How to monetize your small business blog

I received an email today with the following question:

I have a friend, though, who has a lot of material and does blog actively. He would like to find out more about how to monetize his site?

What this means is making as much money as possible from the blog. Typically, this means adding advertisements to the blog such as Google Adwords, or affiliate links such as images of books that bring you to Amazon.com.

Here's the bottom line: if you are writing a blog for your small business, don't use these ads. If you are blogging for 10-14 hours a day and are building tens of thousands of visitors per month, use these ads as they are probably your main source of income. (By the way, if you are one of these insane bloggers you absolutely must become a fan of Problogger.net, the blog for professional bloggers.)

99% of small business blogs (if not 100%) simply do not get enough traffic on them to make any significant money from these type of ad campaigns. By significant, I mean more than $10/month. It's really that small.

So do without them. Instead of an ad to sell someone else's product on another website or through Amazon, use the space to sell your own company. It will make much more money in the long run.

(Ironically, I linked to Amazon in a story I wrote last night. It's not an affiliate link though. I only linked to Amazon so my readers could see the book I was referencing for humor's sake in my post. I'm probably losing $.20 because I didn't make it an affiliate link. Oh well.)

I also wrote about this subject a while ago in a post titled: Blog Don'ts #4: Don't use too many links in your posts.