Methods to Monetize Blog Traffic

Monetization of your blog traffic can be accomplished in several ways. Some are easy and some are a little more complex. The most straightforward way is to use a "pay to post" service where you get paid by a third party to post blog messages. Another is where people pay you to include links inside your blog posts to their products or service. These two both first require that you have an established blog with loyal readers but can generate income. The amount of income is going to be a direct result of your traffic levels.

The fact is that if you have traffic to your blog then there a number of ways you can generate income from each post. One of these is to include ads in your highest traffic areas of your posts. You would offer to place an ad into your blog's highest traffic areas for a fee…based on the amount of traffic that section of your blog will receive. This is very straightforward, very common and an extremely easy way to add a new revenue source to your blog.

An extension of this is to use a Cost Per Click (CPC) program or add affiliate links and earn when a visitor clicks a CPC ad or from each order generated through affiliate links. The best part of these methods is that these require very little effort or work to get started. These methods can be done quickly and can be expanded over time and has the potential to provide a good level of income each month.

By far, the most lucrative way to make money from your blog traffic is to offer something that people want and then charge them to access it. In other words, your visitors have to want to pay you for what your write about. If not, they will go away to another site on the same niche. There are many things that fit into this category like eBooks, video instruction courses or podcasts. All you need to do is find a niche that other people are already interested in and are already paying for content and focus your energies there.

Things you should know ahead of time:

Before you try to monetize the traffic to your blog, you need to know a few basic points to insure your success.

First, you need to know your niche. Say your blog is focused on dog training products. You do not want to place ads, links or products that are unrelated to that main category of dog training products. Keep it all focused on your niche. Remember, content is king but it needs to be quality and tightly focused content to keep the search engines and your visitors coming back for more.

Next, you need to know where your traffic is coming from and where it goes when they leave your blog. Most web hosting companies like Host Gator offer a suite of tracking tools to help you with this, so take advantage of what they offer. Reports are available that detail the time of day, what and how many pages your visitors viewed as well as what day of the week the visitor came and how long they stayed. You can even run a report that tells you what page is the starting point of every visit. This kind of information is golden….BUT only if you use it.

Why should you keep track of the click path for your visitors? With this information you could target your audience with ads, guest posted articles or through comments to articles on other sites that your visitors frequent.

Once you're up and running, you can build it from there or move into other niches and repeat the process.