In the first part of ‘what happens in an economic depression’, I tried to suggest that in these extremely difficult times, many people are going to start trying to earn a living from the internet, primarily because there is less work and therefore less money flying around.

Hence, the first question that people who are thinking of earning a living online are going to ask is, ‘how do I do so?’. The simple answer is, by blogging.

Traditionally, if you want to generate an income from a blog, you would do so in one of two different ways.

Either you would feature paid advertising on your site (generally using Google AdSense) or by promoting someone else’s products as an affiliate.

However, I would suggest that neither of these solutions is going to be effective or profitable in the future, for several reasons.

Firstly, there is less money available to the businesses who were previously spending lots of money with Google, and it therefore stands to reason that there are going to be less companies advertising with the ‘big G’ in the future. Furthermore, one of the big bugbears of anyone who has ever used AdSense is that Google has steadfastly refused to tell you how much you will get paid for featuring their advertising on the site, or indeed, what percentage of the money they are paid ends up in your bank account.

Am I wrong in thinking that the percentage is likely to come down when Google see less and less people advertising? And when that happens, will you be any the wiser?

I believe that the answer to these questions is ‘yes’ and ‘no’, in this order.

Thus, if you are going to feature advertising on your blog as a way of making money, you really need to look at other advertising companies apart from Google, companies who offer paid advertising that is an awful lot more transparent than AdSense.

But, why depend on advertising in the first place? After all, by doing so, you are relying on other people (Google et al) to place advertising materials on your website, and then you are relying on your visitors to click on those ads. Granted, that is the very basis of PPC advertising, but it is a fact that the average net user is becoming increasingly ‘ad blind’. AdSense is almost everywhere nowadays, even featuring on the websites of the quality broadsheet newspapers so the average net user is nowadays bombarded with online advertising. Thus, they are becoming increasingly adept at ignoring it.

Then, you have the affiliate product option.

In this situation, you find a product or service created by an individual or company which you promote in exchange for a commission. The problem here is that the product or service you are promoting does not belong to you and you did not create it, so you have no guarantee of the quality of the product unless you buy it yourself.

As 99.9% of affiliate marketers don’t do so (if you bought every product you are thinking of promoting, you would probably spend more money than you generate from sales), there could plenty of refund requests, and again, you are relying on other people for the success of your business.

Add this to the fact that you only ever going to earn a percentage of the overall customer spend as your commission, and you again have to ask is this the best way of earning money online?

As far as I can see, neither of these traditional solutions is going to be the answer for how to make money through your own blog site in the future.

So, is there a better option?

The answer is, of course there is.

More on this next time…

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