Dana Sibilsky's Tips to Successful and Profitable Blogging by Dana Sibilsky - HTML preview

Direct Ad Sales or Banner Advertising

This type of advertising is probably the most commonly known strategy for monetizing a website, and there are two types of website advertising you can use:

• Direct ad sales
• Banner advertising

Direct ad sales will require a bit more effort on your part, but it is also the better option in terms of profit potential. Since you are selling the ad space directly to the advertisers you get to keep 100 percent of the sale, as opposed to the banner advertising programs that take a big cut -- often as large as 50 percent. Direct ad sales will also ensure that you remain in complete control of what appears on your blog since you will not be relying on an automated system like banner advertisers do.

Product Reviews

There are a lot of programs available that will pay you to review a product, but this is another risky way of monetizing your site. You can fully disclose that a specific post is a paid product review, but the fact that you are accepting money to review a product on your site may compromise your integrity despite your disclosure.

Even when you believe a product is truly outstanding it will be hard for your readers to accept your opinion knowing that you have been paid to give it. Like affiliate marketing, you should be very careful in deciding whether or not to use this strategy as it could result in a loss of your core audience or cause harm to your reputation.

It is my opinion that you should exercise a great deal of patience when it comes to monetizing your site. It will undoubtedly be frustrating to put all that work into your site knowing that it is not yet generating revenue, but you have to take a long view and build a solid foundation that will ensure long-term profitability. After you have a sizable core readership in place and feel that you are ready to capitalize on all that hard work, be careful in choosing a method of monetization. After all, you have worked very hard to develop an excellent reputation as an expert in your field, so make sure you protect that reputation and generate revenue in a manner that is most suitable for continued success well into the future.