There comes a time in every bloggers career they have to make a choice about monetizing their blogs. Monetizing isn’t the right thing for every blogger, surprisingly enough. There are plenty of vanity bloggers or those who blog to support a separate business venture. You can rest assured that when I finally get my novel in print there will be absolutely no ads other than products on the corresponding site/blog.

Just as not every blog is meant for monetizing, not every blog should be monetized in the same way.  Most people recommend starting off with adsense, which for sure is (was) the easiest program to get into.  As I understand it from a great many noobs plenty of sites are getting rejected these days and many more are getting their accounts cut within the first couple of days of going active with Google’s normal no explanation given email.  If this has happened to you, don’t get worried over it since it happens to a lot of bloggers with no rhyme or reason.  Also don’t get bent out of shape over it since there are alternatives to Adsense, which usually work a lot better for most bloggers.

The one thing most bloggers have a hard time with when it comes to adsense is actually getting enough traffic to make any sort of money.  With the maximum allowed banner load you need something in the order of about 1000 page views a day on a low pagerank site to pay out every month.  When you covert this to the traffic the average blogger gets you might get paid once a year by google.  This is the sort of thing that causes most bloggers to give up.  Fear not though, once you discover if adsense is right for your site, and I encourage everyone to try it, you an move on to bigger and better things.

The program i want to tell you about today is one I have been using for about six weeks, Amped Media.  Unlike Adsense. Amped Media is an affiliate marketing program letting you pick and choose whcih ads you want to display based on your blog’s niche.  They have a wide range of programs and once you are accepted into the program you can always shoot a message to your affiliate manager to help you find the right ads.  In affiliate marketing, an Affiliate Manager’s pay is usually based in part on your performance so a good manager will be willing to do whatever it takes to find you ads that make money.

There are a couple of ways to make money with an affiliate program, email, banners, social media and referrals.  It is the referral income which makes most of the big name bloggers, the bulk of their income in truth, and one you shouldn’t necessarily discount from your own repertoire either.  Not only do you have referral income, something that you will never get from Adsense, most affiliate programs pay out at between $25 and $50 monthly.  I know what you are thinking, $25, I still only make a $0.02 a day with adsense.  The difference between adsense and affiliate programs comes back to you choosing your own ads based on the sort of traffic you get.  Take these three ads for example:

This ad for Cool Aid is something you might see on adsense. If you had it on your site and someone clicked on it, you might get a penny or two from adsense no matter what the person did with the page on the other end. As an affiliate ad you aren’t getting paid unless some action is take after the click.  This might seem a bit unfair since you are displaying the ad and getting nothing for doing so.  That assumption is however completely wrong.  The chances are if someone sees the ad and clicks on it they want what is being offered.  If you smartly picked ads readers are likely to click on, then you are going to make a lot more money.  This particular ad takes you to a form and they want you to fill it out, in my experience about 1 in 4 people will fill out a short form on the first page of an ad click.  At most you are going to $0.20 from adsense and more like half that with this sort of ad getting 4 clicks.  With an affiliate like Amped Media it pays out more than a buck and a quarter for every form fill out.  At that rate it is also on the low end of payouts.  If you do the math and I think you will figure it out which is more profitable.

This isn’t the only type of offer available either there are also offer that are sales based and incentive offers.  I will go more into those types of offers in the next affiliate program I review for you.  Stay tuned for next weeks review, MonetizeIt.

If you read my blog, it is most likely you are either a) a friend who is trying to get inside my head, or b) want to make money from blogging. I am going with the latter. You, like me, may be frustrated with Google for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into, but I am here to say there are alternatives. I am partial to BidVertiser myself, but I am looking into a number of affilate programs right now to replace Google on The Hart Blog Network blogs.

The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger.

John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals.

Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network. What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions.

Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an interview with Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam Network

Earlier in the week I posted that PepperJam Network was giving all new publishers who signed up with their network a signup bonus of $10. Today I’ve managed to get a quick interview with Pepperjam Network’s CEO and President Kristopher B. Jones to ask him about the network, why he started it and what tips he could give us as publishers for using it in a way that earns us the most money.

John Chow has been pushing NeverBlue Ads pretty hard of late. I am also interested and owe them a return phone call. It seems these days even the bigger blogs are abandoning google so fast we can smell smoke. Possibly it is the guys at google taking the torch to ever more bloggers. It is hard to say for sure.

Earlier in the week John also wrote on TinyMasive.com

What do you get when you combine the contextual advertising of Google AdSense with an interactive shopping widget that can offer some pretty good deals to the visitors of your site. In some respects, TinyMassive.com may just look like another shopping-based ad network, but over the course of doing this review, I came to discover that it has a few unique qualities as well.

There are many other networks available. Some of them are sketchy. Some of them just hard to get into. Some of them only in beta, like Yahoo. They are out there though and for those who are frustrated with Google, fear not there are options.