Make Money with Blogging

Lately, more and more people are trying their hand at making money online with blogging. Generally, these new bloggers know someone who is successful at blogging and think that they could do the same thing with relative ease. After all, they have been writing for years.

In fact, they started writing in school as a child. Unforunately, they fail to realize that writing interesting articles for a blog is much different than writing a school term paper. Unfortunately, many new bloggers give up long before they have really given blogging a chance. They thought the money would just magically appear without ever giving it much thought where this money would be coming from.

Although there are many ways to monetize blogs, one of the least tried ways is selling advertising on it. Although it is a very popular way to monetize blogs and websites, I am not talking about Google Adsense accounts either. Popular bloggers can sell their own ad space to whomever they wish. The more popular the blog, the more money the blogger can get for their adspace.

But how does the average blogger know if they could sell their own adspace profitably? There are a few tools the blogger can use to find out if selling adspace on their blog is worthwhile or not to make money online.

First, Google has ranked every page with their own page rank. This rank is from 0 to 10 and the higher the number, the more importance google has placed on the site. Of course, Google.com is one of the few page rank 10 websites in the world since it is either first or second in terms of visitors. Popular blogs generally have a page rank of 5 or higher. Of course, some blogs have lower page rank, but generally the very popular ones start with a page rank of 5.

Although there are online sites where page rank can be checked, the easiest method to check page rank is to download the google toolbar. Once it is installed, the toolbar sits at the top of the browser and shows a linear graph depicting page rank. The more color that shows up in the page rank graph, the more popular the blog. One thing to keep in mind is that Google recently has de-valued page rank. According to them, page rank will probably be phased out in the years to come.

The second way to check the popularity of a website is with alexa.com. Alexa ranks online entities by the number of visitors the web site or blog has on a daily, monthy, and yearly basis. Although some people question the validity of alexa’s numbers, I have found them to be fairly accurate. If you list your site with alexa, they are really accurate. Register today to get your site listed on alexa.

Once you obtain a page rank of 5 or higher, coupled with a decent alexa ranking, you should be able to approach other sites about advertising on your site. If the other site could benefit from your visitors, many bloggers will try your service for awhile. If they see an increase in sales or visitors, you may have a long term business relationship that continues to put money in your pocket month after month. Good luck with whatever method you choose.