BloggingCoach.com

The unfortunate truth is that most bloggers don’t make much money from their blogs. With the economy in the dumps, advertisers aren’t shelling out big bucks to place ads on relevant niche websites these days. But that doesn’t mean bloggers can’t make money. It just means they need a different strategy than relying solely on sponsored advertising.

If you are looking for ways to make money from your blog, here are a few tried and true methods.

1. Product Reviews – Product reviews let you soft sell potential customers by offering your opinion on a particular product or service you recommend. At the end of the review, you then offer them a link if they would like to check out the product further. No one likes to be sold, and most blog readers won’t have the attention span to listen to you give a hyped up sales pitch for a product. They want the pros and cons – and specifically want to know whether it can help them.

   There are many affiliate programs out there that will pay you a percentage of whatever you sell. Some of the most popular include Amazon.com, Commission Junction, and Clickbank. Do a search for products within your niche and the term “affiliate program” – you may be surprised at what you will find.

   Let me give a quick warning about this. The FTC recently published new guidelines that require bloggers to disclose when they receive payment for purchases, so make sure you let your readers know that you are using an affiliate link. If you’ve built up enough trust through great content, most of your readers won’t care that you earn a few bucks on the side.

2. Create InfoProducts – Creating your own guide or audio program that readers can purchase via download is another great way to generate money from your blog. Simply take your best blog posts and turn them into chapters for a special report or record yourself giving a lecture about your specific topic.

   Want to sell your content online? Paypal, Google Checkout, Clickbank, Paydotcom, and e-Junkie make it incredibly easy to take payments and deliver your product easily. You don’t even need shopping cart software – they provide it for you. Want to provide physical products? Amazon’s CreateSpace is a fantastic print-on-demand service that allows you to sell physical books, CDs and DVDs.

3. Write Articles – Article marketing is one of the fastest ways to drive traffic to your website. If you’ve written a product review or have an infoproduct to sell, write up a number of articles about your topic and submit them to eZineArticles and other popular article directories.

   Most article directories allow you to include a “resource box” or “author bio” where you can pitch your products and services and drive traffic to your infoproduct sales page or product review page.

4. Google Adsense – While I’ve gotten away from using Google Adsense in favor of more affiliate marketing stuff, if you have a profitable niche, adding Google Adsense ads might make sense for your website. It’s free to join and only takes a minute to add the code to your blog.

If you get any regular traffic to your blog, you can start earning regular money from these four methods.