Okay. Okay. The topic is instant eye-grab material. You will be salivating to read the next few sentences on how to monetise your blog. I have read tons of stuff on how to monetise your blog and here is what I have found out…
1. First and foremost, get your own domain name. Many affiliate marketing firms and even text link ads don’t work on platforms like WordPress. (I am soon going to start my own blog where I own the domain name).
2. Write content that’s genuine, honest, insightful and original. In the beginning, just keep at gaining a steady readership through your content.
3. Once you gain a critical mass of readers (both through RSS feed subscribers and site visitors), that’s when you should begin to monetise your blog.
4. Many sites like reviewme.com and kontera.com will not even accept you if your traffic rank is below 500,000 hits a month. Therefore, it’s important to get there with great content.
5. Promote your blog on social networking sites, emails, messengers, chat status messages, and through other blogs and websites… it could even be stuff like leaving an insightful comment on other blog posts.
6. Linking to other popular blogs and asking them to reciprocate the gesture works wonders.
7. Make the most of link festivals like April Fools Day to make unrealistic announcements that you made an X amount of money through your blog and so on. This will let many people forward your blog post and you will get so many more new visitors to your site. After that, it all depends on whether your site has enough engaging content to keep them hooked and they don’t mind the con game.
8. Read. Study. Assimilate from the success stories of other bloggers, most notably John Chow dot Com. Last heard, this guy made a cool $31,000 (Rs 12 lakh) from his blog in March 2008. This is how he made his moolah…
* Private Ad Sales: $15,230.00
* Affiliate Commissions: $7,729.37
* ReviewMe: $5,000.00
* Text Link Ads: $2,031.90
* Kontera: $1,000.00
* TTZ Media: $384.24
* FeedBurner: $45.73
* Subscription: $20.00
* Grand Total: $31,441.24
Here’s a detailed report on how he managed it ( Blog income report March 2008). I highly recommend his blog. Not only will his reports inspire you, but subscribing to his blog posts should give you enough dope on how to go about making your blog more profitable.