Most people who start blogs don’t do it for the entertainment value. The majority of people start blogs for the purpose of monetizing them at some point in the future. Once you have enough traffic to your site, you can monetize your blog in many different ways. Here are five ways to integrate commercial items into your site:
1. Put Adsense On Your Blog
One of the easiest ways to implement something commercial on your site is to put up Adsense ads. Adsense is a contextual advertising program provided by Google, which pays site owners a percentage of ad revenue for every click they generate. All you have to do is sign up for the program, get a piece of code, and paste it into the pages on your site.
2. Affiliate Marketing Plugins
Affiliate marketing is a strategy in which you get paid a commission when someone clicks on a link on your site, and then makes a purchase of a product. There are plugins that you can use on your WordPress blog that will automatically post affiliate links for you on your pages, based on the keywords. For instance, AffiLinker Affiliate WordPress Plugin is one of the most popular plugins used for this purpose. Affiliate marketing is a natural choice for blogs that do product reviews. For instance, if you do a review about the best apr credit card, you can get a commission at the same time.
3. Direct Advertising
Besides using contextual advertising like Google Adsense, you can also sell advertising directly to third parties. If you don’t feel like dealing directly with advertisers, you can also use plugins to handle the ads for you. AdRotate is one plugin that manages the ads, and all you have to do is install it on your blog.
4. Paid Links
It is also possible to get paid for hosting links on your pages. When someone wants to get traffic to their site, they may be willing to pay another site owner for a link on their site. There are sites like inlinks.com that make it possible for you to sell links on your site without doing anything besides installing a plugin.
5. Sponsored Posts
You could also get paid to offer sponsored posts on your blog. If your blog is popular, other people will pay to be able to write posts for your site, perhaps a guide to get the best credit card or invest in lucrative stocks.
Try implementing a few of these strategies and see how they work. Don’t do them all at once, as this can turn off your visitors. Try adding one at a time, and see how they do.