Blog Networks: A Faster Way to Make Money Online, or Not? (Part I)

When most of us think of starting a blog, we think of toiling away obscurely in our own little space, hacking away at our blog until we build up some traffic, then monetizing that traffic into – well, blog superstardom, of course!

But, there may be another way to reach blog fame and fortune. What is it? A blog network – the topic I’m going to discuss here this week. Hopefully by the end of this three-part series, you will be able to discern if blog networks are a faster way for you to make money online, or not?

What Is a Blog Network?

For those of you who know, be patient a second while some catch up. Blog networks are simply a conglomeration of blogs run under the auspices of one company/entity umbrella.

About.com is probably the most famous blog network. It has hundreds of blogs “about” everything under the sun practically. Some blog networks only have a few blogs though. Following are four advantages of joining a blog network.

4 Advantages of Joining a Blog Network

Traffic: This is probably the number one reason to join a blog network. As you may have hundreds of blogs in a network, when you join, you already have in-built sources of traffic to capitalize on.

You may spend months or a few years building up to this type of traffic on your own, so joining a blog network gives you an automatic leg up in the traffic department.

Monetization: As it takes traffic to start making money from blogging, you can ostensibly start making money quicker with a blog network. And, they pay you to be a part of their network. Some pay based on the traffic you bring in; some pay a flat fee per month; and yet others pay a flat rate, plus a percentage of traffic.

Every blog network is different. We’ll discuss this topic more in part three of this series when I lay out a series of questions you should ask yourself before joining a blog network.

Professionalism: When you join a blog network, you are usually asked to post a certain number of times per week. And of course, you have to post on time and on topic. All of this forces you to treat your blog professionally from the very beginning – something you may not do as an independent.

Back-end Issues Handled: As part of a blog network, usually all of the backend issues are handled for you. Some of these include design, technical issues, which monetization techniques to choose, etc.

This can be a huge advantage, especially if you are new to blogging because it frees you to focus on producing great content — the foundation of any successful blog.

List of Blog Networks

Here is a list of blog networks, the number of blogs they include and what the topics are. Peruse them and get a feel for some of the perks discussed just above. What do they pay, how much traffic do they generate, what guidelines do they expect bloggers to follow, which back-end issues do they handle for them, etc.

Now that we’ve covered the major positives of joining a blog network, tomorrow, we’ll look at the cons.

Written by Yuwanda Black from Inkwell Editorial
Posted on February 16th, 2009 and filed under Making Money
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