A Guest Post by Melissa Tamura of Zen College Life.

If you are trying to earn money from your blog, you are not alone. There are many out there who are trying to do the exact same thing. Blogging is becoming more and more profitable. People are using blogging as a means to earn an extra few dollars a month to help make ends meet, while others are making enough to become full-time bloggers and provide for their families. Whatever your desire is with your blog, follow the suggestions below to start earning money from your blog today.

1. Amazon Associates: Amazon’s affiliate program works great if you recommend books, software and cameras on your blog. Making recommendations can also help you land gigs writing reviews. If your blog receives a lot of traffic and has good online ranking, you may be able to start writing reviews of different products. Companies are willing to pay $25-$50 per product review. See #6 below as well.


2. Chitika: This is a new tool, but proves to be a great performer. Chitika works best on product focused blogs, however, it does offer non-product related ads. One blogger claims to have earned over a quarter of a million dollars using Chitika.


3. Google AdSense: This may be one of the most effective tools you can use to make money off your blogs. Generally, the ads that are a blend of image and text at 250x300 pixels work the best.


4. Miscellaneous Affiliate Programs: There are various affiliate programs you can link to by placing an affiliate’s banner ad or text ad on your blog. Some programs allow you to get paid when a reader clicks on an affiliate’s link, but generally visitors must purchase an item from the affiliate. Amazon pioneered the affiliate program. Affiliate programs can bring in small amounts of money. As you surf the net and see websites that you like, look to see if they offer affiliate programs and then contact the company about partnering with them. Often these programs offer high quality products that sell themselves.


5. ProBlogger Job Boards: At ProBlogger, the jobs boards are continually growing in the number of advertisements being bought. The job boards add value to your blogs and are a great service to your readers.


6. Pay Per Post: There are companies that will pay you to write about their services and products. How much they pay you will depend on the quality of your site, its content and the amount of traffic coming to the site. Most companies will not pay you immediately. They will require you to blog for a few months before enrolling you in their program. Pay-per-post programs do pay nicely. Some have reported paying up to $1,000 per post.


7. Sponsorships/Private Ad Sales: Although it may be difficult to land a corporate sponsorships or a private ad sales before you have a large reader following on your blog, these ads can provide a nice income once you do. With a large following, advertisers will pay you more to have their ads on your blog because they will be able to reach more potential customers faster. Income from private ad sales and sponsorships can easily surpass Google Adsense and Chitika. Please keep in mind however that you will need to make a name for yourself before you are able to go this route.


8. Shopzilla: The ads are similar to Chitika but the click values have been higher for me to this point. They don’t offer quite as many options as Chitika does in terms of types of ads but for a new ad network there’s definitely promising signs. I’m looking forward to seeing how they continue to develop!
   

This article was written by Melissa Tamura, who recently ranked the top nursing schools for Zen College Life, a directory of online degrees.

Having a successful blog these days not only requires you to constantly be pumping out new content but it also requires you to be in as many different places on the Internet as possible and building a back bone behind your blog.

The average person surfing the net will see your blog more than once before they actually decide to go ahead and read or better yet subscribe to your blog, that's why it's important to be in as many places as possible. Of coarse there will be times where you'll get some instant readers, specifically coming in from search engines but the more your "out there" the better your chances are of getting traffic and loyal readers which is what I call the "Out There" Factor.

When a business starts up online and wants to get their brand out to people as fast and efficiently as possible they tend to use this technique through CPM advertising which means they pay a specific price per 1000 ads viewed, opposed to paying per click, per sale or for a specific amount of time on a site. This method in some cases may not be the most effective for initial sales but it gets their product, brand, service, etc in the back of peoples minds and starts to get them familiar with it a.k.a "out there".

So the question is now, How do I get "out there" Factor?

The Paying Route

Like I mentioned in the above example using CPM ads are great for the job, although any form of advertising will help get you this factor CPM ads will do it the fastest. The only thing about using the paying route is that you really need to have a brand, product, service, etc to sell in order to make paying for advertising really worth your while, here are a few CPM networks.

• Casale Media
• CPX Interactive
• Burst Media
• Value Click
• Tribal Fusion

The Free Route

Using the free route is a lot more time consuming than paid advertising, it consists of signing up to a whole bunch of sites around the net, here's a list I've compiled to help you get started, keep in mind you don't have to use every category here (I don't).

• Social Networking Sites
• Article Directories
• Traffic Exchanges
• Blog Exchanges
• Web Directories
• Banner Exchanges
• Guest Posting
• Building Back links
• Submitting To Search Engines
• Pinging Your Blog
• Make It Your Email Signature
• Make Forum Posts

What do you think? How do you guys get "out there"? Anything I missed on here?

-FBI

Yesterday my first Adsense paycheck finally arrived in the mail, it was for $110.00, not a bad chunck of change considering I only use it on one blog, the problem is the amount of time it took for me to accumulate it, which was about 4 months. I started to think... is it really worth having the ads there for about a dollar a day?

The problem with newer bloggers trying to make a profit from their blog is that Adsense is usually the first thing they hear of (probably because it's run by Google) so they slap up a bunch of ads and that's that. Sure, getting a dollar or two a day can really add up over the coarse of a year, in fact it would be $730.00, but are you really using your advertising space to it's full potential? You might be, but you might make double using that space with a different method of monetization, the problem is you'll never know unless you try and that's what I mean by "getting your head out of the Adsense gutter".

Take this for example, on the same blog I made my Adsense paycheck I also replaced one of my Adsense ads with an affiliate marketing ad. I've had it running for the past two months and I've made $89.00 from it, now lets look back at what an adsense ad would have made me. I ran three ads (which is the maximum allowed amount) on my blog during those 4 months where I recieved my check, so roughly each ad gave me $36.66, meaning each month one ad was making me approximately $9.16, obviously some were doing better than others. Now lets look back and compare...

Adsense Ad: $9.16 per month
Affiliate Ad: $44.50 per month

As you can see I made $35.34 more with the affiliate ad I replaced it with. I really wished I had made that switch a year ago when I started the blog because that's $353.40 I missed out on.

Monetizing really depends on a ton of different factors like traffic, your niche, your relationship with followers and what you have to offer. That's exactly why I don't use Adsense on this blog, because usually the readers coming to my blog already know about Adsense which will give me a horrible CTR, in fact I know this because I used to run them on here a long time ago.

I know I'll probably get a few hateful comments from people who live their lives by Adsense but all I'm trying to say here is that there are literally thousands of ways to make money from your blog and you really don't need to settle for Adsense, although it may turn out in the end to be your best source of income, you need to experiment with monetizing, because why settle for less than you can make more!

-FBI