Bloggin Ads

Still looking for ways to make money? If Part I was not enough for you, then let’s move on with the second part of “30 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog.”

11. Private Forums

If you’ve got valuable information to share, or your network is highly experienced in their fields, you can leverage that expertise into a paid forum on your site because others will want access to the information. Many sites have utilized the paid form method by charging anywhere between $10 to $100. This monthly recurring charge is revenue that requires little to no work after the initial setup and management. The community itself will create a level of importance, and you will simply provide key information from time to time.

• vBulletin
• Simple Machines Forum
• phpBB
• Vanilla

12. Job Boards

If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of employment situations, why wouldn’t you share your abilities with the masses. Some people are just hubs for networking, and these individuals understand that people are tired of the free job sites which get spammed with false postings, or misleading information. By providing a paid for job board, you’ve limited the offerings to some of the best selections and by building your reputation users will have no problem paying for your board because they will come to expect premium level jobs depending on the niche.

• JobThread
• Web Scribe Job Board
• SimplyHired Job-o-matic
• Jobbex

13. Marketplaces

Ever heard of a garage sale? Perhaps you’ve been to a flea market? You can transfer the basic concept into the virtual world by providing a place where people can buy, sell, and trade specialized items. While the process can be complicated for new users, once you’ve gotten over the learning curve, it’s the community will take care of itself. Mashable is a good example of a site that has also integrated a Marketplace into its systems.

14. Paid Surveys and Polls

There are a lot of marketing and advertising companies out there looking to collect data. Many understand how users may not trust a site they have not been to before, but by partnering with popular sites with high numbers of visitors, some will pay to have their surveys and polls on your site. The data is collected on the back end and reportd directly to the company, but the survey itself is housed on your site, where users might be more likely to respond.

15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages

This is an odd practice but has been around for awhile and made notable most recently by sites like Million Dollar Wiki. The idea is to offer internal pages for users to purchase for their own use, naturally your site would have to have an existing high page rank or extremely high views to make the purchase worthwhile. For a small site this might be difficult, but not impossible. This might encourage some of the smaller sites to really implement some of the tools we spoke about in previous posts to increase the number of visitors to their site.

16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors

If you’re site is well designed, and receives a fair amount of traffic, it’s not impossible to get sponsors to support your site. While your data is displayed somewhere on the site, whether it’s a side bar, or at the top, or a separate link all together, sponsors with blogs will highlight their latest and most viewed posts and thus direct qualified traffic both ways. It’s a method that was pioneered by Techmeme, and according to reports nets them $5000 per sponsored post, and guess what? They display six at any given time, you do the math!

17. Donations

Okay, so what’s easier then begging? Don’t like that word? Let’s say asking for donations, it seems to make people more warm and fuzzy. In any case, donation buttons seem to work well. It’s a moderate way to make income, not necessarily a cash cow, but if you’ve got a cause worthy enough, and the money is going to the cause and not to you, there is a good chance that you could raise a lot of funds. Just beware, mentioning a cause, and then taking the money for yourself is illegal, so do the right thing!

18. Online Webinars

With a thriving community of readers, it would be simple to coordinate a webinar on your site to provide information, training, or an open forum for ideas. Using a simple pay method like Pay Pal, you could charge a small fee for those attending, and utilize a closed video circuit to conduct the meeting, requiring a password and login for access. This is especially useful if your session is very visual and access to the webinar will provide insight to the process that would not be possible by just verbal or written explanation.

19. Pop Up Advertising

In the most desparate of situaitons, users could rely on the pop-up ads. The market is apparently still ripe for this type of advertising, though as tech savvy users, they are the bae of our existance. Typically there is a very small percentage of connected users that understand how to install pop-up blockers, and even fewer that know they should not click on everything they see. If you don’t plan on fostering a trusted community of users and you just want to make money…well good luck with that, this might be just what you need!

• Tribal Fusion
• PayPopup
• PopupAd
• Adversal

20. Audio Ads

When traffic comes to your site, they will be introduced to your site with a 5-7 second audio advertisement that does not offer the user a chance to turn off. The recording should be short, but offers 100% conversion rate because users cannot stop the advertisement from playing unless they leave the site. Like the pop-up advertising, this is very intrusive so think very carefully before using this method.

• Net Audio Ads

Stay tuned for the final part to this spectacular series which will provide the last 10 methods to make your blog as highly profitable for 2009!