Monetizing Your Blog ~ The Path To Riches

My original goal when creating this blog wasn't to try and generate a bunch of cash. It was mostly that I wanted to do something with this domain name that I have owned since 2003. When I purchased the domain name I had just finished reading the Rich Dad Poor Dad book and felt motivated to do something to try and generate passive income. I really liked the book and it was ground breaking stuff to me at the time. Initially I created a basic single web page with links to the Rich Dad books and website in hopes people would click through my links and buy his products. Needless to say, that didn't work out real well.

I didn't do anything to attempt to drive traffic to my site or promote the site in any way, I was just hoping people would come across my site somehow or type in the URL directly and then decide to buy something. No such luck. So it just kinda sat there for a few years. After getting excited about the Dave Ramsey plan and being debt free and wanting to share financial knowledge and general info with others, I thought it'd be a great idea to turn the site into a blog and see if it was something I wanted to keep up with after a month or so.

At times it is very difficult to come up with something new and exciting to post, but for the most part I enjoy blogging. It keeps my mind active, lots of times I'm learning a thing or two myself and I enjoy sharing information with others in hopes that you can gain something as well! Whether it be humor, advice, life lessons, etc.

At the same time, I'm always looking for new ways to try and bring in more $, so why not try and monetize my blog at the same time! In the Blogger dashboard, which is the webpage Google provides to update your blog, there is a tab along the top entitled 'Monetize'. It's pretty much like clicking the easy button. I went through the few short steps back in June and set it and forgot it. There is also a tab on the Monetize page to enable Adsense for feeds and a tab to link with an Amazon Associates account. I enabled Adsense and the Amazon Associates part in June and just clicked to enable Adsense for feeds right now.

I clicked on my Adsense account a few days ago and much to my surprise I had a balance! As of today it's $6.42. Not a fortune, but enough for a few items off the McDonald's value menu. So the more traffic you bring, the more eyes you have and the more page views and potential click-throughs you get, bringing in more $. I thought that was pretty cool. I thought maybe after a few months I'd get a click here or there, but wasn't expecting anything immediate.

So if you have a Blogger blog, I'd recommend clicking that Monetize tab and create an Adsense account and just see what happens. If you have a non-Blogger blog, I assume there is an equally easy way to do the same. I ended up taking the defaults I believe, which was to have an ad at the bottom of each post and one in the upper right. Hopefully they're not too obtrusive or annoying and hopefully you'll actually see one or two you're interested in checking out. If you do see ads that are overly annoying, let me know as I can block them as well. Good luck and happy monetizing! I'm very interested to know your results and any suggestions on how to increase revenue without alienating your readers.