Unless you are blogging for the pure joy of writing and sharing your thoughts and feelings with the world, you most likely are reading this because you intend to make money blogging, either directly or indirectly.
Blogs make money directly through advertising based on CPM, CPC, or CPA. CPM (Cost per-thousand) is a carry-over from the previous way of buying media and still remains the most popular way to launch an online advertising campaign and almost every blog ad network is measured by CPM. The other two CPC (Cost per-Click) and CPA (Cost per-Action) are more relevant to the interactive nature of online advertising and measure direct referrals, sign-ups, or sales.
The other direct ways of creating income with a blog are through retail sales of a product or service, affiliate programs (pay you per referral or signup and grow from there), or revenue sharing deals with larger websites such as Amazon where you are an “Associate” and you gain a percentage of a sale Amazon process from their ad tags running on your blog.
The indirect ways a blog can make you money are as follows. A blog can raise your profile while you sell a book or pitch a product. A blog can increase traffic to your website and therefore bring in more visitors to your brick and mortar.
The above are generalizations and even though you can set up a Typepad or Wordpress blog in minutes doesn’t mean you will start making money or selling novels. Here are more reasons why you should blog and I’ll break down the steps of setting up a pro blog in future posts.
