Monetizing a Blog

I have been working with a friend on his blog and was wondering about any best practices that anybody has to start making money off of it. I know there is like adsense. Anybody have any advice on how the best way to turn it into kind of a business to make some money on the side is? I really appreciate any help in advance.

 

What is that blog all about?

 

It is cooking based. He is a french trained chef and wanted to start writing about food and such.

 

If he is getting enough traffic, he can use services like adsense for his Blog.. Or use any affiliate program instead.. I recommend you to join CJ or shareasale if you want to make money through affiliate marketing.

 

You can also try amazon and sell some cooking utensils needed for each recipe.

 

there are ways you can use to monetize your site. there's adsense, infolinks, chitika etc. there's also affiliate marketing. you can try clickbank, clickbooth, amazon, etc. there's just plenty to choose from Good luck!

 

He can just offer a cooking services for the locals.. I'm sure you can find a group dying to eat french cuisine and maybe few adventurous enough who'd want new dishes on their table.

 

Find a couple of products related to cooking to promote as an affiliate. Try the Clickbank marketplace under "Cooking, Food & Wine".

 

Try amazon affiliate program to earn income from it. If you want to know what structure your ads should come, see Hubpages for it.

 

Caveat: I am not a restaurant or food blog expert. Just a sales and marketing guy.

Here is my thought: if he can make the blog have a local or regional twist to it (e.g., he occasionally focuses on recipes with local products in season or favorite local holiday recipes. e.g.) he could actually approach local restaurants, grocery stores, gourmet shops, kitchenware stores, etc., to sponsor his blog or advertise on it, etc. It could include a discount coupon program to entice his visitors to visit the advertiser.

 

all are good suggestions. If the blog gets big, sell banner ads to companies for a flat rate per month. This way income is stable for the month instead of hoping visitors click adsense ads.

 

Food blogging is a great way to create video recipes and create your youtube channel, you wil get additional visitors and paid by youtube ads... also read - 70+ Ways to Make Money Food Blogging

 

It's tough mate specially if its new. You & your friend need to give much more effort to make it famous. There are thousands of cooking blogs so how you can attract visitors to visit your new blog? You need to have some unique contents and recipes that no one can find in other sites. Your friend can write an ebook and sale that from your blog. Make cooking videos and upload those to Youtube. Make sure you are providing your blog information on those videos. Try to get as many traffic as you can and add adsense ads in top right places. Hopefully you guys will earn better from adsense.

 

For a cooking blog, I recommend writing in-depth, helpful reviews for cooking appliances that he uses. In those reviews include affiliate links to Amazon. Also, I recommend he builds a mailing list. Give away something of value to get visitors to opt-in to his list. Perhaps a cookbook or video series (they're not too hard to do). Or give away a kitchen appliance as an incentive for them to sign up. Then once they're on his list, provide content such cooking tips through an autoresponder series. Build a relationship through his mailing list and occasionally recommend useful books or kitchen appliances. The last time I checked, Amazon doesn't allow direct affiliate links in emails but you could instead link to a review on your blog which contains your links.

 

This is one of the good niche to make money, adsense is good of the good choice especially when you use adsense for youtube. Besides, you can consider affiliate program which is selling cooking product or/and offering food course or/and food product

 

@nwtoday makes some great points so I wont rehash it. But here is a post on MOZ that talks about how Matthew Barby created a successful food blog that might be a good reference http://moz.com/blog/my-recipe-for-success-how-to-launch-a-successful-blog