If you’re one of the bloggers trying to make money online, and you’re using just Adsense to do that, you’re selling yourself short. As soon as you have couple of months behind you and some regular traffic coming your way, it’s time you start looking for new monetization methods.

Using just Adsense on a blog or website means you don’t put a high enough price on your work. You spend time writing, promoting, networking, researching, and you’re earning peanuts. I imagine the goal of blogging for money is to earn a living online. Why would you be satisfied with earning $1/hour or less?

For most of you the alternatives below are already known, but let’s just make a recap on what you need to use them, and see what you can use right now, because knowing doesn’t always mean doing it.

1) Affiliates

What You Need: some traffic, study the products you’re selling

What it is: a visitor on your website reads an article where you recommend a product, clicks on a link containing your affiliate id, goes to the merchant site and if he buys something you get a percentage of what he spends (from 2% to 75% for some e-books).

 Obviously, the more traffic you have, the more you can sell. Sign-up with one or more of these: Commission Junction, Clickbank, LinkShare, AzoogleAds. Then look for something that your readers might be interested in. If you’re writing for programmers you might want to sign-up to a program where you can recommend some ergonomic keyboards. If you’re writing for gamers, then gaming keyboards, mouses or video cards might be something they’re interested in. And this goes on and on. Whatever your topic is, chances are you’ll find something you can promote.

2) Selling Links

What You Need: minimum PR 3, a decent Alexa rank wouldn’t  hurt but it’s not mandatory to get started.

You can sell (actually rent) links on your blog or website through Text Link Ads or you can do it direct on forums like DigitalPoint. If you’re doing your link building right, then you should be able to sell links at the next PR update.

Tips on boosting your PR with plugins and themes, guest posting and Digg.

3) CPM ads

What You Need: high number of page views per month

Typically CPM ads can amount to a nice bonus if you have at least couple thousand unique visitors per day. Tribal Fusion for example wants a minimum of 2000 unique visitors per day. They can be used together with Adsense, so you don’t loose any money.

4) In-Text Advertising

What You Need: content based websites, traffic

There are two main companies that offer in-text advertising, Kontera and IntelliTxt. IntelliTxt asks for a high number of page views per month (300,000 minimum). Kontera normally do the same but you can sign up with the link from this John Chow article and be accepted only based on your content and not on your traffic. On the only website where I’m using them, I have a $1.54 ECPM with them. That’s an extra $1.50 for every thousand impressions on that blog, and it doesn’t decrease the Adsense CTR.

5) Paid Reviews

What You Need: minimum PR 3, good Alexa and Technorati rank, 3 months of blogging behind you.

It has some restricting requirements for new bloggers, but once you have a few months behind you and a decent PR, it’s quite common for bloggers to make more money from paid reviews then from Adsense.

Choices: Review Me and PayPerPost are the most commonly used.

 

Depending on your blog, niche, age, PR, Alexa or Technorati rank, one or more of these can be solid options. You can find affiliate programs for almost anything, you need a good PR to sell links or do paid reviews, good traffic for CPM and Kontera.

Check on what category your blogs qualifies and start making money with more then just Adsense.

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