Advertisements (Pay-per-click types such as Google Adsense, rental space types such as Performancing Ads, or pay-per-action types eg. for signing on loans enquiry forms, or insurance surveys, among other things).
Affiliate marketing (selling other people's products).
Selling one's own products.
Getting paid for blogging about other sites/products.
However in order to make money blogging there have to be people visiting the blog. And this will have to be people who are interested enough in what you say or what your ads say to take the appropriate action needed (whether to click on an ad, or to buy some product, or to sign up for some more information to be provided by the advertiser).
Where do these people come from?
The most common sources are search traffic, forum traffic, subscription traffic, link traffic, and social traffic, among others.
What is the common factor that attracts them to come to choose your blog, out of the zillions of blogs floating around in the blogosphere?
In 2 short answers: regular frequent posting, and good interesting content.
Therein lies the problem. How does one find the time and energy to post frequently, and even worse, post good content frequently?
It is often said that you can, with a lot of hard work and fantastic S.E.O. tricks work wonders in getting to the front page of google search. This is assuming you want to get a lot of search traffic. The front page of search results on any search engine is the ultimate goal of all blogs and websites which seek to make some money from search traffic.
Obviously the first page will be the one that all searchers for a particular keyword or keyphrase will see first when they click on search. If you have a couple of thousand people searching for that keyword everyday and your blogsite is one of the 10 fortunate sites to be on that page, you can expect that a sizeable proportion of that few thousand people will visit your site and be exposed to its attractions.
However, maintaining this position is always a problem. As a blog, your life depends on regular postings. Too infrequent a posting or too few postings result in search engine spiders deciding that the blog no longer deserves its position at the top of search engine results, and as a result, the blog gets pushed down and out of sight faster than a stinking pair of socks.
Articles a-plenty are advising that one should post at least 5x a day, and quote the panic that even top bloggers feel if they should even slow down in their posts or run out of ideas about what to write about.
Tension... Tension. This is definitely not the kind of good life that one has dreamed about when one ventures into the world of making money blogging. It was never meant to be like this. The idea was to get a good passive income i.e. income that came along even if one did not work actively for it.
The least complicated passive income that you can get in a blog is one that is earned through Google Adsense clicks. To earn from Adsense is quite simple. Just register with Google Adsense and insert your Adsense advertising code on your blog. Visitors to your blog will read what you have to write, and in an effort to learn more, will click on the Adsense ads, and presto, you earn from the clicks.
The downside to this Google earn from Adsense arrangement is that traffic is often unpredictable, unless you have massively popular content that makes people search out for you. Most times this does not happen, and we are all dependent on traffic and clicks to earn a passive income, and this traffic can dwindle very fast if you do not take care to maintain it. Imagine the thousands of potential clicks dwindling fast to a trickle and then nothing....
How then does one reduce this dependency on traffic and clicks? The answer is obvious. Build an email list.
In your blog, place a section inviting readers to sign in with their names (first name will suffice, as a request for the full name scares people away), and their email addresses, in order to receive regular mailers that will offer free tips, ebooks, and the like. Watch them come on in droves to sign up. After all, who does not want a freebie?
In the end there you will be, the proud owner of a list of interested targetted people you can send regular email messages to via an autoresponder, and to whom you can make occasional sales pitches, secure in the knowledge that they signed up willingly for your email program, and so you cannot be accused of spamming them.
In this form of email marketing, you either sell your own products or you can also do affiliate email marketing, that is, you become an affiliate of a merchant and sell his products through your email program and earn substantial income. This is thus the ultimate passive income program, as the regular emails you send out are automatic, via your autoresponder, and your conversion rate is much better here than the usual click ads.
Interested in making more money online? Read more articles and tips about how to make money blogging and the world of internet marketing by visiting http://fortuneblogger.com which also discusses other ways of making money on the internet.
Tags: internet marketing, affiliate programs, make money blogging, affiliate email marketing, earn from adsense