By Cassy van Eeden

Despite the obvious profit that could be made by marketing and selling a product, there are several ways to earn money just by owning and running a blog.

What do I need to know?

As Darren Rowse, author and writer for ProBlogger.net, says, while there are many options when it comes to making money through blogging, each blog is unique. This means that “[some] income streams will work on some blogs better than others – the key is to experiment with as many as possible to see what works best for you”.

What are my choices?

The list of money-making options for bloggers is endless. However, Rowse explains that the most popular – and the most likely to suit your blog – methods include Google AdSense, Chitika and Amazon Associates.

“I continue to use AdSense with amazing effect on my blogs,” says Rowse. “It is a quick and easy way for bloggers of all sizes to display ads that are relevant to their content.”

“Chitika continues to be a great performer for me on my blogs,” says Rowse. He recommends that product-related blogs make use of Chitika as it specifically geared towards this kind of content. “They’ve now earned me over a quarter of a million dollars – as a result I can’t recommend them enough,” he adds.

The Amazon Associates programme gives bloggers the opportunity to choose from over a million products to advertise to their readers. The programme has simple linking tools to meet a blogger’s specific needs when monetizing their blog.

These are just three of the many platforms that allow bloggers to monetize their content. But how do they work?

How does it work?

There are three main types of blog advertising opportunities: pay-per-click, pay-per-impression and pay-per-action.

Blogging expert Susan Gunelius explains that pay-per-click means that “the advertiser pays the blogger each time someone clicks on the advertisers’ ad”.

Pay-per-impression, as Gunelius writes, is when “the advertiser pays the blogger each time the ad appears on the blog”.

Finally, pay-per-action refers to the advertiser paying the blogger each time someone clicks on the ad and performs an action such as making a purchase, adds Gunelius.

What else is there?

Two further ways of monetising a blog is through affiliate marketing or paid content or products.

Affiliate marketing, as writer and founder of Startup College Mike Fishbein, explains, affiliate marketing is marketing someone else’s products and being paid on a commission basis. “As an affiliate marketing, you will receive a unique URK to the product. If someone buys the product after clicking through your link, you receive a commission,” he says.

Using paid content or products often trumps affiliate marketing “because it’s your product and not someone else’s, you keep 100% of the revenue”, says Fishbein.

Some paidproducts and services include writing and charging for an ebook; creating premium content that is only available to paying subscribers; offering a video course on the topic of the blog and offering consulting or coaching services for a fee.

Have you monetised your blog? Are there any other ways to make money out of blogging that you want to share with others? Let us know in the comments below.