How To Make Money From Your Blog ? Can I Earn Money Blogging ?

Adrew Panganiban from Austin, Texas emailed us this great question last night:
"Dear TechPinas, is it possible to make money from blogging? How do you make money from your blog?"

Hi Andrew! Thank you so much for your inquiry.
Yes, it is very possible to make money from blogging. But first, you have to make sure that your blog is up for it. One important thing to keep in mind when blogging for money is that a high-traffic blog has a greater chance of making more money than a blog with low traffic (, of course...right?).

So first, build your blog's traffic. Follow these basic steps to do that:

1. Produce well-written relevant content. Check if you what you want to blog about will be relevant to your readers. It will help if you choose a niche that you are particularly good at and that a lot people might be interested in. Avoid copying others' content unless you are doing a news blog that requires a lot of quoting.

2. Once your content is up, make sure that search engines can crawl through them. Submit your blog to major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Type "Submit Website to Google" on the TechPinas search box above to find articles on how to submit a website or blog to search engines.

3. Submit your entries to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious. This will create an automatic backlink to your entries and could very well help in increasing your site's traffic and page rank.

Once your site's traffic is good, you may start implementing some money-making measures on your blog. There are three popular ways to do that:

1. Google Adsense - Google's ad service for publishers ~ Place ads relevant to your content that your readers could click on. Every click translates to cash. Naturally, if you have thousands or millions of readers, you have more chances of people clicking on them.

2. Affiliate Programs - Selling relevant third party products and services for a fixed commission. Sites like Commission Junction and Clickbank collate available affiliate programs on the net that you can join.

3. Donation Program - usually via Paypal. You've been blogging your heart out, why not ask for donations from your readers?

IMPORTANT NOTE: Remember that it may take a while before you can actually earn money from blogging, so if money is your only motivation for writing content online, it might not serve you well in the long run. Hence, I suggest that you find other more important reasons to blog and consider earning from it simply incidental.

Here's a video courtesy of HowCast on Earning Money from Blogging :


Good luck!