How Bloggers Make Money: Advertising

“How do you make money off of your blog?”

I get asked this question fairly often. And by bloggers fairly often. And I feel sort of weird answering. I mean I’m not rolling in the income here, folks. I’m very much a beginner at this whole thing. I’ve set reasonable goals (my main goal is to have my blog make an amount commensurate with a part-time job and that’s quickly coming to fruition) but I’m not rich off my blog by any means.

Still, I KNOW how it’s done. I just don’t always do it. For various reasons which I’ll not get into right now. But over the next week or so we’ll go over the various means of making money from a blog. I’ll do some reading up on the pro’s opinions of them  and I’ll ask you to weigh in.

Let’s start with the most simple to understand method. Advertising.

So you have this blog. And you have this audience. And your audience (no matter the size) respects your opinion and looks forward to your posts. These are the most basic requirements of your blog to seek out advertising revenue.

And advertising revenue is just what it sounds like. You are seeking out companies to place ads on your site for a price. What price? Good question. There are many schools of thought on how to price out advertisement. We can get into all that later. For now it’s just important that you know that there are methods.

Ok, so how does this all work?

Look at your blog. Look at your entire computer screen open to your blog. Every piece of space on your blog has potential monetary value. Some of it you can sell and some you can’t. Obviously you want to reserve space for YOUR blog posts and photos. That is, after all, what people come to you for. The rest is up for grabs.

Obviously anything in the first screen view (the view of your blog without having to scroll) is going to be the most valuable. The less people have to look for things, the more likely they are to look at things.  Bigger ads are more valuable (both because they are more noticeable and because they take up more of a finite amount of space) than smaller ads.

The pro’s of ad space

The con’s/reservations about ad space

I guess technically ad revenue is active income. You have to seek them out to get them. But they are sort of a passive form of active income. Once an ad space is sold, it’s sold. You cannot sell it again. And since there’s only so much space on your blog, there are only so many ads you can sell.