How to make money from blogging

How Do I Make Money from Blogging?

So I cleared campus and I have been job hunting for quiet some time.I needed cash but with no job, I had to get some means of making some. I couldn't start a business, I didn't have capital. After some extensive research on how to make money online, I finally got a means with assurance. Now I get asked how much money my blogging makes me on a regular basis. These days I don’t go into specifics about it – all I will say is that it continues to increase each month as my cheque lands in my mailbox

I hope you find it useful to see the mix and variety of ways that I earn a living from blogging.

1. AdSense

I use AdSense with real effect on my other blogs.
While I do use AdSense Referrals and their search feature it is their normal ads that work best for me. I have them all set to show image and text based ads and find that 250×300 pixel ads work best (usually with a blended design).

2. Chitika

Last time I did this sort of summary Chitika ranked #1. This time around it has been overtaken by AdSense – not because Chitika slipped in how much it earned but because AdSense went up and because I also replaced a few Chitika ad units with WidgetBucks ones. Chitika offers a range of ad units that I experiment with. I find their eMiniMalls work best and that Related Product Units are also good. Their Shoplincs product isn’t performing as well as it once did for me – mainly because I’ve been promoting it less and have driven less traffic to it. 

3. Amazon Associates

This has been one of my big movers in the last 12 months. I used to make a few odd dollars from it – however in recent times it has become a significant earner for me. This quarter it overtook TLA as my third biggest earner – largely on the back of me directing traffic to Amazon from my product related sites – mainly digital cameras. While the commission on cameras is only 4% this adds up when those that you refer buy higher ticket items.
4. Forex Trading – As seen in the offline forex bureaus, they buy currency A and make a margin by selling it at a higher rate. Say if I buy $ 100 for Kes. 7,000 and then I sell the dollars to a tourist who is leaving the country for example for Kes. 80 Per dollar. that means 100*80 = Kes. 8,000. You see I spent Kes. 7,000 to buy $100 and I’ve sold the $100 for Kes. 8,000, that means I have kes.1,000 in profits. The same logic is applied online. Using the Right tools you can trade this and make loads of money.


5. FreeLance – Your Photography, Typing, Customer Service, Programming, Design and other personal 
services can be outsourced to various companies and you get paid for it. This form of earning I don’t refer it a business, as it limits to you to the amount of work you can do for a certain number of hours. however, it’s usually better off than nothing.

6. Affiliate Marketing- This is my favorite, its what drives the internet in social media, social bookmarking, forums, blogs, e-commerce sites name them. Have you heard of Amazon, Click bank, Craiglist, commission Junction, Neverblueads and ebay among others. Have seen guys claim to make millions of dollars online the lazy way. this is what they are referring to: Affiliate marketing.

4. Private Ad Sales/Sponsorships

This includes ad sales of the 125 x 125 ads mostly at probogger as well as a couple of private ad deals that I did with sponsors on my camera blog (including sponsorships with Canon, Kodak and Adobe). This area has jumped up since last time I checked.
5. Text Link Ads

The income from TLA has dipped slightly over the last few months simply because I took the decision to stop selling them at my blogs. This was because I wanted to focus more upon selling the 125 pixel ads instead and felt that the ads I was attracting were not as relevant to this site as they could have been. As it turns out this might have been a good move because it seems Google has been penalizing blogs that run them lately.

6. ProBlogger Job Boards

The job boards  at ProBlogger continue to grow each month in the number of advertisements that are being bought. This enabled me to invest most of the money that they’d earned a while back into getting a new back end for the boards and to redesign them. It hit me today that the boards are now bringing in around $1000 a month in revenue which is pretty nice considering that they are now so low maintenance to run! stay tuned for some new features coming soon which could see this revenue increase and more importantly for it to become an even more useful resource to readers.

7. Miscellaneous Affiliate Programs

I run a variety of affiliate programs on my blogs – most of which bring in smaller amounts of money that don’t really justify a category of their own. These include – - Digital Photography Secrets (a camera technique series), Pro Photo Secrets (a great photoshop product) , Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program, SEO Book (Aaron’s legendary resource). This area is set to continue to grow in the current quarter with me having had reasonable conversions from the promotion of the excellent Teaching Sells course.

8. Miscellaneous Advertising Programs

I also play with a number of other ad networks. Some I run as tests to see if I should review them here – and some are just advertising that run in the background on some of my smaller blogs. These include AuctionAds, Feedburner RSS ads, Vizu (a poll advertising system), Kontera and Bidvertiser. Together these don’t add up to major earnings for me – not because they are not good, but because I don’t use them heavily (a blog can only run so many ads on it).

I think that that covers most of it. Since last quarter I’ve also been experimenting withWidgetBucks as well as one other ad system that is still in a closed beta test. I’m certain that WidgetBucks will feature in next quarter’s list because I am getting good returns on that so far. In fact at it’s current earnings it’ll debut at at least number 4 on the list and perhaps even at number 3.


I will dwell more in affiliate marketing as it is the most sure way of landing cheques to your bank account without spending a dime!!!