How to make money with a blog [Christian PF]

[Greg]

This is one of the most comprehensive "how I make money blogging" posts I've seen in the PF blogosphere. Bob of ChristianPF.com shares all (and I mean all) of the lessons he's learned in the last two years of blogging, when he went from not knowing anything about a blog to making more than his corporate paycheck.

http://www.christianpf.com/how-to-ma...y-with-a-blog/

In less than 2 years I went from not knowing what a blog was to making more with one than my corporate desk job.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money with a blog. I suspect most people won’t stick with it long enough to make a full-time income, but even making an extra few hundred dollars a month isn’t bad either. This article is extremely long (more like 10 articles), but I wanted it to be a thorough and helpful resource for those wanting to start a blog or make some more money from the one they already have.

Good read.

[hermione]

This looks like a great resource. I've bookmarked it and am definitely going to read all of it this week. Thanks for sharing this, Greg!

[financialnut]

Fantastic! I'll be reading it today. I love posts like these.

[financialnut]

I just barely read it and loved it. It has some great tips, especially if you're interested in making some money via Adsense. It sounds like he does VERY well with it. He also talks a lot about affiliate marketing, which is interesting because I have been very convinced that affiliate marketing is a much more difficult approach.

[mymeans]

Read the article last night and I instantly book-marked the article. As I'm trying to start up my own blog, every piece of information I can find on driving traffic is pure gold to me. It also gave me some perspective as far as my hopes of making a profit after seeing the amount of time he waited (and effort put in) before he started generating a profit. Good read, highly recommended.

[moneymatters]

Bob's article is an instant classic - and he's a great guy too! Definitely a must read.

[ChristianPF]

Greg, thanks for the shout out! Sorry it took me this long to get to this thread - Financialnut, to clarify, while I do make some $ with affiliate products, it has been the tougher way to go, I have had better luck with adsense. But I am working so hard to not have all my "eggs in one basket" and diversify the income...

Pete - I think you are a great guy too!! Thanks!

[financialnut]

That's great. It's certainly inspiring to those of us with "up and coming" blogs to see some people succeed. Congrats.

[cap]

imo, there are a few ways to go about it.. you can focus your monetization on your pages that ranks well in search results (more for affiliate models), or you can drive traffic and produce steady revenue through pay per clicks programs like adsense (more for magazine/newspaper models).

if you feel that you'll be hard pressed to drive significant traffic in the foreseeable future to generate good money base on your traffic and adsense EPC, then consider focusing on post/articles you have that do rank well. a simple trip to analytics will show you what your top contents are.

after figuring out what your top contents/keywords are, focus on monetizing those specific pages only.

for some people, this may do much better in terms of generating an actual revenue versus waiting for the adsense (and its equivalents) to "pop" and break the tipping point.

to add: when you do become a large enough blog/site (and it may not even be at an insane level, ~100k monthly pageviews should be plenty), you will want to consider moving from pay per clicks and start considering direct ad sales... this way, you're able to set how much you're really getting from your impressions/readership. of course, dealing w/ direct ad sales requires more than a simple slapping in of adsense codes, but you will of course get more in your pocket.

eventually, when your blog/site grows even larger.. you'll want to consider ad servers or means to track your ad servings. imo a few blogs are already at this level and can really take revenue to the next step if they start considering a dedicated sales team/person (as one person can only do so much). but it's all about comfort level, too.

[financialnut]

Well put, Cap. I couldn't agree more.l