate Network

Clicksor
Clicksor offers webmasters the opportunity to earn more income by simply underlining a selection of clickable text (inline text links) or displaying targeted contextual ads (various sizes of banners) on their Web sites or blogs.
Generate revenue today and receive your payment in 15 days. Join our contextual advertising affiliate program today!

Intelli Txt
IntelliTXT is an advertisement platform developed by Vibrant Media, and is an example of keyword advertising. Website authors insert a script into their pages which calls the IntelliTXT platform when a viewer views the page; this script then finds keywords on the page and double underlines them. When holding the mouse over the double underlined link, an advertisement associated with that word will pop up. Advertisers pay to have their ads associated with particular words. “Context” is considered in an attempt to make the ads relevant to the web page hosting IntelliTXT.

The liability of this feature is that it makes pages more difficult to read; scrolling down the page may inadvertently cause delays while random ads flash on and pause before disappearing.

Peak Click
Getting paid through PeakClick’s Pay-Per-Click program is as easy as 1-2-3.
Step 1: Webmasters install PeakClick’s code into their pages. Every time your visitors load your pages, PeakClick’s search results appear.
Step 2: Your site visitors click on the PeakClick links.
Step 3: Your PeakClick account is credited and your accumulated balance is paid out to you every 15 days.
Webmasters get paid 70% of all sales generated by their traffic.

Double Click
Drive revenue by making inventory more valuable and selling more of it. Make your premium inventory more valuable and your advertisers more loyal by driving quality traffic to your site. Improve campaign performance with our advanced search, rich media and optimization tools.

Industry Brains
Leverage your premium online content to generate additional revenue from contextually targeted ads that are consistent with your brand

AdHearUs- Gone the way of the Dodo.

Kanoodle
Kanoodle offers you a way to earn revenue for every visitor who comes to your site and searches for products and services. Our pay-per click network includes quality advertisements and generous commissions.

AVN
Adult Video Network

Adknowledge
Monetize your existing ad inventory by becoming an Adknowledge publisher. Our predictive targeting allows us to increase ad yields and deliver industry-leading CPMs across our channels. In addition, our publisher solutions are quick and easy to integrate. Partner with Adknowledge to gain access to over 50,000 advertisers competing for traffic in our network.

YesAdvertising
Benefits and Features:
- Accept and pay traffic from all countries
- Guaranteed CPM payout rate
- 5 Level of referral
- 24/7 Live stats and earning reports
- Bi-weekly payment via check or paypal
- Advance default ad management (Geo-target capable)
- No volume contracts
- High quality and innovative ads
- Advertisement control
- Dedicated account manager
- Self-serve account management
- No setup fees
- Free support service

RevenuePilotTextAds
No sign of life here.

SearchFeed

A leader in pay per click search engine advertising, Searchfeed.com helps online advertisers attract targeted leads while offering Web publishers a greater opportunity to monetize Internet traffic. As an alternative to traditional forms of advertising, innovative search engine and pay per click technology deliver millions of advertiser introductions each month.

Target Point
Targetpoint is an Israeli company that provides targeted advertisements on webpages, allowing webmasters (especially of BitTorrent websites) to make money based on which/how many ads are clicked on, known as the pay-per-click model.

OneMonkey
No sign of this one either

TextAds.
This one looks like it died in 2005, but is still pretending to be alive.

This is Part 2 of a two part series about making money on your blog. Part 1 can be found here and deals with making money through Ad Networks. Part 2 is focused on direct revenue from non ad-network sources.

Part 2 Non Network Ads

Sponsorships

Sponsorships are advertising relationships built directly between the blogger and the advertiser. There is no middle man and hence, the blogger gets 100% control and revenue.

As your blog becomes bigger and more influential, advertisers might find you or you might join one of the larger blogging networks in which case you will have ad reps actively seeking sponsors for you. Otherwise, you are left to approach advertisers who lie within your niche and work out all the details.

Obviously, the more tightly focused your niche is, the better you will do with sponsorships. If your niche is running and your blog is not huge, chances are you won’t get sponsored by Nike or Adidas, but if your blog is focused on trail running in Ogden, Utah and you have a small but dedicated following, the chances are pretty good that you will be able to sell a sponsorship to a trail running shop in Ogden or Salt Lake City.

Sponsorships can be through text links, banners, reviews, or any other form you can think of that the sponsor likes.

Affiliate Programs

An affiliate program works like this. You refer a reader to a product or service. They purchase the product or service. The product or service gives you a small percentage of their profit.

Amazon is definitely the most well known affiliate program. Amazon affiliates sell just about anything you can imagine.
Like the Kindle:

Then there are Affiliate conglomerates like Clickbank and Commission Junction which represent hundreds of independent companies under one banner. The advantage here is that you only need to sign up for one account and you can then sell all of the products or brands they represent.

Affiliate bloggers work much harder than I like to, but they also tend to make more money than I do. If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, you need to have an intensely focused niche blog and pair it to exactly the right affiliate program.

My recommendation is to do your homework before jumping into the vast ocean of affiliate marketing. Again, there are many books on finding success with affiliates, man of which can be found at Free-Ebooks.biz

Blog Flipping

More and more you see people creating a quality blog and then selling it. There are a few bloggers (very few) who have made millions doing this. Weblogs Inc was sold for $25 million. Don’t expect that to happen to you though.

The reality is that there are blog buyers out there ready to buy your blog if it meets a few important criteria.

1) Generating income
2) High page ranking
3) Heavy traffic

Buyers will usually pay between 6 months to 2 years advance revenue. You can expect to find an easier sale on the 6 month end of things. I’ve sold a few blogs and find that usually I can expect 9 months to one year’s worth of revenue. So if your blog is making a solid $100 a month, you can expect to get between $900 – $1200 unless you’ve got other factors like high page rank, high volume traffic, a super hot niche, or a really cool domain name.

Blogs are being sold everyday at places like eBay, GoDaddy auctions, Sitepoint forums, and Flippa. In my experience, eBay is the worst place to sell a blog or domain as users are less likely to appreciate the finer points of your blog. If you list a blog on eBay, don’t be surprised if it goes for your start price or not at all. So set your price accordingly.

Currently there is a lot of hype about the opportunities for blog flippers, but I don’t buy it. Unless you are either really good or really lucky, chances are you will end up getting about $1 for each hour you’ve put into your blog. In my opinion, you are better off spending the time to learn to monetize first, building an income, and then you might actually be able to get out of your blog what you’ve put into it, but then, if it is producing a good, soft income, why would you want to get rid of it?

Donations

In five years of blogging, I’ve made about $100 in donations. Unless you have a compelling reason why readers should give you their money, don’t expect them to give it to you. Ask yourself, when is the last time you donated money to a blog, a piece of free-ware, or a developer? If you ever have, try to figure out why you did and you might be on to a way of having your readers do the same.

Selling Stuff

I think this is the best way to make money from your blog. The hard part is figuring out what you have to sell that your readers will want to buy. If you have a well read travel blog, your readers might be into buying your guidebooks. If you have a really cool logo, you might be able to find a degree of success selling shirts or merchandise through a program such as Cafepress.

I have one friend who ran a political blog in the early 2000’s that managed to make a couple of thousand dollars selling novelty butt-plugs (yes, butt-plugs) shaped like President Bush. He thought he would make millions, but (and I could have told him this) most people have no desire to own such a thing though his website did go viral and get millions of hits. Unfortunately for him, he was so sure he would make millions on his product that he didn’t have any CPC, impression, or affiliate ads running on his site and thus missed out on what could have been a good chunk of change, probably more than he made from his products.

Subscriptions

Almost every major media outlet provides free content on the web. Are you sure that yours has such a high demand that people will pay for it?

What is to stop someone else from stepping in and providing a similar blog for free as soon as you announce you are charging? Oops. There goes your readership, revenue, and traffic. I think this is a non-option. If you’ve made it work though, I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

One success story I know of is my friend Tanya who put together a blog listing all the cruise ship jobs. Apparently her reputation was solid enough and she had a loyal enough following that when she monetized in this way, it worked. Well, it worked for a while. Before too long she was forced to create a free content site that offered limited information in order to keep her competitors from knocking her out of the water (pun intended).

Create a Blog Network

You and all of your blogger friends decide that you will create a co-op of sorts. You pool all of your traffic and site data together and offer to sell ads to advertisers over the whole network rather than on a single blog. Think about it, as an advertiser would you rather advertise on one blog with 2000 readers a day or on a network of 10 blogs with 20,000 readers a day. Obvious, right?

The hard part as in any joint venture is finding the right people to work with and figuring out all of the technical deals, profit shares , and more. It can work, but I’ve seen several networks start with high hopes and then crash and burn. In a few cases, promising blogs were destroyed and friendships were lost. So, be careful.

Another option is to contract out as a writer for an existing network. You can find plenty of ‘Blogger wanted’ ads over at ProBlogger.com

And that wraps up this two part series. I hope you’ve found something that works for you and if I’ve left anything out, please don’t be shy, comment below and tell us all about it.

ATB,

R.W.

Congratulations! You are here and you are reading this and that means that you already possess one of the essential ingredients for creating a money making blog. Desire.

It’s incredibly simple but not many people are able to follow this recipe. I know you can, because you are already here. Here are the other ingredients.

1) Commitment

If you don’t have enough of a desire to make a personal commitment to creating a money making blog then you won’t. It’s as simple as that. The main thing that you need to get anywhere, whether it is a place, an economic point, or a mental state is the commitment to do what it takes to get there. If you don’t have that, you should stop reading now and move on to something you are willing to commit to.

2) Knowledge

Blogging and the online world are constantly changing. You may be the most knowledgeable person in the world about your topic, but if you stop learning and gaining knowledge you will find yourself left behind by those who have the knowledge you lack. Knowledge is not just about knowing, it is also about constantly educating yourself and making yourself better than you were.

3) Paypal

On a more practical level, if you don’t yet have a Paypal account you need to get one right now. Paypal is the most widely used means of payment on the internet. Signing up is free, but you will need a bank account to confirm your account so that you have access to your money.

4) Participation

No human is an island. If you want to simply write your blog from your hermit cave and not interact with the rest of the online world, you will quickly find that no one will interact with you either. If that’s what you want, fine, but the chances of making any money with your blog are very close to zero since commerce involves more than one person. Get out there, read other blogs, sign up for forums, make comments, share your knowledge and learn from others. If you won’t participate, you won’t create a money making blog. If you do, it will be a miracle.

5) Time

If you aren’t willing to take the time to create useful and informative content, learn the latest news of your industry, network with other bloggers, or tweak your blog until it has perfect SEO then you aren’t going to make any money blogging. You can pay someone to set up a blog for you, pay for a content scraper, and never lift a finger, but honestly, do you think that’s going to work? If it did, there would be millions doing it. My suspicion is that there are millions doing just that and that they are making little to nothing. Go ahead give it a try and let me know the results. The other aspect of time is having the patience to work hard and wait for results. If you don’t bake a cake for the right amount of time, it won’t come out right. If you use the wrong ingredients, it won’t come out right. It’s simple if you follow the recipe.

So there it is, your recipe for a money making blog.

1 part desire
1 part commitment
1 part knowledge
1 part the ability to get paid
1 part participation
1 part time

Mix them all together, place in blog, put in the oven at 350 degrees, wait 3-6 months and you will have a money making blog.

It really is that easy.

Happy Baking,

~R.W.