One of the best methods to monetize your blog is to take advantage of its advertising potential. Advertising on your blog doesn’t need any extra effort on the part of the publisher. It is great if you have your own product. But even if you don’t, you can still earn great paychecks selling ad space to other advertisers. As a publisher, all you need to do is to approve advertisers or ads of products that match the niche of your site. The scope of online advertising has exponentially risen since the time of its inception. So, what type of advertising is best suited for your blog ?

Once the question of relevance of the products to your blog’s content is sorted, you can approach the best form of advertising from a revenue angle. The ads that earn you the highest revenue while increasing the brand value of your site are the best ones. In order to maximize your ad revenue, you will need to know the money these advertisers pay for the exposure they get or for definite results like clicks and sales.

An ad network like Google adsense is typically believed to share 25% of its ad revenue with the publishers. So, if an advertiser pays $1 per click for a search term, then you may expect 25 cents on every dollar that the advertiser spends on Google for clicks on his ad generated through your site. However, there are some high profit industries for which Google may charge the advertiser a high cost per click, but caps the publisher’s income share on those search terms.

Compare this with an ad network like Tribal Fusion that employs the CPM model to compensate its publishers. The cost per thousand impressions basically means that you get paid a preset dollar amount for every thousand page impressions that the advertiser’s ad receives on your site. So, if the CPM is $1, then that means you will make $1 for every thousand visitors being exposed to the ad. Unlike the adsense scenario where you get paid when the visitor clicks on the ad, here you get paid irrespective of whether or not the ad gets clicked on. So, if your site traffic is 200,000 per month then you can earn at least $200 from just one ad from Tribal Fusion.

Let us now contrast this with another ad network Commission Junction. At CJ, you can choose from numerous advertisers belonging to a plethora of industries. They pay for cost per lead, cost per click and cost per sale. The money that you can make with them varies from industry to industry. For example a lead generated for the emergency loan industry can pay anywhere between $30 to $75 per lead generated. While you may comparatively make a lot more money when the required action is performed, you wouldn’t make any money if no clicks or leads are generated by the visitors.

The fourth ad network that I’d like you to evaluate is Clickbank. CB has a large chunk of advertisers dealing in digital products for which they pay only for sales generated. You need to join their network as an affiliate to get paid a commission for every sale generated from your site. The percentage of commission ranges from 50-75% of the price of the product.

While all these ad networks present lucrative opportunities to optimally monetize your blog and create a passive income stream, you must measure the opportunity cost when choosing one ad network over the other. What may be highly profitable ad in one industry may not perform as well in another. Understanding what form of monetization maximizes the revenue potential for your blog is a gradual process and comes with experimenting with different ad networks.

If you know how to increase traffic to your blog , then you can be sure of a steadily rising revenue graph. Every day millions of phrases and keywords are searched on internet by people around the world. Some searches are for information, but a big chunk of these searches are for commerce. Many people querying the search engines actually buy products they need from websites shown in their search engine query results.

When you create a blog, you want the information you provide to reach the people looking for it on internet. You connect with these people via search engines by getting listed in search results for those keywords. This helps more and more people find your website for the keywords that you rank for. This increase in your traffic also increases your blog’s profit potential. But how do you get listed on search engines? An easy way to increase search engine traffic to your site is to use the appropriate keywords in your content.

There are several free and paid softwares that can help you find these keywords. One example of a free software is Google’s keyword tool. If you enter a keyword or phrase in this tool, then it shows you the number of times it is searched on Google on a monthly basis. It also shows many other related keywords and their corresponding searches.

When you use these keywords in your content and as tags, your blog will show under these keywords in the search engines. Although this isn’t the only way to optimize your blog for the search engines, it’s a proven way to improve your blog’s exposure to the search engine traffic. You can also use the niche as a keyword to research more related keywords on the google keyword tool.

The traffic from the search engines is also known as organic or natural traffic. This is because the visitors naturally find their way to your blog for their search queries and it is not through advertising or incentives. The more organic traffic your blog receives, the more advertisers will want spend on your blog. Keyword research will not only boost your natural traffic, but significantly increase your blog’s income potential.