Monetizing Your Site
In case you’ve missed the beginning on the series, feel free to check out parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7
Now that you’ve got the word out about your new blog, you’re ready to start making some money from it. Aren’t we all? Of course. Unfortunately, making any kind of decent money from a blog is next to impossible. Sorry, to burst your bubble. I know I haven’t made much of anything. Oh well, that’s not why I blog. So, needless to say I am not the best person to be writing a tutorial about monetizing your site. Nonetheless, I will do my best to provide you with a few resources to hopefully make some money.
The most obvious is to run some kind of ads on your site. Google Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher program are popular choices. Other alternatives with slightly different twist are text link ads and adbrite. The success of these really depends on the amount of traffic you have on your site and your ability to display the ads in a way that will attract clicks…neither of which I’m good at. 
Other money making choices include writing reviews for money and affiliate ads. Writing reviews for money has some ethical issues…if you are paid to write a review, how can you truly be unbiased. So, my recommendation, if you do decide to do this, is to disclose that you are getting paid. This disclosure is not a law as far as I know, but please do the Internet community a service by letting us know that you’re getting paid and also be honest about what you review. If you can’t wouldn’t consider buying what ever it is you are reviewing, then don’t write a review about it. Therefore, your positive reviews won’t be a lie even if you are getting paid for it.
Affiliate ads can be from a variety of sources. Amazon will allow you to display products on your site and will pay you if someone clicks through to their site and buys the product. Lots of hosting companies also will pay you to refer visitors to them. Dreamhost does this. They allow you to make up to $97 on 1 year basic hosting plan referral. To make the service more appealing and affordable to your readers, Dreamhost allows you to create promotional codes. These promotional codes can be used to offer a discount of your discretion…up to $97 (I think). Of course, the more you discount the less you make. So determining what the least amount of discount you can offer and still make money is an art form. If you’re looking for a good host, use my promo code “MandL” to receive a good discount and support my site at the same time.
One last option I can think of is selling a service or product of your own on your site. This requires a lot more work, but has much more potential to make some serious money. Actually, I can think of another… come up with a great idea and hope an established firm will buy your site out (this works for domain names as well). Google and Yahoo both have paid a ton of cash to some pretty small, innovative companies.
I’m sure there are other ways to make some money from blogging, but I’m out of ideas. If you know of any, feel free to share in the comments below. Best of luck to you.