“How can I make money with a blog?” is a common question asked that cannot easily be answered in a straight “do this” type of post, as there are many deciding factors as to whether you will be in a position to make money from a blog or not. So lets, instead, look at some of the criteria necessary for a blog to have a chance at making money for its owner.

What niche does the blog occupy?

This is very important because some niches are way more competitive than others. If you are writing a blog about credit cards, for instance, then while you have chosen a niche where there are big bucks to be made, chances are you are not going to see any of it because the competition is way ahead of you. However, if you’re blog is about how to build wooden boats, then your competition will be a lot less difficult to outshine. The trade off is that in this niche your potential earnings will be considerably less than for credit cards. At the end of the scale, I heard about a guy who found a niche with exactly zero competition and he got a blog to the number one spot in Google’s index, but he didn’t make a dime from it. What was his niche? Greenland cuisine. Enough said about that.

How much traffic can you attract?

This is another important factor you have to consider. Without traffic to your blog, you will not be able to convert you blog into a money maker. That’s because a blog with some great ads and occupying a low competition niche will earn nothing if no one goes to visit. But there is traffic and there is traffic and not all traffic is made equal.

What kind of traffic are you attracting?

There are two main categories of traffic that we are concerned with here. The first is social traffic which you can attract to your blog by virtue of sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, Entrecard etc. There are tons of social sites that you can leverage to easily attract a ton of traffic to your blog. But that traffic will not convert into dollars.

That’s because that traffic are bloggers just like you.

They all know what ads are and all have their own affiliate ids with Clickbank, CJ, etc so they’re not going to give you commission on something they want to buy when they can use their own affiliate link and keep the commission for themselves.

Equally, they rarely click adsense ads, because the also serve adsense on their blogs and they are already trained not to click on their own ads, so why would they want to click on yours?

That brings us to the other kind of traffic – targeted search traffic.

This is the traffic that shows up from clicking a link in the search engines index. For that to happen, your blog must occupy a prominent position in the search engine results page (SERPs) and preferably that of Google, as they are by far the biggest search engine in terms of traffic generated. To achieve that, you need to know some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, many of which y9ou can pick up for free here: SEO to Make Money Online. Incidentally, when you’ve read that post, there is a newer one on the same site that deals with how to make money with adsense.

Ok, I have the niche and I have the traffic. Now, how can I turn that into dollars?

Well, I think I’ve written enough for this post, so I’ll save that subject for a whole new post all on its own, because it’ll take some explaining. See you again soon folks!

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