The recent craze of bloggers adding these 125×125 ads on their sites is something you shouldn’t expect to see end anytime soon. Whether you have 100 RSS subscribers or 2000 you can easily make some quick money to partially justify the time you are putting into your blog. These in no way are going to pay off the hours you put into a blog, but they are a starting point.

The average blog getting decent amounts of traffic can easily sell these spaces for around $5 a week, or $20 a month. Generally the blog sells eight to six spots, in two columns. That would earn your blog up to $160 a months 12 months a year if you were to sell out each month. That isn’t going to make you rich, but I’m not expecting you to be jobless at this point in the game. If you’re blog is just getting started $2,000 a year from these banners will be an accepted reward.

How do you go about selling these banners? Unless your blog is one with extremely high traffic, enough that your viewers would recognize these spots are for sale, and then think highly enough of your site to want to advertise there, you may need to go out and find these advertisers. A good place to start would be to find blogs in the same niche as you with these ads. Click on the ads and find the “contact us” or another means of contacting them located on the advertisers site. Email them a link to your site, your rates such as $5 a week or $20 a month, and a brief message about why they should advertise on your blog.

In the message you should include that you are the owner of the blog, that you saw they advertised on (insert blog name here) and thought they may be interested in advertising on your blog as well. Depending upon how spectacular your traffic stats are you may wish to include this. Anything over 100 RSS subscribers, 100+ uniques a day, or simply 1,000 page views a week. These will show them your blog is actually receiving traffic that would show them there is an audience for their ad.

Once you have the eight ads up, change the price on your advertising page. Inform all previous advertisers that their rate will NOT be raised. They can continue to advertise there for the same price for as long as they want, pending they keep renewing. Once your blog takes off, you may start seeing a few emails coming in from people interested in buying one of these spots, for your new, higher price.

You’re out of ad space, yet you’ve got these new offers. What do you do? Inform the interested parties of the next open slot. Whether it be somebody no longer wishing to advertise there, or when somebody from the original lower price has run out of time for their current contract. Never remove anybody until their time has expired, this will give your site bad rep.

Basically, once you have the spots filled, you will no longer need to go out looking for people to take these spots for the time being. You won’t have to go out looking for new advertisers for a few weeks, and in that time you may hook one or two advertisers sending you an email because they saw your advertising page.

To make sure you are not the one getting the sore end of the deal, all payments must be made upfront. Any time when payments have not been made is subject to removal and replacement without warning. This is one of many ways to start to monetize your blog. I do however suggest informing advertisers a few days in advance so they have time to renew if they want. It saves you work.

This is the most popular and simple way to monetize your blog. It also increases as your blog gets more traffic and popularity. Making sure that you keep your prices high, yet fair is the key to consistently selling these spots and making money off of them.

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  2. Niche Cooperation
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