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When you start a blog, there is always a big question of how to monetize your blog. Before that, there is an even bigger one - when to monetize it. Some experts recommend focusing on your content and increasing your reader base before monetizing while others disagree. I am one of the “others” and believe you should not wait too long. Most bloggers blog to make money online and if you are one of them, you might as well start earning from the beginning. If you do not figure out ways to monetize you blog when its new, it is going to be hard to find ways when you get more traffic. When new, you can experiment with your ad placements, change the layout and the whole design of the blog to maximize views and ad click through rates. You have the opportunity to find what works and what does not. You do not have any readers at that moment so no body is going to care that your blog looks different than before. But, if you try to monetize only after you get loads of readers, you will have difficulties:

1. The layout, colors and the design of your blog is the brand of your blog. People recognize it as yours. But, if you want to place a banner at the top of your blog and your sidebar or whatever and the current layout does not let you do it, then you risk losing your brand image if you have to completely change the look of the blog to place the ads in the right place.

2. If you monetize before having lots of traffic, that means people will accept your blog for what ads it has, but if you suddenly add ads to the clean ad free blog they are used to seeing, it might have a negative impact on your readers.

Of course, I would like to hear from anyone who has views different than mine.

Text link advertisement is widely popular among webmasters especially bloggers. It is perhaps the simplest and the least intrusive form of online advertisement. Big companies like TLA have been in this business for a long time, but why is this review not of TLA but of TNX.net? Because- TNX is for everyone. They do not exclude publishers with new blogs and new websites from using their service and making money. Not only that, TNX.net only charges 12.5% in commission from publishers while TLA charges 50%.

For Publisher: You are given a simple code to paste in your blog where you want the ads to appear. TNX works with points system which you can later buy or sell for real money through paypal. The site has a simple and easy navigation to manage your account and approve or disapprove the links in your site. They also have a earnings estimator which will estimate the monthly earning for your site based on the page rank, link popularity and other factors. Here are some of the frequently asked questions and their answers for a publisher.
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Getting traffic to your blog is not as hard as maintaing it. When you start a blog, you might think you are the only person blogging on that topic - you are wrong. There are literally hundreds and thousands of others who write on that very topic. Out of that pool only handful make it big time. You may ask- How to know if others are blogging better than you on that niche. Just look around, they are already successful and you are not. If readers do not visit your site, make them. To do this, make every post interesting. Think outside the box and give them a twist. For example, if you are a blogger about making money online, you do not have to invent something to write to get traffic. If you cannot find new materials, just rewrite the old stuff floating around the net and spice them up. Be creative. Change the tone of your articles to more sarcastic and humorous. People like funnies. It keeps them coming back for more.

To inspire you folks, I have included an example of a “different” writing. This is a old piece and (written more than a decade ago) if you have already read it, read it again. I am sure it will make you smile again.

This essay was written as a college application essay by Hugh Gallagher.

Essay Topic: Are there any sinificant experiences you have had, or accomplishments you have realized, that have helped to define you as a person?

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college.

You can find top Wordpress plugins posted by virtually every blogger. Well, its my turn to put forward mine. I will rate the plugins on the basis of its necessity, importance and coolness.

10. Adsense Deluxe: This is number ten because not everyone uses adsense to monetize their blog. This plugin allows automatic insertion of google adsense ads or yahoo publishing network (YPN) ads in between posts or wherever you want it.

Necessity: * Importance: ** Coolness: ***

9. Simple Tags: If you want to tag your posts with important keywords then this plugin is for you. Tagging makes the post more search engine friendly and is proven to increase traffic.

Ultimate Tag Warrior the previous best tag plugin is not compatible with Wordpress 2.3+. For other tagging related plugins go here!

I haven’t used any Tag Plugin in this blog but you can see the keyword tags after each post. I just included a line of php code in the loop of my ‘Main Index Template’. So, if you want to give it a try, just copy and paste the code below in the loop after the post entry.

<?php the_tags(); ?>

Necessity: * Importance: *** Coolness: ***

8. Sociable: This plugin allows your to put small icons of various social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, etc after each post which helps your readers spread the word about your blog.

Necessity: * Importance: *** Coolness: ****

7. Wp-Super Cache: As the name suggests, this is a caching system which makes your blog load faster and makes it highly responsive. If you used the Sociable plugin and got your blog dugg then this plugin will help your blog survive the ‘Digg effect’. This plugin might not be as important if your blog traffic is low.

Necessity: ** Importance: **** Coolness: *

6. Related Posts: After each post, this plugin shows the title of other posts that are related to the current post. This is highly effective to engage your readers and get more page views. You can see the example of this plugin in this blog. After every post there are links to the older related posts.

Necessity: ** Importance: *** Coolness: ****

5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin was creatd by Steve Smith and now adopted by FeedBurner themselves. Here are Smith’s words about this plugin:

this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: **

4. Optimal Title: This is a really cool and important plugin. Here is the original description of this plugin:

This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. Having your page information appear before your blog name in the title is advantageous because it provides more meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names. The text that appears between your <title> tags is used to generate both of these things, and will often be truncated when viewed. Because of this, it is more effective to have words directly relating to the content of your page appear before common markers. Not only will the titles be more meaningful, but the they will also be more scan able when being viewed in a list.

If that confused you, it simply means it makes the post title appear as the blog title for the respective post page. You can see the example on this blog.

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: ***

3. Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin generated a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog which is supported not only by Google but also by Ask.com and Yahoo. Sitemap is basically the map of your site in the language search engine bots can understand. This is an important plugin for SEO purposes.

Necessity: *** Importance: ***** Coolness: **

2. Wp-Contact Form With Spam Protection: Wp-Contact Form allows your readers to contact you without having to email you. This plugin creates a simple contact form where readers can fill in their information and leave your messages. The Contact Form now comes with spam protection. So, yay!!

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: ****

1. Wordpress Database Backup: Now, this plugin is perhaps the most important plugin after Akismet. It creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. So, if you are not very good at backing up your database yourself, like me, then this plugin is absolutely necessary. You never know what accident might happen.

Necessity: ***** Importance: ***** Coolness: ***

Top Wordpress Plugin: Akismet is a spam protection plugin which comes by default with Wordpress ( You just need to activate it and insert the Wordpress.com API key). I would include this as Number 1 but since it is already present in your plugins directory, I decided to give this a special mentioning. Spam is a big and annoying issue and akismet really helps filter them out.

Necessity: ***** Importace: ***** Coolness: *****

Other Mentionable Plugins: Source:

No Ping Wait - Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.

PXS Mail Form - Creates a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. It is much more easy to contact with website author.

SpotMilk - SpotMilk is the admin theme for WordPress 2.0. It makes wp-admin panel much nicer.

Super Archive - Implements a dynamic archive, the best archives system i know.

SRG Clean Archives - Super clean archive. Very simple and useful.

WP lightbox 2 - Overlay images on the current page for WordPress. You can turn it on and all images are now working with it.

fQuick - Sidenotes, short notes for WordPress. You can place it for example in sidebar.

CG-FlashyTitles - Implementation of sIFR 2.0 Flash-based - Nice graphical flash titles for WP. Very easy to install.

flickrRSS - Integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. Show flickr photos on your website.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Gravatars - Add gravatar support to WP. Administrative interface to control default gravatar options.

Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar or where you want.

WP Paginate - Create pagination for pages. It is the best plugin for that makes navigation easy with many static pages.

wp-notable - Add social bookmark links such as digg or del.icio.us to each blog entry

Exec-PHP - Execute PHP code in posts or static pages. When this plugin is on you can add php code to static pages or even posts.