How to Make Money from your Blog with Advertising & Sponsored Content
Several ways are available to make money from a blog, but nowadays, achieving profitability is getting harder with the blog marketplace continuing to get crowded. Most people are turning away from affiliate marketing because it has been overused and has become boring to prospects to ad feeds and sponsored content which offers better monetization opportunities that can drive profit fast. In this article, we will look at how money can be made on your blog with advertising and sponsored content. Let’s start with advertising.
Advertising
There are three primary types of online advertising that bloggers can use to make money from their blogs. They include:
1. Pay-Per-Click: With this, the blogger is paid by the advertiser any time someone clicks on the advertiser’s ad.
2. Pay-Per-Impression: The blogger is paid by the adviser whenever the ad appears on the blog pages.
3. Pay-Per-Action: The advertiser pays the blogger when someone clicks on the ad and performs further action such as signing up or making a purchase.
These ad types can be used on your blog or website in many different ways.
Some of these are:
Contextual Ads
These ads are basically pay-per-click ads that are delivered based on a blog page content. Theoretically, the ads that appear on the page match up with the content of the page, thus increasing the chance that someone is going to click on them. The biggest example of contextual advertising is Google Adsense advertising.
Text Link Ads
These ads are not based on blog page content but are placed instead on specific text in the blog posts. There are text link brokers offering one such text link advertising service.
Impression-Based Ads
Impression-based ads are ads that pay bloggers based on the number of times an ad appears on their blog. Examples of impression-based advertising providers are FastClick and eXponential.
Affiliate Ads
Bloggers are able to provide links to products and earn based on the ads with affiliate ads. When someone clicks through any of these ads and completes a purchase of the advertised product, the blogger gets paid. Two of the most popular affiliate ads platforms are Amazon Associates and eBay Affiliates.
Direct Ads
Ad spaces are offered to visitors to purchase and when they buy it, they supply the blogger directly with ad content to post to the blog. These ads appear as banner ads or similar display ads on a blog which is uploaded directly to the blog by the blogger. Pricing for direct ads differ from one blogger to another (usually depends on traffic the blog receives). Direct ads are referred to as sponsors ads as well.
Reviews
An indirect form of advertising on blogs is reviews. Bloggers can be contacted by companies and paid to talk about their products, services, or anything else. Some companies use the PayPerPost type of review advertising where the blogger is paid for every post about the company.
Now that we have seen how to make money on your blog through advertising, let us take a look at how to do same through sponsored content.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is content that a blogger is paid for by businesses who want to get information about product or service to target readers faster. Several forms of sponsored content are available, which include:
-Reviews (as mentioned earlier).
-Articles by sponsors which are then posted to the blog.
-Links embedded in existing content.
-Giveaways, etc.
Note that sponsored content is not only for articles and written content, some companies pay for social media posts and YouTube Videos covering their products and services like written content do.
Factors that influence how much money you can be paid with sponsored content is size of monthly traffic, target audience reach, social media influence, backlinks and much more. These determines if you earn tens or thousands of dollars. Bloggers with established audiences are often contacted first by potential advertisers, but these advertisers can also be contacted directly by the blogger as well.