Earning Money Blogging

Ok, so I went out and found loads of information on logging for money. Loads and loads and loads. And most of it is pretty useless. 

Blogging for money comes down to TWO elements

1. Ad revenue

2. Affiliate links

Now lets take a closer look at them individually.

1. Ad Revenue

This is pretty simple - you put ads on your blog or web page (or you get someone else to, Adsense, for example), and each time someone clicks the ad, you get a small payment. 

See? Simple.

BUT! You need to get a fair few clicks to generate any real earnings.

Say, 10 percent of visitors to your site click an ad, and you get $0.10 per click. To earn $100 you need TEN THOUSAND hits to your site. 

So, to earn ad revenue, you need Traffic. As an added bonus, the more traffic you get, the more you get paid per click, so that $100 in my example would be much, much easier to reach. Advertisers like busy blogs, so they'll pay more. 

Advertisers also like blogs that are well liked by search engines, and to be liked by search engines you need traffic, and you need to always be loading fresh, relevant, content constantly to maintain your ad revenue. 

Recapping: To get and maintain decent ad revenue, you need high traffic levels and fresh, relevant content all the time. 

Moving on;

2. Affiliate Links

Also pretty simple: Earn money by selling other people's products. 

This will give you a much higher return per purchase than ad revenue, simply because you get a percentage of the purchase price. For example, if you direct a customer to a product that costs $80, you might get 40 percent of the cost, giving you $32.00.

Sounds pretty cool. 

BUT! You need more Traffic!

Just like above, if 10% of people click on a link, its "safe" to assume 10% of those people will purchase the product. So for ONE MEASLY sale, you need one hundred thousand people to visit your site. (Unless you are really, really awesome at selling other people's products and can get a higher conversion rate).

Doesn't sound so awesome right now, but in the end the higher your traffic, the higher your click through rate, and thus the more money you get. 

Selling other people's stuff takes effort, good copy writing and really, really good promotion skills. Mad skillz you could say. 

You also need a fantastic affiliate network you can source products from. So far, Click Bank looks the best; the most products and the highest percentage of sales as well - up to a whopping 75% of the money from every sale will go directly to you once the purchase has been finalized. I'll have more on affiliate programs in later posts. 

Recapping: To earn money from affiliate links you need, an affiliate program, really awesome traffic, and the ability to sell stuff for other people.

Later posts (coming very soon) will cover

1. Traffic

2. Affiliate Marketing

3. Selling stuff for other peopl

4. Other amazing stuff.

And for those interested, I haven't made any money from this blog yet. But given that its been up for less than five hours, I'm not complaining.