PayPerPost

PayPerPost is a relatively new method of advertising for blogs. In essence, you are paid to write an article or post a link in an entry about a particular product or company. Designed to be self-serve style of ad service, you sign up for an account and submit your blog for approval. After you are approved, you can then accept Opportunities.

An advertiser posts an Opportunity, and when your account is approved, you are free to respond to that advertiser's Opportunity. Most often, the advertiser is looking for someone to blog about his product, website, or company in exchange for cash, although the amount and requirements for each Opportunity varies from advertiser to advertiser.

When you post the blog entries relating to the Opportunities chosen, you submit links to those entries to the people at PayPerPost. Their staff reviews the links and if all is well, approves the posts. If your post is denied, they do give you a chance to revise it once before rejecting it.

If your post has been approved, you must leave it up on your site for 30 days. It does not have to be on the front page of your blog, but it does need to remain live. PayPerPost will spot-check over the course of that time and again at the end of 30 days to ensure it is still visible to the public. If your blog entry is still alive, you will get paid.

PayPerPost has a moderate list of other requirements that vary depending on the Opportunity selected. You can view these requirements on its website. You must have a PayPal account in order to receive payment from PayPerPost.

Federated Media

Federated Media, or in short FM is currently an exclusive, invite-only advertising network that accepts only blogs with what their staff members consider the utmost in passion, integrity, authority and strong community support. They choose the bloggers in their network based on how much revenue they think the blogs can generate. FM feels bloggers with the trust of their audience, in addition to high traffic and quality content, are going to lure more potential advertisers.

FM organizes its sites, similar to other services into groups that they call federations. They have federations for parenting, travel, graphic arts, entertainment, and much more, so there is a good chance your blog should fit into at least one federation. FM also allows you to approve or deny all ads that may appear on your site. FM does not publicly disclose the amount of revenue you can expect to earn by joining their network, so you need them to accept your blog before they share that info.

While Federated Media is invitation-only, you are welcome to submit your site for consideration. If you feel your blog meets FM's criteria, fill out the submission form on the site.

Blogads

Blogads has been around since 2002 and is wildly popular choice of advertising among bloggers of all types. In the Blogads structure, the advertisers themselves, with assistance from Blogads, manage, renew, and add campaigns to your blog via a simple web-based interface.

The blogs participating in the service are classified under various categories that Blogads calls hives. Hives are groups organized by location and topic. Advertisers decide, by visiting your blog or by perusing the list of blogs in their targeted hives, whether to purchase ads based on your blog's advertising cost, audience, traffic, and popularity. They also can purchase ads in targeted group buys based on the quantity, quality, and cost of the other blogs in your hive.

In addition to having advertising approval, Blogads also allows you to customize the appearance of your ads, set your own prices, and even write the copy to entice potential advertisers. Ultimately, Blogads is one of the most rewarding services. The company takes a mere 30% cut from the revenue generated by the ads on your blog. And you can run Blogads along with other ad services.

Text Link Ads

One of the hot services around is Text Link Ads. It places very subtle text link ads on websites and blogs. Text Link Ads are not contextual; they are static links, meaning they do not change on refresh and are not served dynamically. You can personally approve or deny the text link ads that are sold before applying them to your blog. Having some say in what gets served up to your readers can give you peace of mind and a feeling of control over the advertising process.

Text Link Ads touts a 50% revenue share on the price of the ads sold to your site. You are not paid per click or per impression, just for the cost that Text Link Ads charged the advertiser to place the ad. So if an ad on your site cost $20, you get $10. You are conveniently paid via check or Paypal on the first of every month with a minimum payout of $25.

Google Adsense

Google, the oracle of Internet search engines, has a great ad delivery service called Adsense which allows you to run ads based on the content Google indexes from your blog. This method for displaying ads is called contextual advertising. The ads come in varying sizes, and you can customize them to match your blog design through the Google Adsense web-based interface.

Google Adsense serves both text and graphic ads to your blog in a relatively unobtrusive manner. Google does have to approve your participation in Adsense, so if it deems your site controversial or offensive, it may deny your application. Google Adsense is free.

Google pays for the ads on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-1000-impressions (CPM) basis. Your potential advertisers pay Google either when your readers click on the ads (CPC) or whenever their ads are displayed on your blog (CPM). You receive a certain portion of this payment via check every month, provided your ads have generated revenue. And a minimum amount of $100 must be earned before Google will issue a check. Google does not disclose the exact amount that you receive per click or impression, but you can make money with Google Adsense if you use it in accordance with Google's guidelines.

Pro and Con of Blog Advertising

The pro:

Advertising on blogs has become more accepted as a way to make legitimate cash. There are bloggers who support themselves solely with advertisements. Of course, not in the sense of placing advertisements all over the blog, hiding the actual content. There are some widely successful sites that run unobstrusive advertisements and use them as a primary source of income.

Once you have established your blog and can convince potential advertisers, via site statistics and consistent content, that they should invest some advertisements on your blog on a regular basis, you can sit back and have money rolling in. You can make a tidy sum if you place your ads wisely and generate steady traffic.

The con:

When you accept ads on your site, you should have a sense of responsibility to your advertisers. Some bloggers have legitimate concerns about making sure their voices are not compromised by the requirements of certain advertisers. In this highly litigious society, advertisers are much more careful about who they align themselves with.

Not all advertisers are that picky, but if you are hoping to make money with your blog, keep your target audience and target advertisers in mind when you post entries.

The best way to keep your blog free of influence and truly your own point of view is to call the shots whenever possible. This may or may not be lucrative, depending on the circumstances, but it is your blog and ultimately your choice on what kind of content it holds and what advertisers you choose to partner with.