Blog Monetization – Adsense Vs. Affiliate Ads

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“How am I going to make money from my blog?” This is by far one of the biggest questions every new blogger has when they set out to start their first blog.

Their are a lot of different ways to monetize a blog. So many, in fact, that new bloggers have no idea where to start or what form of advertising to use.

I’d like to give my insight into two of the most widely used forms of monetization used for blogs – Google Adsense and Affiliate advertising.

Blog Monetization – Using Adsense

The reason I aim this section directly at Adsense is because Adsense is more lucrative than other PPC networks by far. There are other quality PPC networks to chose from, like Adbrite, but you wont get paid nearly as much per click like you will with Adsense.

With that said, I see a lot of ads from people on the internet that say they can teach you how to make massive amounts of money from Adsense. They claim that by simply adding the Adsense code to your blog, you’ll make thousands of dollars a month.

The claims made these people aren’t necessarily untrue but they mislead you to believe that it is a simple and quick process.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of money to be made from Adsense and some people make their living from it but don’t waste your money on these ads and claims.

So how can you make money online with your blog and Adsense? Well, let’s look at a couple of basic facts:

• You make money from Adsense when a visitor clicks on an Adsense ad that is placed on your blog
• A very small percentage of your blog visitors will click on your Adsense ads

Fact is, your visitors are there to look at the content you provide to them. Every once and a while, visitors will see something out of the corner of their eye that catches their attention and will proceed to click on it.

But simply hoping that they’ll click on your ads won’t work and asking your readers to click on those ads or offering some sort of incentive would not be smart and doing so will quickly get you banned.

There are ways to increase your conversion rates though.

Superior banner placement – This can make a huge difference in conversion rates. There are many different sizes of ads and plenty of spots to place the ads making the possibilities endless. Choosing the best places and sizes takes a lot of time, research, and patience. For a newbie, the best bet would be to purchase a premium blog theme, such as Carl Ocab’s Blogging Theme or Thesis Theme for Wordpress, that has done this research for you. All you have to do is put the code in the spots and focus on content. To find more themes, you can do a search on Google.

Blend Adsense Into Your Blog – The great thing about Adsense text ads is that you can change the color scheme of the text to fit your blog’s color scheme. This makes it seem as though the ads are part of your site making it more likely for visitors to click on it. If you feel that this may be misleading or sort of blackhat, keep in mind that Adsense ads match the content of your blog and simply provides more relevant information to your visitors.

Blog Monetization – Affiliate Ads

I like affiliate marketing for a lot of reasons. Basically you just market products services from other companies on their behalf.

You then get a commission, sometimes as high as %75, for every sale you make. You don’t have to deliver an actual product to the customer or even carry inventory. Simple right?

Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds but you can get paid much faster this way than you can from Adsense.

The best affiliate programs will have pre-made banners for you to use in different sizes, email marketing letters, and text ads. All you need to do is use them how you see fit. Never spam though!

To become an affiliate for a company, you can join am affiliate network like Clickbank or PepperJam, or some companies have their own affiliate program.

Keep in mind that there are two different kinds of routes you can go with this. One time affiliate commission, which is when you get paid a commission only once for a sale that the customer only pays for once, and there is recursive affiliate commission, which is when you get a commission for a sale that the customer has to pay for more than once such as a monthly membership to a site.

I recommend that you try to be an affiliate for as many monthly membership sites.

To truly be successful with affiliate marketing on your blog, you have to remember to keep the ads you place on your blog relevant to your blog niche and the information you have on your blog.

If you have an entertainment blog, put ads up that have to do with movie downloads, ringtones, etc.

This is important because you have to realize that your visitors are already interested in stuff that has to do with your blogs niche so it’s best to capitalize on that.

Do you use these two forms of advertising on your blog? If so, have you had any success? If you don’t use these two forms of monetization, what others do you use?

Post a comment with the answer to this question and join the discussion.

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