How to Monetize Your Professional Blog

Professional blogging is just one of the many ways in which one can make money on the Internet.  Professional blogging may be the simplest way in which one can make money from home too.  Though it is simple, people still need to know how to make money from a professional blog. If you have a professional, self-hosted blog set up, you could look into these ways to monetize your blog.
Contextual Advertising:
Contextual advertising is the fastest way to monetize your blog. A contextual ad service can be considered to be a platform for internet advertisers and internet publishers to meet. When a blogger signs up with the contextual advertising service, they can make monetize their blog by putting up the advertisements of the advertisers who have signed up with the contextual advertising service.
When and if the website viewers click on the site, the webmaster makes a pre-determined, calculated amount of money from the advertisement. Though this is the fastest and the simplest way for a website to make money, the too many factors that decide the amount of money make it too complicated to be feasible.
The top contextual advertising services are:

• Google Adsense
• Smowtion and
• Ad Brite

Contextual ads work for the web master only as a secondary method to make money from a site. The payout is very less if the site does not have good traffic, and when the site has good traffic, there are other ways through which the site can make money, so it is a vicious circle.
Affiliate Sales:
Though affiliate sales have been highly derided, they are still the best bet when it comes to make a good amount of money through your site. When you join an affiliate program, you sign up with the site, and can then apply to be affiliated with – basically to put up advertisements of – various products and services on your site. You make a commission if the users on your website complete any of the pre-determined user behaviors, for example buy a product or service, download a service, or sign up with a website.
There are several affiliate programs available, and you would need to check which affiliate program would have the products and services that match your niche. Here are three affiliate programs that you can look at:

• Google Connect Commerce
• Commission Junction
• Share a Sale

You can sign up with Google Connect Commerce and Commission Junction even if you have a free blog but you need to have a self-hosted blog with an email account if you wish to sign up with Share a Sale.
Sponsored Posts:
Recently, sponsored posts have become a famous way when it comes to monetizing websites.  There are some services which offer information about companies, products and services that are looking for sponsored posts. Of course, the amounts of money you make via these posts depend on the popularity of your blog. The two famous sponsored posts programs are:

• Sponzai
• Pay per Post

However, keep in mind that if you have a blog at WordPress.com, you may not be allowed to put sponsored posts on your blog.