As Chitika is in the news right now, I thought it would be worth linking to Darren’s post on how to earn money from blogging.

 

While advertising gets some of the most attention, and I think it can be a relatively easy way to earn money, there are other ways and it never hurts to diversify.

 

Personally, and professionally, I recommend trying all the methods below (Darren has great explanations of all of them in his post).

Is advertising a good choice for everyone?  That is a question worth spending a bit of time on.  Many bloggers have told us that, love your tool (Qumana), but you know I don’t want to have advertising on my blog.  You know, that’s okay.  That’s part of the deal with us.  Qumana was, actually, first created to be the professional bloggers tool of choice.  It was designed to let you diversify your income stream by allowing you to write for lots of blogs more easily than before.

 

I love professional blogging.  I don’t have nearly as many writing gigs as I used to, but I do have a some (Visionpace in a current one).  I also like the guest contributor role.  Might not earn me money, per se, but it does help to add to my overall portfolio (Business Blog Consulting and RSS Applied are two good examples).

 

What about advertising then?  You should consider it because in the next year it is going to grow to more than the roughly $13 billion that was spent this year.  A simple, subtle, ad might earn a little money on the side for you.  Consider having a wordpress.com blog (they are free, btw) on your hobby where the goal is to earn money from advertising or sponsorships.  Again, diversification is the key.

 

Personally, I think advertising hold a lot of promise for the blogger.  Not just with AdSense, but leveraging as many networks as you can.  Publishers need to have more control over what ads are on their sites and how much that space is worth.  As blogs continue to increase in their value as sources of information, so should their value to advertisers.  I think 2006 is going to be the year when we see this happen.

 

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