Alright, you own a blog, have been writing for a while now, and decided to monetize your blog. That’s a pretty nice idea to do. Blogging for money may not be the best idea, but making money blogging is good. There is a difference between the two – when you blog for money, you tend to compromise on the quality of content and focus more on the money part of the equation.

4 Steps to Monetize Your Blog

That’s not to say that you should not blog for money at all – you could, after you have reached a point where you are pretty confident about the quality aspect of your blog, you have accustomed to knowing what it is that people expect out of your blog and are sure of providing it to customers. When you get the basics right, you can focus on what matters.

Step 1 – Examine your blog thoroughly.

Now, if you are ready to monetize your blog, there are a few checks that you need to do, and there are a few options that you need to weigh. First off, do a thorough review of your blog. It would help if you made sure that, among the basics of giving your readers quality content, are also involves such aspects as blog design and neatness. Your blog should be easily readable and accessible to the eye.

There is no set template or blog design universally successful or prescribed. Blogs differ in their plans, and some blogs have succeeded just by their design.

You can try a few templates that are off-track, and different from the regular ones if you have the ability and confidence to tamper with your blog design. Once you have decided on the plan that you think is optimal for your blog and its contents, you would then have to work on the general cleanliness of your blog. Is your blog cluttered with too many contents crammed into a small space? Does your blog have its contents appropriately tagged? How have your blog’s topics been classified and categorized? Does the current way you have organized your blog make sense in your blog’s theme? How have you archived your previous contents?

Do a thorough check of all these aspects and make sure you are happy about it – and more importantly, your prospective advertiser would be happy about it all. If you are satisfied with your blog layout, blog design, and neatness factor, and you also have good content to speak for, get into the statistics.

Step 2 – Get your Blog Statistics Right

 How much traffic does your blog generate? How many hits does your blog get through reference? How much of the traffic is purely organic? How many readers do you think you have? Which part of the globe do you get the maximum traffic from? How has the trend been when it comes to the number of hits that you generate and the types and regions of origins of your visitors? What are your plans for the future? How do you think your readership will pan out over the next year or a couple of years? Get your statistics right. It would help if you had all of these and more as you take the next step in your blogging venture – monetizing.

But you are not there yet. It would help if you considered things before going ahead with the next step of monetizing your blog. What’s your blog’s theme? How closely knit is your blog with the overall theme? Have you managed to pull it off with topics and content focused on the general idea of your blog? If yes, you can now monetize – based on your content.

Step 3 – Decide How to Monetize

 If your contents are good enough for advertising, you can approach companies like Google or Yahoo for them to place ads on your site. Or, you have another option – coming companies directly. If you have been following things online, you would have a fair idea of the sort of companies that advertise online.

Now that you know which companies spend money on advertising try contacting those companies directly. But, make sure that you contact those companies whose products and services would be in line with your blog’s theme and contents. If you have a travel blog, get in touch with a few established advertisers in the travel or related businesses or those interested in readers of a travelogue. Companies have online advertising budgets, and they would be willing to spend on quality content.

Step 4 – Contacting Online Advertisers:

1. When you approach companies, try to find out the names of the persons in charge of advertising in the firms and get hold of their direct e-mail ids.
2. Craft a mail personally addressed to them.
3. Do some research about the companies and explain how your blog could promote their products and how they could benefit from advertising in your blog – never send mass mails when you seek to get advertising orders.
4. Include your statistics and estimates in your mail, including your plans.

There you go. If you have done all of these, you are almost there; you only have to wait for the advertisers to respond to your mail. And your journey towards making money online starts here.

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