Blogging has sky-rocketed in popularity in the past couple years. It seems that almost everyone has a blog nowadays and there are even quite a few people making a great living as bloggers.

I’ve been blogging for almost four years but for the longest time I just did it as an easy way to add content to my websites. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I realized I could be making money from my blogging efforts.

Sure I always had Adsense ads on my blogs and made a few bucks here and there but never thought much of the actual income potential of a good blog. I had heard of many others making a lot of money from their blogs but for some reason it never sank in that I could too.

Once I got my head out of my butt I decided it was time to start making some real money off my blogs. But there was still the question of how to maximize the earnings of my blogs. What were the best ways to make money from my blogs? I still didn’t know the answer to that question.

After doing some research and asking a lot of my Internet marketing buddies, I finally figured out some of the best ways to earn a good income from my blogs. And have been doing very well with them ever since then.

I’m going to save you the time and headaches of figuring out how to maximize the income potential of your blog and just tell you how right now…

Here are 5 ways you can earn from your blogging efforts:

1) Sell text links.

Charge a certain amount per month for a link in your blogroll or somewhere else on your blog. This is a great way to make passive income from your blog. Each time someone buys a link just set up a monthly subscription that automatically bills them every month until they cancel. All you have to do is take a few minutes to put up the link and you get paid every month.

2) Charge for individual posts on your blog.

You can allow people to pay a certain amount for their own post on your blog. Blog marketing is huge right now and there are loads of people who are willing to pay for posts of other people’s blogs. You can write up a review, article, advertisement, or any other type of post. Or have them write it. Limit the posts to maybe 200 words or less to ensure you don’t get excessively long posts.

3) Google Adsense.

If you have a blog then chances are you know what Adsense is so I won’t talk much about this one. Get a Google Adsense account if you don’t already have one and put the code on your blog. You will earn a little every time someone clicks on an ad.

4) Affiliate blogging.

Find products or services that you can become an affiliate of and write up reviews to post on your blog. When someone uses your affiliate link to buy the product then you will earn a percentage of the money. Make sure the company offers at least a 50% commission on all affiliate sales. There are plenty that do so there’s no reason to waste your time on any less.

5) Paid for posting sites.

There are sites such as PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com that will pay you for blogging about other people’s sites. How much you earn per post mainly depends on how popular your blog is, so if you have a very popular blog you can make a lot of money with this method. Even if you don’t it’s still worth looking in to.

6) Make money posting news.

This is one that I have only tried a few times but it does work. All you have to do is get a free account at http://www.thenewsroom.com and then search for news relevant to the topic of your blog. You will see a little button next to all news that says “embed.” Click that button and copy the code it gives you into your blog as a post. You get paid every single time someone visits the page the news is posted on. They don’t have to click or do anything else. You only get fractions of a cent per visitor, but it will add up over time and you can post as many as you want on your blog.

Now before you can use any of the above techniques to make money from your blog you will first need to have a steady flow of traffic. You can’t maximize your blog’s earning potential without visitors.

Getting traffic is a whole other lesson in itself so I’m not going to get too in-depth, but here are a few ways to increase your blog’s traffic:

* First and foremost you need to be posting quality content to your blog on a regular basis. You must give information that people actually want to come and read. Without this your blog is dead.

* Get as many inbound links as possible. The higher quality the link, the better! There are tons of ways to do this. Do some searching on just about any good internet marketing forum and you will find all the information you need for doing this.

* Social bookmarking. Put buttons on your blog that allow people to post it to social bookmarking sites. There are a lot of these but some of the more popular ones are; Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Stumbleupon, and Reddit. You can also post your blog posts to these yourself.

* Be consistent with your blog topic. If your blog is about home business tips then keep the content relevant to that. Don’t go blogging about how to deer hunt on a home business blog.

* Search Engine Optimization. Getting your blog ranked highly in the search engines for competitive keywords in your niche is an excellent way to bring in a lot of traffic to it. SEO is another topic that requires a whole lesson of its own so I won’t teach it here. But again you can find all the information you need about SEO on any good internet marketing forum.

Ok that’s it. You should now be able to go out and make a pretty good income from your blogging efforts. Remember, consistency is key! Build your blogs popularity and you will soon find you are making more and more money from it.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Teaching you how to make money online with your own internet home business.

Filed under: Blogging