I have to admit it: there are many people who jump into the blogging bandwagon because they think that they can get rich off of it. There has been too much hype about making money off of blogging that, inevitably, misconceptions have arisen. Of course, to a certain degree, one can reasonably expect to make some money with a blog. You do have to be realistic about your expectations, however; and that is what I am here for.

Yes, you can earn money with your blog, but don’t turn in your resignation letter just yet. There are some people who make it quite big in the blogosphere, but sad to say, there are even more who do not really earn much. Let’s try to be positive here and look at the ways that you can make money through your blog, shall we?

Get paid to blog. This is one of the most common ways by which you can make money through your blog. It is also called “pay per post” blogging, and is quite popular with personal bloggers. Basically, you sign up with a company that assigns you certain posts on topics and they pay you an agreed amount for each post. You’d have to include a link and/or talk about a product or service. This kind of scheme has created a lot of controversy, mainly because of transparency issues. Still, it provides a small but steady stream of income for bloggers.

Advertising and affiliate programs. The idea is to create a niche blog that focus on a “popular” topic. When I say popular, I mean a topic that is searched a LOT online. Think loans, weight loss, and the like. You will have to focus on these topics and write posts about them. Also, your blog has to achieve a decent PageRank (Google’s way of ranking web sites) in order to attract advertisers.

Alternatively, you can join Google’s Adsense program. The income is lower over a period of time UNLESS you optimize your blog for it; THEN, you can earn a considerable amount. Of course, you have to realize that you need a large amount of traffic in order to make hefty earnings.

As for affiliate programs, think of these as a sales job online. You get a certain percentage of the sales made if someone clicks on an ad from your blog and buys a product or service from your affiliate partner.

I have to clarify something here – your blog does not have to be a niche blog in order to sell ad space. Indeed, a lot of personal blogs have ads.

Contract blogging. For the lack of a better word, I used contract blogging. Basically, what you can do is hone your writing and blogging skills and then join an existing blog network. What’s going to happen is you sell your services as a blogger and you get paid under some sort of scheme. The advantage of this is that you get a relatively stable income and you get to enjoy what you’re doing more!

So, if you want to blog for the money, check out these methods and see which suits you best!