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In response to Chad Randall’s post detailing his 7 Levels of Revenue for your Blog I’ve compiled my own ranking list of what I consider the best methods to make money from a blog.

This list reviews my preference starting from the best to the least effective monetization methods I have implemented on my blogs. Note the list is entirely representative of my experience and I believe what monetization methods work depends heavily on the topic you blog about and consequently the type of reader you attract. This is why, as you will see, my list differs from Chad’s, although I do agree with him that AdSense is at the bottom of the heap.

The important thing is to test and find out what works best for you. Don’t assume because something is best for someone else’s blog that is the case for all blogs.

1. Recursive Affiliate Income

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I’ve recently become impressed with the potential for making money from a website by selling text link ads. During May I generated over $250 USD from selling text links on my blogs just from the brokerage service provided by Text-Link-Ads.com. It’s not a huge amount of money but it’s cash I didn’t have before. If you are aiming to become a full time blogger then any extra sources of income helps, so you may want to try selling text links yourself.

John Webster from AdBrite Guide contacted me about his new website aimed at helping publishers and advertisers maximize their return from another text link broker, AdBrite.com. AdBrite offers a similar service to Text-Link-Ads.com, brokering deals between website publishers and advertisers. As a blog publisher this means you can leave the selling of your advertising inventory to companies like AdBrite while you just work on making the best blog you can. All you have to do is add your site to their system, place some code on your site, then watch the money roll in (theoritically at least!).

Of course factors such as how much traffic you have, what industry your site is in, your site’s PageRank (What is PageRank?) and where you place the add code will determine how much you make, but as I said, anything is better than nothing, so it’s worth a try.

John kindly offered a list of tips for me to publish to help you get the most out of AdBrite as a publisher and an advertiser. I’m posting the tips for AdBrite publishers (those wanting to make money from text links) here. The AdBrite advertiser tips (those wanting to generate traffic from buying links) are posted on my other blog, Small Business Branding.

Tips To Maximize Your AdBrite Income

1. Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.
2. Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.
3. Spend some time tagging your site and giving proper demographic information.
4. In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.
5. AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as opposed to just MANY backfill placements.
6. Hard code all placements because of the concreteness of “your ad here”. Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn’t perform as well.
7. Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.
8. Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.
9. Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.

You can find more AdBrite publishers tips and AdBrite advertisers tips at AdBriteGuide.com

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