Making money on content blogs

Most of the advice on making money with blogs refers to blogs about products. How do you make money with a site that attracts lots of people who want to read about your topic but tend to be ad-blind? Is it hopeless? Must it forever be merely a labor of love?

Darren at ProBlogger has a great post about indirect ways to earn money from a content blog. He talks about such things as book deals and speaking engagements that could result from your blog, as well as less glamorous possibilities, like meeting a business partner who opens up new possibilities for you.

If you have a content blog that’s attracting and engaging readers, congratulations! You don’t need to slap ugly ads all over it. You just need to build your traffic and wait for opportunity to present itself. If you do want to monetize right away, there are a couple of good options:

• TextLinkAds - discreet, quick-loading. The good news is, people don’t rent this space to get clicks: they’re often after your pagerank, which your content blog will have plenty of. So your ad-blind visitors won’t turn anybody off.
• CafePress - if you can come up with some pithy slogans and/or cool designs, you can have CafePress slap them all over merchandise and sell them on demand for you.

I also think that if you can get around 25,000 readers on a content blog, you will eventually get some people who click ads and buy things. It’s the law of averages.