I think that people are really confused about how to properly monetize their blog. The truth of the matter is it will take some time to set up properly. In fact, it’s really not going to be that easy at all, and believe it or not, it doesn’t even have to do with your content. (I mean if it’s total crap the conversion rates might be low )  Here’s a short explanation of how I feel you could properly monetize a blog in any niche.

First of all you need a traffic source. No I’m not talking about crappy Entrecard, untargeted, rubbish traffic that’s not worth ANYTHING. How do you get the good traffic?

Well, you can go the Adsense route and just pay for your traffic. Wait! Pay for traffic? Are you insane? We’ll get to this later. You’re actually not going to be losing money if you set things up correctly. Adsense is not something to play with or take lightly. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories across the net of how people lost tons of money by not optimizing campaigns correctly. I’m not going to go into full fledged detail about adsense, that would take forever, and there’s a lot of reading material out there if you want to get involved with it. Keyword elite is a decent tool for adwords, you can check it out here.

The second option is SEO. This is where we generate a bunch of keywords with adwords tool or similar, then analyze all of them. How? I just look at the traffic for that keyword and analyze it with Market Samurai. It saves me tons of time, but you can do it the manual way if you want. By manual I mean get a plugin for FireFox called SEOQuake. You need to analyze backlinks to that page for that keyword and look at if the site is even targeting that keyword. Does the site have the keyword in the title? The URL? The description? The header? If it does then it’s most definitely targeting that keyword You’ll need to analyze the strength of the links pointing to that page as well. Generally more links = harder to rank. Targeting the keyword + a lot of links = harder to rank. I could probably go on and on about SEO for ages, this is just basic stuff.

The absolute best way is to combine both!

Now you have some traffic, how do you monetize it? FORGET ADSENSE,  PROJECTWONDERFUL, ADGITIZE, and OTHER CPC. All that stuff is really useless if you want to monetize your traffic FULLY. If you thought that stuff was going to make all your money then you’re mistaken. You can leave that stuff up, but it shouldn’t be your main focus, ever.

The best way, by far is affiliate products. Think clickbank, CPA, and being a regular affiliate of various products. What’s your niche? What would they be interested in? For example, if you have a blog about technology (tee hee ) then if you recommend any kind of software or hardware that you can be an affiliate of, don’t be afraid to plug in your link. No one cares, the product is good to begin with correct? So if they’re going to buy it, why not buy it through the person that spent time to write the post related to the product? Anyway, if you find it’s converting with SEO traffic or other traffic sources that just seem to visit that page, you might want to add in adsense. Run some traffic to that page with some keywords and see if you can get a decent ROI. (Return On Investment, which means you make more then you spend.) You’re basically turning your blog pages into landing pages. I don’t do this really, but I’m sure it would work fairly well.

Now, I was reading John Chow’s blog and stumbled on this post: http://www.johnchow.com/how-i-make-40000-a-month-from-a-blog/. I watched that entire video, this guy really has it down and I really see how it works, and it works well. Basically what he does is try to get every visitor to his site he can to sign up on his email list with Aweber. He basically runs down through some steps about setting up your blog and monetizing it. The tools and services he recommends in his guides he’s an affiliate of. He just sends 1 email a week going through the guide. So, he’s being helpful and making money at the same time. This method would work well for any niche really, watch the video it’s a really nice system. He uses pay per click campaigns to just get people to sign up for his email list. He’s already calculated how much each visitor is worth and how much he can spend per click to get a decent ROI.

This is a very generic guide, I’m just trying to wake everyone up from their dream of making thousands by just throwing up an adsense banner and writing blog posts. That’s not how this game works, if you really want to make money with your blog you need to think outside the box, implement your own methods really and investigate opportunities. What I’m getting at is to properly monetize a blog, you basically have to be an Internet Marketer. Nothing in life is really that easy, this is no different. Wake up guys

Side note: I’m going to set up an Internet Marketing blog really soon so I don’t bore my tech audience with this stuff