Professional Blogging For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Monetizing Your Blog Strategy

In This Chapter

• Being realistic about your blog expectations

• Understanding how to make money with your blog

• Matching monetization to your business goals

• Creating your financial plan

• Questioning whether to stay or sell

• Getting money

Whether you want to make a living from your blog or merely enough money to pay for the family vacation, you need a plan for monetizing your blog. Your plan doesn't have to be 40 pages with charts, graphs, and footnotes. An outline of your goals and how you intend to achieve them is enough to get started, although a financial plan is a good idea.

The most important part of your monetization plan is selecting ways to monetize that fit your skills, blog, and audience. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

In this chapter, I give a brief overview of the various ways you can make money from your blog. The rest of the chapters in this part go into the details.

Having Realistic Expectations

You need to be realistic about the effort you're willing to put into your blogging endeavor. Most blogs don't make a lot of money. In a the survey that I conducted for this book, only 56 percent of the bloggers reported making money from their blog, and most of them attributed less than 10 percent of their income to their blog (see Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1. A chart detailing the percentage of income attributed by bloggers to their blog.

The good ...