Alright, you own a blog, you have been writing for a while now and you have decided to monetise your blog. That’s a pretty nice idea to do. Blogging for money may not be the best of ideas, but making money blogging is good. There is a difference between the two – when you blog for money, you tend to compromise on quality of contents and focus more on the money part of the equation. That’s not to say that you should not blog for money at all – you could, after you have reached a point where you are pretty confident about the quality aspect in your blog, you have accustomed to knowing what it is that people expect out of your blog and are sure of providing it to customers. When you get the basics right, you can focus on what really matters.

Step 1 – Do a Thorough Blog Check: Now, if you are ready to monetise your blog, there are few checks that you need to do and there are a few options that you need to weigh. First off, do a thorough check of your blog. You need to make sure that, among the basics of giving your readers quality content, are also involves such aspects as blog design and neatness. Your blog should be easily readable and easy on the eye. There is no set template or blog design that is universally successful or prescribed. Blogs differ in their designs and some blogs have got successful just by their design.

You can try a few templates that are off-track, different from the regular ones, if you have the ability and confidence to tamper with your blog design. Once you have decided on your design that you think is optimal for your blog and its contents, you would then have to work on the general cleanliness of your blog. Is your blog cluttered with too much of contents crammed into a small space? Does your blog have its contents tagged properly? How have your blog’s topics been classified and categorised? Does the current way in which you have categorised your blog make sense in terms of your blog’s theme? How have you archived your previous contents?

Do a thorough check of all these aspects and make sure you are happy about it – and more importantly, your prospective advertiser would be happy about it all. If you are satisfied with your blog layout, blog design and its neatness factor, and you also have sufficient content in it to speak for, get into the statistics.

Step 2 – Get your Blog Statistics Right: How much traffic does your blog generate? How many hits does your blog get through reference? How much of the traffic is purely organic? How many readers do you think you have? Which part of the globe do you get the maximum traffic from? How has the trend been when it comes to the number of hits that you generate as well as the types and regions of origins of your visitors? What are your plans for the future? How do you think your readership is going to pan out over the next year or the couple of years? Get your statistics right. You need all of these and more as you take the next step in your blogging venture – monetising.

But you are not there yet. There are things that you need to consider before you go ahead with the next step of monetising your blog. What’s your blog’s theme? How closely knit is your blog with the overall theme? Have you managed to pull it off with topics and contents focussed on the overall idea of your blog? If yes, you can now monetise – based on your contents.

Step 3 – Decide How to Monetise: If your contents are good enough for advertising, you can approach companies like Google or Yahoo for them to place ads in your site. Or, you have another option – approaching companies directly. If you have been following things online, you would have a fair idea of the sort of companies that advertise online. Now that you know which companies are those that spend money on advertising, try contacting those companies directly. But, make sure that you contact those companies whose products and services would be in line with your blog’s theme and contents. If you have a travel blog, get in touch with a few established advertisers who are in the travel or related businesses or those who would be interested in readers of a travelogue. Companies do have online advertising budgets and they would be willing to spend on quality content.

Step 4 – Conntacting Online Advertisers: When you approach companies, try to find out the names of the persons in charge of advertising in the firms and get hold of their direct e-mail ids. Craft a mail personally addressed to them. Do some research about the companies and explain how your blog could promote their products and how they could benefit from advertising in your blog – never send mass mails when you seek to get advertising orders. Include your statistics and estimates in your mail, including your future plans.

There you go. If you have done all of these, you are almost there – and you only have to wait for the advertisers to respond to your mail. And your journey towards making money online starts here.