Pat McCarthy of Conversion Rater has a great ten-point list of options for monetizing your weblog and your blogging. I’m summarizing the list below in point-form, and adding a bit of commentary later. There are other opportunities for monetizing your skills as well. Here are Pat’s 10 points:

1. Contextual advertising
2. Display advertising
3. Targeted advertising
4. Text link advertising
5. Affiliate links
6. Selling your content
7. Consulting
8. Donations
9. Selling products
10. Selling your blog

I’d like to comment on a few of these, which may overlap what Pat’s written. I’m not necessarily commenting in the same order as the above list.

Affiliate Links

There are bloggers earning a decent income with affiliate programs, but it requires active promotion and regular fresh content to generate the traffic that’ll turn the low conversion rates into actual revenue. Many programs will terminate your account if you don’t give them any traffic, let alone traffic that turns into sales. I’ve lost my status on a few programs that I really wanted to be part of.

I have yet to earn any affiliate income period, but that’s likely because my blogging style is not focused on building a single blog at a time. However, I have the most hope for using Amazon. On some of my sites, I liberally pepper affiliate links to books, CDs and DVDs, when it’s appropriate. Not all the time, but when I’m focusing on a particular topic. On other sites, I don’t use Amazon links at all.

If you decide to add affiliate programs to your blog, other than something like Amazon, you may want to wait until you have some decent traffic, say at least 100 unique visitors per day. (See my web analytics primer for an explanation of various metrics terms.)

Consulting

I know, or know of, a few bloggers who are making good incomes as consultants, who have absolutely no advertising on their blog (except maybe to promote their own services or books). Some, such as Seth Godin and Brian Clark, give away free, high-quality ebooks - ones they’ve written, based on their own experiences, instead of selling someone else’s.

I’ve spent a significant part of my computer programming/ technical writing career as a consultant. The question for me is what topic do I focus on online, to showcase my skills? That’s a tough question that you’ll have to mull over and decide for yourself.

For example, Brian Clark is a lawyer by trade, but most of his current business appears to be copywriting. Seth Godin gives talks and makes good money for that.

Me, I’ve spent most of my adult life as a programmer or webmaster, and part of it as a consultant/ trainer/ technical writer. But writing about programming is a time-consuming endeavour, so I actually write about writing and go after writing clients.

That doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing. Whatever consulting practice you have can be enhanced by building your credibility online. Just weigh out the price of your time.

Selling Your Content

I only started getting blogging clients early this year, and the work has been slow, but it’s building. While it’s not a lot of money yet (such is the freelance life), I actually make more money blogging for other people than the ad revenue from my own websites. But as a long-time technical writer, that doesn’t surprise or disturb me. (What does bother me is that blogs still do not have enough cachet to gain the ad revenue needed to pay professional bloggers a good rate for their work.)

My own blogs have been created for two reasons:

(1) They’re a place for me to showcase my varied writing topics and styles. A professional non-fiction writer, to stay competitive, has to be able to cover many topics with authority. Although what topics you choose to write about, whether for your clients or yourself, should closely resemble your own interests. Else it’ll cease to be enjoyable. Turn down anything you’re not comfortable with.

(2) They’re a long-term investment. Over time, quality content will eventually generate web traffic. If you’ve added contextual advertising to your website/ weblog, the theory is that you’ll eventually earn ad revenue (provided you’ve got ads on your own websites).

If you have the type of site where the content is written once and eventually produces, say, even just $300-500/month with minimal new content, you could make a good living by building a few of these sites over time. It may take 2-3 years before each site earns any revenue, but eventually the return is high. Or so the theory goes. And if you have the time and have done the research on a topic for a client, you might as well spend a bit more time and leverage your writing by publishing some additional articles on your own sites.

But in the meantime, if you’re writing/ blogging full-time and have no guaranteed income source, try to maximize the number of clients you have.