Blog Organization

Knowledge is the greatest asset anybody can have. Everybody gain experiences and knowledge during course of their life journey. Knowledge should not be dumped at a place, it should be properly circulate;d so that it can help improving life of other people (specially new generations). This is the main reason which drive people to share knowledge. There are two hindrance in the process – first is ignorance of the ways to spread  knowledge and second is time factor. Many people hesitate to do it because of no return (in term of personal gain) despite giving lots of time.

Everybody knows that internet is one of the best way to circulate knowledge.  In this article following topics is covered
I. Free vs Paid ways to share knowledge
II. Different ways to earn money after using above two ways

I. Free vs Paid ways to share knowledge

The basic requirement of any of these services is availability of your content over internet without any interruption of the services.

Free services:

1. Creating Blogs: Knowledge can be shared on many free platforms. These are webservers and website that offer opening of own personalized blog. The popular among this category is WordPress and eBlogger. Both platforms are index in all search engines and have higher ranking in the web searches. Therefore both has capacity to drive targeted traffic to the quality contents. Beside WordPress and eBlogger, there are other options as well like BigAdda.

2. Creating webpages: There are websites which offer creation of webpages which become immediately available after submitting/publishing. Squidoo and Hubpages are the most popular in this category. Beside this there are many article directory in which you can write and publish your article in different categories. The comprehensive list of website offering article submission can be found at Blog Organization.

Although the above services are free but almost all come with limitations. It provides a nice platform to share knowledge but the  major problem is that it restrict the ways to earn money though your contents. Some of the problems are listed below

i) WordPress don’t allow display of the advertisements on their free blog service.
ii) The revenue generated through advertisements in the Squidoo and HubPages is shared by owner of the service.
iii) eBloggers

Because of above reason many people prefer to use their own platform to maintain their contents. By this way they they can earn a lot without sharing their revenue. Here maintaining contents on internet cost money. Earning is possible by various ways discussed later in this article.

Paid Services:

The only way to maintain personal contents fully under your control is buying a domain and hosting it either on your own server of using some web hosting service providers. For convenience and security purpose web hosting services is always better.

1. Buy a domain: The most important aspect to start anything is theme or purpose. The name of the website/blog and its url should point out towards the niche. There are number of websites on every theme. Therefore it is possible that the name you shortlisted is not available.  In those cases, you should have many alternative names. You can check the availability of a domain on many websites like Whois, etc. Once you have finalized the domain name, you can go ahead and open an account with web hosting services. They also provides option to check the availability of a particular domain.

2. Web Hosting: The domain is just a name to identify particular website.  Two website can never have same name.  Web hosting services provides a place to store your contents. They also provide security to your data so that nobody can hack or misuse your contents. Their servers remain available 24×7 throughout year. Therefore anybody can access your contents at anytime.  There are many web hosting service providers. The comprehensive list can be seen at Blog Organization. Quality and price should be considered to select a particular web host for your website. The best choice should be web host which suited your budget without compromising quality. It is always possible to change the web host if you are not satisfied with the services.

Now you have a platform to share your knowledge with rest of the world. The next question is do you have sufficient knowledge of basic interface provided by your web host to start publishing your contents. Many people think that it is tough to maintain personalized contents without good computer skills. Such thinking is not right. Web hosts provides very user friendly interface (like Microsoft Windows OS) to start with. But you should know some software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Statusnet etc. WordPress platfom is based onCSS and HTML but you don’t need to be expert on such coding. Everything is possible even without knowing CSS and HTML language. With little efforts you can easily use WordPress. The tutorials to learn basic software/platform to share knowledge is discussed at different places on this website. As everybody has different choice and there is no platform which can be best for all. After reading those articles in this website, you can finalize your choice.

Now you have a nice platform to share your knowledge; next question is how can you earn money from your contents.

II. Different ways to earn money from your website

Affiliate Marketing Networks

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice. It has four key players- 1) Merchant (also known as \'retailer\' or \'brand\' is the owner of any products/services), 2) network (a way to connect merchants with a person who advertise their products/services), 3) affiliate (also known as publisher is a person who publicize merchant\'s products/services) and 4) Customer (who buy the product or avail the services).

Affiliates (publishers) are generally free to choose their own marketing strategies to bring customers to ower/advertiser. Advertising over internet(e-retailer) is one of the most popular way of affiliate marketing. Owner of a particular website or blog can advertise the products/services by various ways like displaying banner, text links, e-mail marketing, writing product/service review etc. This helps to drive traffic to the partner websites/products/services.

Affiliates earn money whenever a customer buy the product or avail the service. Earning can be in the form of revenue sharing or gift. Reward are also given for diverting the visitor to merchant.

Affiliate networks are the agency/agents which connect merchants with affiliates. This market is growing very fast and also offering the secondary tier of players which simply means that affiliates (publishers) can refer the network to other affiliates and they can get some percentage of cash earn by referred affiliates. This system doesn\'t affect the earning of new affilites.

Following are the important resources to master the tricks to maximize earning through affiliate marketing.

PPC Advertising Networks

There are various way by which you can earn money through your website. However earning depends on popularity of your blog which indicates the number of visitors to your blog. PPC is one of the most popular way to earn money through blogs/websites.

PPC stands for pay per click. If the number of visitors to your website is more, the probability of clicks is more. CTR (Click Through Rate) decide the earning through this method. However there is one more aspect to this and that is CPC (Cost Per Click). Getting clicks on different advertisements placed on your website doesn\'t lead to same earning. Some advertiser like educational and financial pay more (even$ 1 for single click) per click while others (few cents). The probability of clicking is most when advertisement is related to the theme of the blog and it is properly blended into the theme of the blog. The advertisements are generally displayed through affiliate network which display the advertisements related to the theme of your blog. Theme will decide the high or low earning advertisements which you cannot control.

Sponsored Reviews

Sponsored review is one of the popular way to earn through blogs. There are number of marketplaces which gives the opportunity to write sponsored posts on varied range of topics. The adoption of this idea depends on the willingness to get paid for writing blog post (related to specific products and websites). If the blog has a big fan list one can contact the advertiser directly to cut down the commissions of middleman. Following are the list of popular networks offering sponsored reviews and paid blogs. Opt any of these and start earning. Advertisers can also join these program for wide publicity of their products or website.

Googlebot is a program by which Google constantly examine and read web pages. It reads keywords, language, structure and formatting of the web contents. After examining these things Google sends AdSense ads to a particular website/webpage. The related ads entice visitors to click on them. As Googlebot also examine the language of the blog, so the ads appear in that language. Google AdSense ads are available in many languages. Following are the some of the facts you should know about Google AdSense.

• Googlebot takes time to scan the contents. Therefore older blogs have better chance of more appropriate ads. If the blog is loaded with inappropriate keywords then ads will also not match with the contents. Therefore you should always focus on the theme (niche) of the blog. You should regularly include the proper keywords in the title and contents of the post. It helps in getting more appropriate ads. But avoid adding lots of keywords without having any significance. Visitors will be annoyed by inappropriate use of keywords.
• Author should minimize the number of graphics in the blog. AdSense prefers pages with textual materials and dislike many graphics in the same page. Larger and bold texts are given more importance compared to normal text by the Googlebot.
• Copying the free contents available on internet can ban you from AdSense. Therefore you should avoid duplication of the information already available somewhere else.
• If you don’t want your competitor ads to appear on your website, you can include this restriction on your account while creating the code for the ad unit.
• AdSense simply save time of the publishers to search for the advertisers which can pay them for publicizing products related to theme of the blog.
• The best think about the AdSense ad is that you can dedicate specific sections in the blog for those ads and then can forget about it. Subsequently you can focus on other things like making blog content rich. Therefore it is best way for getting passive income.
• How much Google pay you for the clicks is not completely known. Google never disclose this. Traffic to your website and average number of click also matters. Some click pays in cent while other can pay in dollars. Value of ads depends on the specific topic and keywords. Google never tells which clicks get paid more. However ads related to topic like finance and education generally pay more while those related to electronics etc pay less.
• You can use AdSense referral option. If you refer other publisher to use AdSense, you will get some percentage of money earned by those new publishers. The earning of the referred publishers will not be affected by this and your payment is not the sharing of their earned money. As Google pay you only a part of the money given by advertisers. Therefore the money you get as percentage by referring AdSense to other publisher is share of Google’s profit and not of new publisher.
• Finally, you don’t have to play game with Google or your reader to get money. You just have to make your blog content rich. It will automatically drive traffic to your blog. Regularly updated good contents will convert random visitor into regular visitor. And more traffic is the synonyms for more clicks on ads which in turn lead to more income.

Google AdSense is not the only way to earn money by this way. Although it is most popular among advertising networks, there are number of other good options as well like Chitika, Bidvertiser etc.

Alternatively you can also earn money by affiliate marketing. It is a way to sell or promote others products and services though your blog. In that case you get paid on revenue sharing basis.

Chitika is an online advertising network founded in 2003 which selectively display the advertisements on the website of publishers. It is one of the largest search-targeted advertising networks and offers  higher eCPMs compared to Google AdSense. The biggest advantage of Chitika is that it knows when not to show an ad. Chitika targets users based on online search activity, session analysis, and affinity to specific offers, promotions and adverts. At present it serve over 650 million search-targeted ads per month. More than 34,000 websites are associated with Chitika to sever over 2 billions ads per month. Chitika Premium ads can only be seen by visitors from US and Canada which are coming from a search engine. You can follow the following step to preview the Chitika Premium ads before placing it on your website.

1. Logged in to the Chitika.

2. Get Chitika Premium Ad code with your preferred settings.

3. Place the Chitika Premium Ad code on your webpage.

4. Write url of your website (or any webpage) followed by #chitikatest=keyword and press enter key

5. Your ad will be displayed in the browser. This will mimic the condition of a visitor coming through search engine to find the relevant information. Eg. suppose somebody is searching for a keyword “money” on any search engine and directed to this page of the site. To see the ad appeared in that case you can type “http://finance.blogorganization.com/earning-tips/earn-money-with-chitika-premium-ads#chitikatest=money” in the web browser and press enter. Suppose the visitor is coming to this page after searching for keyword “Premium Ads” in search engine then to see the ad in that case you can use link “http://finance.blogorganization.com/earning-tips/earn-money-with-chitika-premium-ads#chitikatest=earning“. Same principle applies to ads appeared on any webpage or website.

3. Press (Ctrl + R) to refresh the display of advertisements.

Earning through Chitika is best when traffic is mainly coming from search engines. Chitika offer two types of ad units – Chitika | Select and Chitika | Premium. Chitika | Select choose when and when not to show an ad. Chitika | Premiuma ad is shown only when traffic is coming from the search engine in US and Canada. The Chitika | Select ads may or may not be relevant to your content – however you can be sure that they are relevant to the user. Chitika | Select technology will determine the likelihood of whether an ad is a good match for that user or not. Earning through the traffic outside US and Canada is possible through Chitika | Select ads.

PPC programs provide an opportunity for earn money to the publishers. Ads can be placed on the website though these programs. There is no need to search for the advertisers related to the niche area. Publishers get paid whenever a visitors click on those ads. A particular ad is displayed on the website when it is relevant to the products or services of the advertiser. Advertisers generally bid on keywords relevant to their target market. PPC programs operate under two criteria CTR (click-through-rate) and CPC (cost-per-click). CPC vary from advertiser to advertiser. Some pay very high, while others relatively very low. Ads from the particular advertiser appear only when your web content has the relevant keywords set by the advertisers. Some ads like Chitika ads appear mainly when people come to your site though search engine and the ads appears match with their search term. PPC program has potential to earn even more than millions per month.

There are two models which decide the CPC – flat-rate and bid-based. In both case advertiser has full right to decide the value of their clicks. Advertisers also consider the value of visitor coming to them after clicking. If the visitors are going to give them big returns for long term, the price of CPC will naturally be more. Therefore some ads related to education and finance pay more compared to digital devices.

Five top paying PPC programs are Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN), Microsoft adCenter(MSN AdCenter) publisher affiliate program and Chitika affiliate and Kontera affiliates.