Is Blogging Profitable?

I think we are all in agreement that the Internet contains a wealth of opportunities for making some extra money and supplementing an income. Blogging harnesses these revenue prospects but in a low cost way with little effort actually coming from the blogger. Is it really possible to earn money in such a simplistic fashion? If so, then why isn't everybody doing it? I have described blogging initially as an online diary but over time through confidence in personal expression and advancing monetization methods, blogging has evolved. Most desirable by bloggers is to now turn their work into a home-business. Who wouldn't want to earn money for doing something which they enjoy? This is a goal for all of us.

We will start with the established blog. Great quality content, a witty and interesting author and the subject base 'Making Money Online'. This blog has a large number of subscribers and consistantly has 1000 hits from visitors per month. Now anyone running a business that specialises in delivering advice for making money online, runs an online marketplace or produces a product that delivers more traffic to a website etc would see advertising on this blog as a great money spinner. Heres why:

The visitors to the blog are clearly interested in making money online, perhaps they have their own businesses and want to make more money through increased sales or they just want to supplement their income using the Internet for this means. A well established businessman would see the marketing potential here and ask to advertise on the homepage of the blog, somewhere near the top of the page with a catchy slogan:

Fat Loss For Idiots

Now my friends this is bound to draw the eyes of the 1000 visitors away from whatever article they are reading on the blog for at least 1 second, yes? Well so far so good, 1000 glances at this advertisement per month. Now lets be really conservative here, say 10% of the visitors actually click the link attached to the slogan:

Fat Loss For Idiots

Thats 100 people per month following through to the business' homepage to read about the product, great! Now we are going to be even more conservative and say that just 10% of these people go and actually buy the advertised product. Thats 10 sales extra per month the business has gained. If the product is priced at say $20 then thats $2400 in extra sales per year. Most bloggers will advertise for a small commission, for continuity we will again say 10% (although much higher commissions can be made!). Now the blogger is earning $240 per year, and the business is earning and $2160 per year! Very lucrative!

So you can see that through little effort on either part, both are earning money. You can scale this up for yourself for popular webblogs recieving 100,000 visits per month etc.

A key factor mentioned here is visitor numbers, you must be recieving plenty of hits for this process to work.Luckily this is attainable for most by following a few simple procedures that I will discuss in the following weeks. To summarise though you must make web search possible directly from your blog using perhaps one of the Google programs available. Then your blog visitors should be able to interact with your blog; make comments, download images, subscribe etc. You must regularily update your blog to make it 'sticky' for the reader and then monitor your site statistics regularily; visitor number, time on site etc.

It is not just companies promoting single products that want to advertise on your site, there are also great advertising companies like Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Clickbank and Amazon Associates that allow you to advertise lots of different products for lots of companies using banners, link groups etc that are created by the marketing company for you.

If you have great content, great functionality and good adverts then word will get around and traffic will come to your site and you will make money. However there are a few tips and tricks that will make this a much quicker process, some of which will be discussed next time.

Next Time: How Do I Start Blogging?