How Blogs Make Money

Print magazines make money by selling advertising. The larger their circulation, the more influence they exert over people, and the demographics of their readers dictate how much money they make. Blogs are essentially the same. The more traffic (circulation) you have, the type and quality of that traffic (reader demographics) and the influence you have over your audience, determines your profitability. 

 

This is why bloggers are obsessed with building traffic. It really doesn’t matter how you make money – it might be a contextual ad program like Google AdSense, affiliate marketing or direct ad sales – the more raw readers you have, generally, the more money you can make.

Traffic Addiction

Bloggers are obsessed with

increasing traffic because

traffic is the key

determinant for income

online.

Without traffic, no blog

makes money.

Quality of traffic plays an important part too. If you have a strong influence over your readers, when you ask them to do something, such as recommending they buy a product you promote as an affiliate, more of them will do so.

If you break down the process of blog monetization, the following events occur:

1. A person (blogger) creates a web destination point (blog) that people want to visit, possibly on a repeat basis, because of the value it offers. Initially they find the blog by following a link from another blog or website, through a referral from friends or colleagues, or they come across the blog when it appears in the results of a search-engine query.

2. A proportion of that audience is funneledon to other sites that “pay” to buy

the traffic. Payment mightbe in the form of a per-click fee, a monthly rate, an affiliate commission, or profiton a product or service sale. The blogger works to attract attention and then sells that attention to advertisers for a fee or uses the att

ention to profit from their own product and/or service sales.

The key variable here is “attention”. Attention is traffic, influence and the potential to make money from blogging.

So how does a blogger attract attention?