How to Monetize a Personal Blog
Personal blogs for the duration of this article will encompass not only personal blog format sites but also any site that does not include commercial or non-profit concepts. This may include an online forum for fans of a certain movie genre, political writers, humor writers, and any number of other project types. This category contains any type of site that does not directly sell items or services and does not focus on charity or communal projects of a civil nature. Monetizing online sites in this group will usually require the acquisition of an affiliate marketing account with a related company, and possibly advertisement based income sources of the pay-per-view or pay-per-click variety. In this article we will address the basics on non-commercial website monetization.
Affiliate Marketing Options
Affiliate marketing is one of the most common and potentially lucrative forms of online website monetization. The would-be web entrepreneur will contact a website that offers an affiliate program or searchable affiliate database sites such as commission junction or Clickbank. These types of programs make the website owner into a middleman of sorts. They drive traffic to another site or product and get paid for doing so.
Affiliate marketing often works best when there are only a few offers on a given webpage. Advertising in general should be light and work with the color scheme of the site it is placed on. My personal suggestion is to seek out three separate companies and directly join their affiliate marketing programs. One of the best programs currently is the one attached to Amazon.com if you can actively become an affiliate. Your capacity to join the program will largely revolve around where you live. Local and state, or country, tax laws have caused Amazon to shut down affiliate operations in many areas due to improper taxation.
The best method of affiliate marketing will be to find a company or site that has highly relevant items or information related to the site that will be marketing the items or information. Once two to three good sites for your project are found use their affiliate links and banner adds to act as a splash of color on an otherwise potentially draw page. If done with an artistic flair the site will look better overall and the affiliate links and banners will not be a distraction. It would be even better to use these links and banners as a review style page on a website. This reinforces the idea of buying or clicking on a link for further information without violating most affiliate program terms of service obligations. Pharmaceutical drug review sites, videogame sites, move review sites, and similar concepts can readily make use of this tactic without owning or shipping any products.
Two Basic Advertisement Based Monetizing Methods
While affiliate marketing can be exceptionally lucrative it can also fail to produce results. A website owner who wishes to make money whether they sell anything or not should consider attempting to work with a pay-per-click or pay-per-view style advertising source.
Google is the world's largest program for pay-per-click advertisement and the one that most individuals are used to seeing in action on a given web page. The well-known and often viewed nature of this program allows many website owners to make a consistent income based off of their traffic alone. They will be paid whenever someone clicks on one of the ads regardless of whether anything is purchased. Pay-per-view style advertising concepts are different in that they pay the site owner simply to have the advertisement viewed by a unique visitor. Typically, these views are lumped together in a concept known as CPM. CPM is an acronym relating to the concept of one thousand advertisement views.
How To Effectively Place Advertisements or Affiliate Banners
A well trafficked site can easily rack up unique page views and if several of these advertisements are located on a given page then they usually will count as a unique view for each advertisement. Do not fall into the trap of over-saturation. Try to keep your advertisements to five per page or less. Place at least three ads above the fold, or the point on the website wherein an individual has to scroll down to see the rest of the page. Experiment with the different placement of your ads to find the best locations.
A good early suggestion will be to place one ad set on each side of the main page body, one ad set at the top of the page just above where the body section begins, one ad set in the middle of the main body of the page in order to break up text heavy pages, and a larger advertisement at the bottom of the page just below the main body. This will allow the information on the page to be framed without intruding into the information provided.
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