There are so many ways to make money on the internet. With the internet’s availability on the rise, more and more people are finding themselves in the middle of this huge trend. The fact is, everyone could use some extra cash. How you get this extra cash might prove to be quite difficult. This is where blogging comes in.

If you’ve never started a blog before, it is a website dedicated to many different things that may or may not be going on in your life. An example of this being a how-to website on how to build houses because building houses may be something you do for a living. Another example would be a blog dedicated to posts about technology news because you love technology and what’s going on in the tech world is very important to you. You get the idea, but now your question is probably, “So how does this blogging thing make me money?”

The first and most important way you can make money through your blog is traffic. No, the amount of traffic your blog gets does not directly pay you, but traffic translates into money. This is probably the most important thing an internet marketer (someone who makes money on the internet, say, a blogger for example) should know. The more traffic your blog gets, the more money it will generate in the end. You can increase this traffic by increasing your search engine rankings and by social bookmarking every blog post in your blog. I don’t have time to go into the details of search engine optimization with you in this article, but it’s definitely something you’ll want to read up on before you start your blog.

So now you’ve got some traffic, but where’s the money? This is where Google Adsense comes in. Think of it as the holy grail of a bloggers wallet. This is how 90% of all bloggers make money off of their blogs. If you’ve never heard of Google Adsense, it is a text based ad firm that pays you for every time someone clicks on the advertisement of theirs that is featured on your website. So how do you start? Apply for Google’s Adsense program, and when you get accepted feature some ads of theirs on your website. That’s pretty much it! This is how many bloggers make cash off of their website, so it does work. It just requires some dedication to post new content each day to get traffic to your blog.

(This is a guest post written by Johan Deus)

I am sure most of you would have realized the potential of having an website. This may help you to earn an income, what you can not have from your regular job. There are many people who would have said you this and finally they would have tried to sell you something of this sort. They would have tried to convince you that with the help of their product, you will start earning six figure online income. Hold on!!! I am not a sales guy and don’t want to sale you any product like others. I am saying you what I believe and what I have found true after spending couple of years here.

Having said that, I never meant you just make a website and money will start pouring in. No way! if this would be the case, no one would have struggled to make extra source of income. Making money online requires disciplined and focused approach. Of course your hard work too… At the same time, you should also know all the basic facts related with making money online. Once you start practicing the basic tactics, you will discover your own way to make it more advanced tactics day by day.

So the question is what all it requires to earn a living online from your website. As discussed in my other article, you have to have a good content and marketing strategy to get traffic. “Good content in a website” is like a “Blood in a body”, without which it can not survive and traffic is something without which content will be worthless. To appreciate the good content, you need to have visitors and this will also help you to make more and more earning. Your earning is directly proportionate to traffic. Once you are ready with your website, you need to work on monetization carefully. Different types of website requires different strategy and you have to clearly understand the psychology of your website visitor before you go ahead with your monetization plan. You also need to understand what sort of advertisement you need to select to appear in your website. For example, if your website focus on health, it does not make any sense to put a advertisement of “Dating” website.

What all you could include in your website, which will help you to earn? Believe me there are 101 ways and I will pick up few among these to start up with and will keep on adding in the coming days.

(1) Advertisement: Advertising can be in different forms like Banner ad, Text Link ads, Descriptive ads etc. There is a myth among newcomers that how it is possible to get an advertising from any company, if they have just started a website or if their website has very less traffic. Although it is true that you may not get offer directly from the company due to stated reason but you can always use the resources of intermediary (known as ‘Advertising Network’). There are hundereds of advertising network services available and signing up does not require much hassles. Once it is over, you are ready to display thousands of advertisement in your website. Most of these providers have almost all type of companies with them and you get a fair chance to pick up advertisement matching your website theme.

(2) Referral Programs: There are large number of websites who runs referral programs, wherein you get paid if your website visitor perform certain action by clicking on your affiliate banner. You just need to register with a company who has affiliate programs and you need to place banner in your website provided by them. There are some companies who have specific criteria to become affiliate of them like ‘number of hits per day’ or ‘how old your website is’ etc. Also Each company has different crieteria to make you eligible for the payment. Broadly they are:

(a) Pay per click: Here you get paid based on how many of your website visitor click on your affiliate links.
(b) Pay per sales: In this case you will get paid flat commission say $50 on per sale
(c) Percentage earning per sales: You will get paid certain percentage of transaction value, it varies between 10% to 75% depending on programs.
(d) Pay per leads: these programs pay their affiliates based on the number of visitors they refer who sign up as leads. This simply means the visitor fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

Many affiliate programs also pays you in slabs. For example, if you have done 100 sales in a month, you will get paid 40% of the transaction value, for 100-149 sales in a month the commission will be 50%, while for 150-199 sales the commission will be 60%.

However you should always be careful in selecting referral programs. Make sure the company is genuine and paying to its members. Also you should promote only those programs, which relates your website theme. If your website deals in ‘Home Furnishing’, you should not promote ‘Dating Websites’ in that page.

(3) Contextual Ad: This is one of the most popular ways with least effort from your side. The most popular in this segment is ‘Google Adsense’, however there are many others like ‘Bidvertiser’, ‘adbrite’ etc. The main advantage of using contextual ad is you don’t have to put any effort towards selection of the advertisements. You just need to paste the system generated code and advertisement appears in that space based on your web page theme automatically.

We will discuss some other monetization options like Paid content, Endorsement advertisement etc separately