money

Among the best money making ideas for beginners is to use methods which earn recurring income such as affiliate sales. You could achieve this without a blog but blogging about a product which you’ve tried and tested beats any sales copy because of the special connection and trust bloggers establish with their readers.

There are several ways bloggers use to make money blogging:

1. Affiliate Sales
   You can pick a best-selling product from popular affiliate sales site like Clickbank or PayDotCom where sellers list their products and affiliates select products they want to sell.

   How to choose affiliate products to sell?

   Commission rates vary but picking a high price product with high commissions of at least 75% and a low refund rate is a good start. Ideally, you should try the product or read the ebook you are promoting since blogging about something you haven’t experienced first hand would likely result in a post that readers can tell is not genuine.

   Many sites also have direct affiliate sales programmes such as Amazon.

   Pros: High commissions and recurring income if offered by product.
   Cons: Products usually have a money-back guarantee period of at least 30 days which means you will only be paid your commission after 30 days if there is no refund made.

   If a product is a best-selling one, it means many other affiliates are already selling it and the market may be saturated making it hard to get sales.

2. Direct Advertisers
   When you have a fair amount of traffic on your blog, advertisers will be interested to buy advertising banners and text links to place on your blog. You can also charge to write a review for advertisers’ products and services.

   Pros: You get all the money without having to give out any commission.
   Cons: Direct advertisers are not easy to come by so if one does, treat the advertiser like royalty.

3. Paid Reviews And Text Links
   One of the most common money making opportunities for bloggers is by paid blogging. There are many companies that act as a middle man for advertisers and bloggers. They take a commission cut from sales but their service is useful to help bloggers find advertisers who want to buy reviews or text ads.

   These companies include LinkWorth and Text-Link-Ads. Blogs have to meet certain requirements such as PageRank before they are accepted.

   Pros: Ready pool of advertisers provided.
   Cons: Middleman takes a percentage cut from your revenue.

4. Contextual/Text Ads
   Beside Google AdSense, there are many other companies that provide contextual-relevant text ads which are automatically sent with a code placed
   in your blog template. Another text ad company, Bidvertiser lets you pick the advertisers you want for your blog. They are more suitable for beginners because minimum payout is only US$10 compared to US$100 for AdSense which is much harder to reach.

   Pros: Easy to implement – just copy and past the ad code and no need to bother with it anymore.
   Cons: Unless you have fairly good blog traffic, you may not get many people clicking on the ads. Revenue is usually very slow.

There is no reason why you cannot try all the methods to find out which ones work best for you. In fact, you should try them all more than once as your blog changes and grows over time. For some, make money selling affiliate products work best while others find success elsewhere.

Different bloggers will report varying success with different methods so don’t be put off by reading someone’s post that AdSense doesn’t work or get angry when a recommended method flopped badly for you.

It will take time to work out an income strategy that works for you but the most important task to make it work is to have good blog content. Without good content, there can be no blog traffic and non of the methods have a chance of succeeding.