How Bloggers Make Money Online

The most common way bloggers seem to make money online is via Google AdSense and most of them even make the mistake of just depending on it alone.

Inorder to make money online as a blogger you should not depend on just AdSense or any one revenue source alone. The trick to make more money from your blog is to add more revenue sources.

To make it easier for you, I have listed the common Ad programs that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

• AdSense: AdSense is a contextual advertising program for which publishers simply have to add a piece of code to their sites that helps Google analyze what your page is about so they can serve Ads on that topic. AdSense also allows you to earn money by using Google Search on your site that will display relevant Ads when visitors search on your site. AdSense also has a referral program that allows you to earn by recommending various products like Firefox toolbar, AdSense, Adwords, etc.
• Text Link Ads: Text Link Ads will help you sell simple text links on your site easily. The monthly link price will depend on factors like your Google Pagerank and Alexa rank. As a new Advertiser on Text Link Ads you are eligible for $100 in FREE Links.Text Link Ads has an affiliate program that will pay you $25 for any referred visitor that is accepted into their publisher program and installs the advertising script on their site for seven days. If you refer an advertiser who purchases an advertisement, the referral will appear in your affiliate account within 24 hours.

  For more info, read my Text Link Ads Review and my post on how to make money online with Text Link Ads.

• Tribal Fusion: Tribal Fusion’s payment is calculated based on ad impressions (CPM). So the higher your web site traffic is the more money you will earn. To get accepted though you will need a minimum of 2000 unique visitors per day.
• Kontera: Kontera’s ContentLink is a double underlined contextually relevant keyword on a web page that upon mouse-over opens a small bubble like box that displays and links to an ad from one of Kontera’s advertisers. When a visitor clicks the in text advertisement, they will be taken to the advertiser’s web site and the publisher will make money online. With ContentLink, advertisers reach their targeted audience on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis.ContentLink requires your site to have a minimum of 500,000 pageview per month, but I have seen them accepting new sites with lower pageviews.
• Vizu Answers: Vizu Answers helps you earn money from your site by placing interactive Polls on desired topics. They pay you based on CPM (Cost per thousand impressions), and you even get to set the minimum CPM rate for each poll you put up on your web site.
• ReviewMe: Pays you to review products and services on your site. You control what you review.
• Chitika eMiniMalls: Chitika eMiniMalls is a cost per click advertising program that will perform particularly well for product related blogs.
• Intellitxt: This is an in-text advertising program just like Kontera, but is harder to get accepted into.
• FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN): FAN adds CPM ads to your feed. You may need around 500 RSS readers to get accepted.
• BlogAds - BlogAds lets you set the price and helps you find advertisers for your blog easily. To perform better with BlogAds, place it at a more prominent position on your blog.

You can also make money with direct ad sales and through Affiliate programs like Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction (I have not tried these affiliate programs, but know that a few bloggers use them). Text Link Ads, ReviewMe and Aaron’s SEO book also offer affiliate programs that many bloggers use.

There are many more affiliate programs, you have to choose the one that matches your blog. Check here for tips on how to improve your Affiliate earnings.

Guest blogging on other blogs seems to be a new way of making money for bloggers these days, but some bloggers guest blog just for a link back.

I hope this post makes bloggers realize that they should not depend on just Google AdSense. May be in the beginning stage of a blog AdSense will do enough, but as your blog grows you should keep adding more revenue sources if you really want to earn from your blog. But also keep in mind that overloading your blog with Ads can make you lose readers.

To find more ways to make money online, check my <" title="Make Money Online">make money online page (this list will be updated often) and make money online category (this is where you can find more tips to make money online).

Let me know if you want to add any more common Ad programs (used by bloggers) to the list. I know there are a lot of ad programs that allow bloggers to make money online, but I just want to mention the most common ones used by bloggers to prevent confusion for new bloggers looking for ways to make more money with their blogs.