There are many different ways that you can make money on your blog. One way that many people choose to make money on their blog is by selling advertising space on their blog site. Many companies will not only purchase ad space from you, but will also pay you for pay through clicks, when people click on the ad. Another way that you can make money with your blog is by offering services such as blog hosting or setting up blogs for other people. You can charge a one time fee for these services or you can also charge a monthly fee as well. Another way that many people choose to earn money from their blog is to charge a membership fee for people that visit their blog site.

As I said in Advertising Basics, cost-per-click (CPC) ads are displayed on your pages at all times but only earn you money when a visitor clicks on one of them. These ads are perhaps the steadiest form of income for a blogger who gets at least 100 pageviews a day (a fairly low number that any articulate blogger can reach within a month or two with a little work), and revenue is most directly proportional to traffic numbers. When your traffic goes up, your CPC ad revenue will probably increase at a similar rate.

Here are the networks I have used, along with recommendations based on experience and conventional wisdom. One caveat: the minimum threshold for getting a check from most of these services is high ($50-100), so I would discourage you from using more than one or–at most–two of these networks at a time, unless you are already getting a lot of traffic. A blog with 500 pageviews a day might take about 3 months to earn $50 from well-placed CPC ads, so if you want to get a check anytime soon, it is not a good idea to split your revenue between different programs.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is the CPC ad hegemon. Almost everyone who earns money from CPC ads uses Google AdSense. Google uses part of its search technology, which ’spiders’ your pages and reads its text, to automatically determine what keywords your site contains that would be of interest to advertisers. The result is that all of the ads shown are directly related to at least one of the keywords you have written in your posts.

And Google is the 800 lb. gorilla in the market, which offers several advantages:

• There are more advertisers. Because the amount of money you get paid for a click is decided using a competitive bidding system (completely automated), the more competition is for placement on your site, the higher the bids will be.
• Users are already familiar with Google ads. They will not be surprised or confused when you place them on your pages, because so many of the other sites they read already have them.
• Countless others with more of a stake in this than you count on Google, which means that they have to be reliable, honest, and responsible. You get payouts on time, ads that are displayed are appropriate and professional-looking, ads are well-tailored to the words on your page, etc.

If you are only going to use one CPC network on your site (and, as I have noted, there is a distinct advantage to only using one), it should be Google AdSense.

Note: The terms of service for Google AdSense prohibit users from using other context-based CPC ad networks on pages where AdSense ads appear. Because of this fact, very few CPC ad networks besides Google use context-based ad placement. The other options listed here have all claimed to be compatible with Google’s requirements, but I offer no guarantee that this is true.

Chitika eMiniMalls and ShopClouds

Chitika’s CPC ads have been very lucrative for notable consumer products bloggers for a long time, but they have not been leveraged much by progressive bloggers. I tried them out about a year ago and found their ads to be of questionable relevance.

But recently, they seem to have added more products to their catalog that might be of interest to our readers. I’m going to give them another try, and I’ll modify my recommendations here according to what I find.

The type of ad most likely to be effective for us is what Chitika calls “eMiniMalls.” They display products (generally with photos) with prices and descriptions, and the products displayed are based on keywords that you chose. I recommend using the keyword “politics” along with keywords that are more specific to your site, which you’ll want to experiment with. With the keyword “politics,” here’s an ad that you might get:

It won’t always show a perfectly relevant ad, but as Chitika’s catalog grows (and its demand for “politics”-related products grows), it will get better. As of now, it might be worth burying one of these ads somewhere towards the bottom of your pages and just letting them sit to see how well they do. If after a few months, the products don’t look relevant and the revenue you generate isn’t good enough, take them down.

The other possible Chitika ad format that might be useful to us is their “ShopCloud.” You get paid only when a user clicks an ad and makes one additional click, according to their description, so this may generate fewer clicks than eMiniMalls, but you get to select the exact categories and words that your ShopCloud ads display. Here is an example of a ShopCloud ad using keywords I thought my users might find attractive:

Again, I recommend here only that you sign up for Chitika’s ads if you feel like experimenting. This kind of ad is not proven on progressive political blogs, so if you find that the ads do not work well enough, stop using them.

There are three kinds of advertisements that could generate income for a political blogger who isn’t getting tens of thousands of pageviews a day:

1. Cost-per-click (CPC) ads: CPC ads are displayed on your pages at all times but only earn you money when a visitor clicks on one of them. (Pay rate is generally between $.01 and $.75 for each click on my sites.)
   Placement ads: Placement ads earn you money simply for displaying them. Typically, ads like these come from campaigns and political organizations through systems like BlogAds (invite only), Text Link Ads, or AdBrite. (Pay rate varies greatly based on how much you are willing to ask for and how much traffic and respect you have earned, but base level is about $10 per week.)
   Affiliate links: Most companies are not going to come knocking on your door to buy advertisements on your blog no matter what you do. Affiliate links give you the opportunity to seek out products that you think your readers might like and place them on your blog, but you only make money when a reader actually buys the product. (Pay rate is generally 4%-30% of the price of the products purchased.)

There are arguments to be made for each of these advertising formats, and it is worth experimenting with all three.

CPC ads generate revenue almost directly proportional to the amount of traffic you receive. On the day that you get front page linked by DailyKos, you might make ten times as much money (we’re talking $5.00 rather than $.50) as you would on a normal day. There are strategies for improving the number of clicks your ads receive (many dealing with placement of ads on the page), but good content-based CPC ad networks are a steady, if small, source of income, because they are always there and require no maintenance to keep them fresh.

Placement ads are the perfect solution for any blogger who can get them. Using a third-party to list your blog and sell ad space on it helps you attract advertisers and process payments automatically (although the services to charge a percentage of ads sold). Blogs with little traffic or reputation will not attract many of these advertisers, so wait until a few people know who you are before trying to attract them.

Affiliate ads are the most hit-or-miss of the three options, and they require the most work on your part. But when you find the one product that 50 of your readers end up buying, you can make more money on this kind of advertising than on the other two combined. But most of the products you link to will not attract many buyers. (Amazon.com does now have some context-based affiliate links, which require less maintenance but are also not specifically tailored to your site’s readers.) Typically, one affiliate purchase will earn you more in a day than all your CPC ads for that day.

Thousands of intelligent, articulate progressives post entries to their blogs every day. A few of them make enough money from one source or another to do it full-time, but most do not. And that is not likely to change much.

But just because you can’t make enough money blogging to quit your day job doesn’t mean you can’t make a little money at it, and that’s what this site is here for. SustainableBlogging.com is committed to the idea that progressive political bloggers who publish worthwhile, timely material on a regular basis can earn a modest amount of money — enough to pay for hosting costs (for private hosting), a couple beers, and a nice meal, maybe — each month.

I can’t claim that I make a six-figure salary from blogging, and you won’t either after following my advice. The truth is, political blogging is not a lucrative activity for anyone who isn’t paid by a news organization, a blog network, a nonprofit, a candidate, or a supportive philanthropist. Blogging about consumer products or other heavily commercialized subjects generates far more advertising revenue than we ever will, and that comes with the territory.

As you might already know, there are hundreds of excellent web sites and blogs dedicated to the subject of making money as a blogger. Unfortunately, none focuses on those of us who write about public affairs, elections, and current events. Most of the information here is drawn from those sources, but it is tailored to more adequately meet our needs as a niche.

Here, I will blog about my experiences trying different methods of monetizing the web sites I’m involved in. We’ll also talk to other bloggers about their successes and failures, and hopefully we’ll have a lively discussion about them.

Use the information here as a tool to generate a little money from your progressive political blog. Keep it to pay for your costs or to convince yourself that blogging is “worth it,” or donate it to a worthy cause or campaign.