After you’ve set up your blog-site, there are two simple ways to make money with it. One way is to permit other businesses to advertise on your blog-site. They pay you for this when a visitor to your site clicks on their ad. The second way is to associate your blog with an affiliate program where you provide a link to a product or service offered by a business and you receive a commission from that business when someone makes a purchase after being directed to the item from your site. Affiliate programs are very popular with website owners and there are many programs available through affiliate networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, Websponsers, Sharesale and many more. There are more than a dozen good affiliate programs that you can work with.   I will expand on the subject of affiliate marketing in another post.

     If you decide to add advertising to your blog-site, you will want to use one of the most widely popular programs offered by Google called Google Adsense. Getting Adsense onto your blog-site is as easy as signing up with Google to get an account and then getting a special code from Google that will allow you to display their Ad on your site. You will get paid every time someone clicks on a Google Ad whether or not a purchase results from the click. You may wonder how you might increase the number of clicks on these ads, after all, the more clicks, the more money you will make. There is only one way to do this and that is to increase the number of viewers to your site. Never, never ever even think about clicking repeatedly on these ads yourself. This is considered to be a form of Fraud. Google teams are extremely competent and can easily recognize fraudulent clicks. It has something to do with tracking the clicks back to the source. Anyone discovered doing this will instantly lose their privilege to use Google Adsense and there may be other consequences as well.

     One way of insuring profitability of a blog is to make sure that the visitor enjoys their visit to your site. Good content, that is, content which is interesting, informative, amusing, inspiring or all of these, will keep readers engaged. They will most likely return to your site and they may linger a while. Profitability is a function of exposure to advertising. The longer a potential buyer is exposed to specific content-related advertising, the more likely that they will see something they need or want. It works the same way in department stores.

     Another factor to consider when making design choices as you are setting up your blog is to be sure that the font colors used in ads are not too different from the rest of the page. You do not want the ads to be glaring or stand out too noticeably. The reason is simply that this may annoy visitors to your site. You want people to spend “quality time” on your site; you don’t want to chase them away. Adsense ads display ads that are most perfectly related to the content of your blog. This increases the likelihood that readers may find something in the ads you display that they want. No space is wasted and nothing left to chance. In this sense, your web site is like a physical store where everything is merchandised and arranged attractively to make the shopping experience a pleasant one. You want readers to enjoy their visit and you want them to come back and stay awhile.

Thanks for reading, I hope you can visit again,  Take Care,

–wil