If you are blogging then you might want to cover the cost of your efforts. You might even want to make an income from your work. What are the best ways of doing this?

There are several ways for the new blogger to earn an income from their website. Some are easier than others and some need a lot more work than others. But if you are wanting to turn your blogging passion into a small, or maybe a not so small, income, here are my favourite ways of earning an income.

Affiliate Marketing
This started off originally through website owners who had regular readers teaming up with companies that needed traffic. The website owners linked to the businesses and generated sales and eventually this became affiliate marketing of what it is today.

In short, as a blogger you can recommend and refer to products that a merchant is promoting. Through signing up to suitable schemes the visitors that you send are tracked and if these make purchases you share in a percentage of the sale. You can place text links in the body of your posts, banners in the side bars and a mixture in your newsletter. It is up to you to tell your visitors about the products and get the sales.

But how to get started? Simply look for a few products that are related to your blog and find who is selling them. If that company advertises an affiliate scheme you are sorted, else run a general search for the company name and the word affiliate. You will be surprised what you can find!

Pay Per Click
The next popular method once installed takes no extra effort and that is pay per click (PPC) schemes such as Google Adsense. With PPC you just display the code within your theme, either embedded in the post or in the side bars, then as long as you are getting website traffic there is not much more to do. Just maybe experiment with the colours and positions of your PPC units.

Very simple and easy to run and if you have a lot of traffic on a high value niche, it can be a great earner. All that you need to do to generate a good income is maintain your blog.

Sponsored Posting
There are a few marketing companies around that can provide you with opportunities to sponsor your posts or include paid for links in the posts. They will keep you up to date with the latest regulations, but in short companies make opportunities available to you for writing posts. You write this post in your own words so that it fits into your blog and as long as everything is correct you become eligible for payment.

Obviously, each payment is related to a small amount of work writing a post, so the amount you earn is limited by the amount of time you can spend, but with some schemes there is a lot of money on offer.

Ebook
Lastly, if you are able to put together a blog of thoughts, why not put some of these thoughts together into a coherent ebook? If readers enjoy your ramblings they might equally enjoy a book of them. There is a bit of work here actually creating a shop function, but on WordPress there is a plugin for this that makes the work so much easier!

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