How to earn from blog

There are various types of advert that can be used to earn money from your website. If your site has a lot of visitors, it can be very worthwhile using discreetly integrated advertising to 'monetize' your website content.

There are basically 3 levels of advertising: Pay-per-impression (CPM), pay-per-click (CPC), and pay-per-action (CPA, CPL, CPS).

Pay-per-impression pays you a certain amount for every 1000 times an advert is displayed to your site visitors. The payout is low, but you can be sure of a certain level of return - based on the number of visits your site receives per month. Also known as CPM (Cost per 1000)

Pay-per-click pays you a certain amount every time someone clicks on an advert on your site. The payout is higher than pay-per-impression, but you can't be sure how many visitors will actually click on the adverts. The more relevant the ads are to the page content, the more likely the visitor is to click on an ad.

Also known as CPC (Cost per click) Pay-per-action has the highest payout, but you only get paid if the visitor you refer goes on to perform some pre-defined action, such as placing an order on the target site. Unless the ads you server are very closely related to the subject of your website, the chances of this happening are pretty slim, so you would need to have a very high level of website traffic (visitors) to make this worthwhile. Also known as CPA (Cost per action), which in turn can be divided into CPL (Cost per lead) and CPS (Cost per sale).

On balance, pay-per-click is probably the easiest way to start earning money from your website quickly. It won't make you rich, but every little helps!
One very quick and easy way of earning money through relevant advertising, is the hugely popular Google Adwords programme. You just sign up for an adsense account, specify some basic details about your site, and Google will generate some code for you. Simply place the code on your site to start earning money every time someone clicks on the adverts.

The good thing about adwords is that the adverts that are displayed are automatically selected to be relevant to the content of the page they appear on. This makes the ads much more appealing to your site's visitors. The downside is that the payout is not that high - generally just one to a few US cents per click.

Another alternative, is using an advertising agency. The principle is similar to adwords, but you choose specific adverts from a range offered to you, rather than the ads being automatically generated depending on the page content. The payout per click is generally higher than with Google, but the range of adverts and their relevance will be more limited, so your CTR ('click through rate' - ratio of clicks to visitors) might be lower.

If you can find individual affiliate programs with a high degree of relevance to your site, this can generate an impressive stream of income. For example, if the visitors to your site are interested in Joomla, you could try a scheme like the Rocket Theme template club, or Magazine.