Blogging is becoming ever more all the time with more and more people setting up a blog. The reason for this is because of the simplicity and how easy it now is to get a blog online full of your own content. A blog is a great place to share your thoughts,reviews and knowledge and there are now thousands of blogs out there

However the more entrepreneurial people there are looking to blogs as a great way to make money online. I personally make money blogging and have to say it is one of the most exciting and rewarding things that I have ever done. You can easily make money blogging and it is a low risk way to make some extra cash.

In this post I am going to explain five ways that you can actually turn a hobby into a profitable business that you can manage from home in your spare time.

Advertisements

Perhaps the most common way to monetize a blog, never the less still one of the most effective ways to make money. There are loads of advertising networks out there for you to choose from and there are a few different ways to provide advertisements on your blog.

First you can use a PPC advertising network such as Google AdSense. Using a PPC network means that you earn money every time someone clicks on an advertisement on your website. To make a decent amount of money from this you are going to need a lot of traffic so when you first start to monetize your blog then you might not want to use this straight away. There is also CPC advertising which is cost per 1000 visits; this is not very popular anymore and is rarely used.

Another way to make money with advertisements is to offer direct advertising where you negotiate an advertising price and period direct with the advertiser. By doing this you can offer a set price regardless of how many people actually view or click on the advertisement and this is often favored by a lot of bloggers, however what you have to remember is that you will need to spend time finding advertisers.

Sponsored posts

This has to be my personal  favourite way to make money with a blog. Sponsored posts are when someone pays you for  a post on your blog promoting their product/website. You can charge what you like for this and the bigger your blog is, the more you can charge. However with sponsored posts you have to strike the balance right with how many you publish if you do not want to put your readers off coming back to your blog. Furthermore you also want to make sure that they are of the usual posts.

Membership

Turning you blog into a membership website can be a great way to earn a regular online income. You need to provide something that is worth paying for though otherwise no-one is going to sign up. There are a lot of blogs providing tutorials out there that offer the source files for a membership fee. What you need to remember is that creating a good membership blog is going to create a lot of work on your behalf if you want to make it work and I do not recommend this to people that are new to blogging.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is another popular way to make money with a blog and for a lot of bloggers this is the preferred way to make money with their blog. Affiliate marketing allows bloggers to make money without ruining the user experience with advertisements everywhere and still keeping the content free. There are loads of websites what you can affiliate market for ; some of the most popular are WordPress theme websites and Amazon Affiliates.

With affiliate links your sidebar can often be a good place to put them as a recommended product for your readers and also I like to do a collection of my favourite WordPress themes as a post and use affiliate links here. The key is to disguise these Affiliate links to your readers and if you are using WordPress the Pretty Links is a great WordPress plugin that will cover these links for you.

Sell your products

For many bloggers this is not their first thought when starting a blog. However your blog is the perfect place to sell products and make money online. You already have the traffic and the audience so if you have a good product and sales speech then it could be a potentially easy way to make money online just as many bloggers have found out.

A lot of bloggers tend to sell eBooks;this is a great way to make money selling products online and if people are already enjoying your content then your eBook is going to be tempting for them. There are a load of guides out there that can help you create an eBook.