So just how do you go about monitizing a blog to make money? In this article I go through working out just how much money you need to make to make the blog pay for itself and also reveal some extra tools that you should use such as wordpress, wordpress affiliate pro and a few others..

Well I guess the first question you should ask yourself is why you want to monitize it in the first place.

• Is it just to pay for the blog hosting itself.
• To get rich - yeah!
• To be famous - possibly although that can take outragous action or a different career.
• To retire from “real work” and a Job “Just Over Broke” as I heard somewhere.

By just working out the goal you want can help to focus and target what you want. There are some people doing the first, some managing the second and most people would like the last but don’t realise it still takes work and give up after a few days.

So lets say I just want to pay for the blog hosting itself. That means that I need about $5 for the domain name, $30 for the hosting itself, $30 to get the blog software installed and configured (although I could do that myself if I have the technical savvy - which I have). SO that’s about $65 for the first year and $35 for the following years. Lets aim to make the middle of that and have $50 per year.

Now how much traffic you get depends on several factors. Lets face it there are lots of people trying to get traffic and the basic rule is either you pay for it via PPC (Adwords, Yahoo/Overture etc..) or you do SEO via linking strategies or Article Submission. Or affiliates but a blog is not necessarily a product. We don’t want to pay anything out so PPC is a no-no at the moment.

Whatever traffic you drive to a blog via the actual content if it doesn’t match with what people are searching for then they will click back or close the window without reading more. However if they like the content they may browse further for other articles or they may just possibly click on you’re adwords advertisers if the links match. It’s getting more and more difficult to direct people to click on your adwords ads so although that might be one way of paying for the blog, its getting less and less effective.

Getting you’re blog to appear in search results for a particular term is not that difficult if you repost it into article submission sites such as… Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, & Searchwarp…which are all article directory sites. You must ensure that the article has a link back to the actual blog entry. Apparently Google likes article engines and does a search quite quickly on them. If you fix your permalink structure it will make things easier for google to index you.

So how do we get our $50?

If the blog entries are article based (like this one) then you could use affiliate links. This can work but it can also take a lot of editing to ensure that you’re links are always correct. It does work but only if you’re content is good and you have a lot of traffic. So hiding the links within the text of the article is a bit more effective than adwords. There is a tool that makes this much easier and I’ll tell you about it in a moment.

Now we have two strategies to get our $50. Adwords and affiliate links within each of our posts. We have some limited traffic because we’ve reposted some blog articles and pointed them back.

Lets look at a worst case scenario.

We have unique 100 visitors a week to our blog… poor I know but I’m being pessimistic here..

Of those 100 only 1 click on an affiliate link and only 1 of them goes through an adwords click.

Lets assume the adword click gives us $0.50 per click

Lets also assume that only 1 in 100 of the people that follow our affiliate link actually buy the product and we make a $25 sale.

The total figures over the year break down like this.

Adwords = 52 (weeks per year) * 1 * 0.50 = $26

Affiliate Link Sales = $25 (Sale) * 52 (weeks per year) * 0.01 = $13

Which gives us $39. Doesn’t recoup the setup costs if you paid someone to install and configure the blog but does just pay for the running costs.

However this is just for one article. If you had 10 articles each one getting the same traffic then that would be $130 a year.. i.e. some beer money.

Well that’s the theory. Now for the practice.

The aim of this particular blog is for it to pay for itself. In the past it hasn’t quite made it so I’ve decided to start taking steps to do that.

Here are my tips for getting money out of a blog (who knows this might just become a special report…)

1. Use wordpress for your blog - use a non standard template but make sure it looks good. Go for white background if you can - its more difficult to read white on grey or black.

2. Use an Adsense plugin to add your adsense account banners to posts and your pages.

3. Change your permalink structure to /%Category%/%postname%/ to make google like you more.

4. Use feedburner, feedblitz and the http://www.submitemnow.com/ firefox submitter to get your blog known about and you’re existing audience to read you’re new posts.

5. Write and repost good articles to the article engines. Don’t always try to write an article that can have an affiliate link.

6. Buy and install the wordpress affiliate pro plug in. This plugin allows you to add all those nice links within the article text. As a timesaver it’s invaluable and the product comes with some nice video tutorials on how to use it. I’ll be doing a specific review shortly.

7. Track your click throughs properly to see if traffic is being generated.

So there you go. Get you’re blog making just a trickle of money and you’re hobby blog might just start paying for itself.