5 Great Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Blog

Making money online nowadays is easier than ever before. Of course, the whole Internet marketing industry is only about a decade and a half old, but at the speed the Web moves and evolves, every week is like a year in the offline world. So, you could say that about 50 years have passed on the Internet :-).

Today, advertisers have a lot of options when it comes to methods of creating an income stream on the Web, and everyone, from complete newbies to advanced marketers can start making money or scale an existing operation pretty easily.

While it is possible to make money without one, a blog is a very desirable thing to have online. It is like having an office or a house in the real world, a presence that establishes you as a citizen of the Web, which can be used to market anything you want and deliver information, making you an expert on any niche you want. Of course, you need to take care of it and always post fresh and quality content, otherwise all your efforts are for nothing, but if you do that, you’re off to a great start in your quest to make money online.

Here are just a few of the best ways to make money, directly or indirectly, with a blog on the Web:

Place affiliate links everywhere. Affiliate links are the bread and butter of today’s marketers. You can find an advertiser for almost any niche, and get a commission for every lead or sale you referred. So, if you’re going to recommend a service or product and place a link to their site anyway, why not make a profit while you’re at it with an affiliate link?

Build an email list. “The money is in the list”, says everyone, and they’re right! Having an email list of people who are interested in what you have to say and trusted you enough to give their email address (which is a pretty personal thing) away means that you’ll get a much better conversion rate for every link you insert. Needless to say, you shouldn’t abuse this privilege, or you’ll be despised or even hated by the readers and they’ll unsubscribe faster than you can blink. A good way to get subscribers on a blog is to give away a free ebook, e-course or provide great information in your newsletters, in exchange for the users’ email addresses.

Sell your own product. A blog is also a great way to sell your own product. If you have an ebook or paper book or design great T-Shirts, cups, albums or other things, you can easily sell them on your site. Sites like Cafepress and Zazzle make it very easy to do that, as they handle all the shipping, storage and payment issues, leaving you to focus on the marketing part.

Sell other people’s products/services. If you don’t have your own products and don’t want to bother with their creation (which can be pretty difficult or even impossible, depending on the niche), you can easily sell other people’s products for a commission. This is pretty similar to inserting affiliate links, only instead of them, you create a dedicated landing/presell page for the product/service you want and insert links and banners in other parts of your site in order to draw the users attention.

Use it to find new contacts and opportunities. A blog is the perfect tool to increase your reputation, find new contacts and people to partner with and create more opportunities for both work and your personal life. If you have a blog that is well known and you always post great content that is useful for its readers, you can be sure that other people in the industry will notice it and you will start being considered an expert in your niche. This of course, will bring about a lot of great opportunities that you would’ve otherwise never had.

If you implement the above advice into your business and use your blog to its maximum potential, you can make enough money online to never have to get a “real job” again (I’m quoting it because you’ll still have to work a lot, but the potential gains and freedom are much bigger), so start doing it now, before it’s too late.