How I make money with this Blog - so can you.

I know, you want to jump right in and have me tell you all the secrets you need to make money blogging.... If your in a rush go buy some quick get rich quick scheem and come back a few months later when it doesn't work out so well for you. I am not being rude, just trying to give the plain basics of how I made it work. Plus you read it for FREE.
(* first let me be up front - do not believe for one second that you can do all this and use all these forms of programs to make money with your blog from "one" blog. Believe me when I tell you you need several blogs with several defferent "Niches". I myself have 15 blogs ranging from making money to a family blog about my adventures of being a dad.)


How I make money with this blog
When I go to family functions or social events I often get a blank stare when I explain what I do for a living. I think people understand the part that I write articles and put them on a website, but when it comes to making money from it, they don’t get it. In this section I will lay it out and hopefully it will help bring some clarity…

CPC Ad Networks
There are a few different ad networks that I use on CPF. The most successful one has been Google’s Adsense program. Basically what they do is read the article that I write and find ads that are relevant to it and display them next to the article. The great thing about it is that by having extremely relevant ads, it actually can be quite beneficial to the readers as well. For example, if I write an article explaining what an IRA was, but didn’t mention where you could open one, Adsense would likely be displaying ads of places to open an IRA. So as a reader, if I read that article and decided that I did want to open an IRA, the ads would be providing options that the article did not. I am currently doing a few tests with another CPC network called Chitika. Apparently, you can use it in conjunction with Adsense. The jury is still out, but I am interested to see how it compares to Adsense. All things considered, I have found that if optimized correctly, Adsense really can work well. I will explain more about how to optimize it in sections below.

CPM Ad Networks
While Adsense pays on a click basis (CPC), I use other ad networks that pay by the total # of impressions (CPM). At the beginning, these networks didn’t produce much income, but as the traffic grows CPM networks seem to work well in conjunction with Adsense. I use (or have used) ContextWeb, AdClickMedia, Adbrite (not a big fan of this one), Adify, BuzzLogic, and Casale Media. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and may be suitable for one kind of a site and not another.
*** Also remember there are many changes going on - Google started it's own affiliate program and these companies have rules and standards. Not to mention the governement was trying to crack down on affiliates (like if were criminals) stating we had to use the products we recomend. I haven't keeped up with the government rules but I am sure as you research more on affiliate programs we will be informed of all the new changes.

Affiliate Product Sales
Basically an example of an affiliate sale would be if you sold lawn mowers and I referred a customer to you, if they purchased you would pay me back a % of the sale for referring them. There are a million options for this on the internet now. The main programs I use are Amazon’s Affiliate program, FlexOffers, LinkConnector, Commission Junction, Shareasale, E-Junkie, and LinkShare. There are many others, but these are a few of the more popular ones available.

Direct Ad Sales
I also sell ad space directly to advertisers. This hasn’t provided much income for me yet and may or may not even be worth my time. I know that in certain niche markets direct ad sales can work out very well, but thus far it hasn’t been a big money maker on CPF.