Making Money Online Blogging

Is it possible to make money online these days without scamming your customers? Given the number of hyped offers one can find on the internet, an aspiring internet entrepreneur might wonder if it’s possible to find legit ways to make money online. But certainly there are opportunities for ethically making money online. No scams are necessary.

One of the most widely used legit ways to make money online is a blog linked to a website. But to find out how this can be done ethically, one needs to remember what a blog is.

A blog, or weblog, is an internet journal by which one can communicate one’s ideas, values, and opinions to others. It is therefore primarily a communication medium, not an advertising medium. So a blog should never give the initial impression that it’s simply an internet billboard. People will not come to a blog in order to view a bunch of advertisements. If they don’t come to get useful information, or support for their own views and ideas, they won’t come at all.

However, while one may begin a blog simply to share his thoughts with others, a specific kind of blog is designed to make money blogging. To make money blogging, a blogger “monetizes” the posts he’s written originally for communication purposes. As long as the blogger continues to offer his visitors useful information, the following can be legit ways to make money online.

 referring readers to a website at which they may buy some product or service of the blog writer’s. For instance, if the blogger has written an eBook, or produced a video, which deepens the information he normally includes on his blog, he may mention this and provide a link where the visitor can purchase the eBook or video.
 including links to sites of which the blog writer is an affiliate.  
 selling ad space on the site. To be successful at selling ad space, a blog writer has to show he’s generated enough traffic to his site to make the advertiser’s purchase of space on that site worth the investment he makes.

Any of these can be legit ways of making money online, although if one is going to be an affiliate, he may want to check out the quality of the product or service he is linking to.

Many times successful professionals in off-line occupations use these strategies simply as a way to supplement their incomes, and of course this is one goal a person might have. On the other hand, some bloggers make handsome full time incomes from their blogs.