How to Monetize Your WordPress Blog (and other blogs, too)

It’s all across the world wide web, people want to know how to make money with websites. People especially want to know how to make money using online advertising. This is because, it’s often assumed that putting a few ads on a website requires less work than other means of monetization.

The first thing to note is that just throwingGoogle adsense or any other advertising on your blog isn’t going to make you much money. Just like you won’t sell products if you don’t have a customer base, you won’t earn money from advertising if you don’t have customers coming to your site. Having a few hundred people visit your WordPress blog each week won’t cut it.

The first way to monetize from ads on your WordPress blog actually has nothing to do with advertising, but everything to do with content. If you’re not offering something fresh and new, then users won’t continually come to your web site. You have to offer fresh content or products to first get people on your site. This may be posting several blog posts a day, selling products or running contests. Find a niche, and work on building a presence on that niche before even thinking about putting advertising on your website.

Once you’ve got a following to your blog, start researching about possible advertising tools out there. Many people do Google Adsense, but it is difficult for it to pay off. There are many other methods of advertising on your WordPress blog including:

• Affiliate Ads. These are often the best advertising method because you can choose affiliates that are geared toward your targeted audience.
• Brokered Ads. This type of advertising only works if you have a high volume of visitors. Advertisers go through a broker to have their ads display on your site. This cuts down on the work you have to do such as billing, ad size and technical issues.
• Text Link Ads. Text link advertising is important if you have a high page rank and your blog is properly optimized. Once again, you can use a broker or sell the ads yourselves.
• Contextual Advertising. These are your basic adsense-type ads that display ads based onkeywords on a page or your blog’s category.

Above I’ve discussed some of the different advertising methods that you can implement on your WordPress blog. Is there an advertising method you’ve had success with? Later, we’ll feature some of the wordpress plugins that are available to help monetize your blog