Affiliate Tracking

Even if you already know how to monetize your website with ads and affiliate programs, monetizing a blog is a bit different. A blog will have even more options to choose from for streams of revenue than a traditional website would.

Banner Ad Blocks

Banner ads, like those from Google's AdSense, are the most common way to monetize a website online, and blogs are no exception here. The same choice apply as with other websites, but with blogs ad placement is even more important. You can have your ads in a sidebar, but that will not give a very high click through rate. Banners at the top of the blog, above content can have a higher CTR, but you will get the highest rate when ads are within posts, inside your content.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs work quite well with blogs, because it is easy to write a post on a focused topic, which in turn increases click through rate for affiliate links. Readers of blogs are often quite ready to click links in posts, because blogs are naturally heavily interlinked. The drawback is that many blog readers tend to be bloggers themselves, and may be more conscious than an average internet user would about the fact that it is an affiliate link you are promoting.

Text Link Ads

Correctly placed sidebar links can generate quite much high quality traffic from a high traffic blog. Blogs are also indexed more often than other websites, which makes text links in blogs very valuable from search engine marketing perspective. Both these reasons help to explain why Text Link Ads, and other similar services are used to a great effect in many blogs. These ads are usually paid monthly, so they can be seen as a more passive source of revenue, since a short term fall in traffic will not have a very significant effect on revenue.

Sponsored Posts

This is where blogs most differ from more traditional websites, and arguably the most important point in this guide. Paid to post services such as Pay Per Post offer opportunities to promote advertisers' products with a blog post for a pay. The posts will usually pay anything from $10 up, and often make an important share of a given blog's advertisement revenue. Pay Per Post has a minimum site age of 90 days, but there are alternative service providers you can choose from, if you have a very new blog. Sponsored Reviews accepts even new sites, and they have a long list of available opportunities to choose from.

Sutocu is the author of the webmaster resources Your Website Profit and Ad Network Reviews