Making Money Online with blogs has exploded in popularity over the last 2 years. Blogging has been popular for a while but the trend of trying to make money blogging is a relatively new phenomenom.

It’s no surprise that as the cost of living grows exponentially that bloggers will be trying to make a few bucks with their blogs.

Why Not Ebay

The methods that bloggers use to monetize vary wildly with most of them being, in my opinion, rubbish. Pay per play ads, Kontera and other useless crap is only going to leave you disappointed. You are better off to use something that readers are familiar with seeing. Something that they trust and that doesn’t seem to be “scammy.”

I think readers have naturally become distrustful of ads that they see on blogs. It’s a crying shame, but true. Depending on your niche I am going to show you a very viable way of monetizing your blog that everyone is quite familiar with and draws little suspicion.

That method is Ebay.

Ebay is almost a household name around most households these days with a lot of people already being signed up and using the service. This familiarity gives you an advantage.

Monetization Made Easy

Like anything else Wordpress, inevitably someone develops a plugin that makes it simple to incorporate into Wordpress. This is no different so let’s talk about phpBay. This plugin allows you to incorporate ebay auctions into your blog posts.

If you are writing a niche blog about Steven King books then you can include a few auctions for Steven King books in your post. Readers that liked your post might potentially click on the auction, purchase and you make a commission.

Putting those auctions into this post literally took about 10 seconds. This is a fast an efficient way to monetize your blog. The possibilities are fairly broad, movie review sites, book review sites, gardening blogs, you name it. There are endless possibilities when it comes to this plug in.

You can set how many auctions you want to show, what keywords to search for, what category to search in and a few other things. It makes it as simple as possible and gives a decent amount of flexibility.

PhpBay Plugin

The plug in as I stated is called PhpBay. It installs just like any other Wordpress plugin in that you download, unzip, upload to your plugin folder and then activate. Setting it up is simple and you can be up and running within 5 or 10 minutes.

You will need an affiliate ID from the Ebay Partner Network so that your sales can be credited to you. Ebay does not use Commission Junction anymore so that account won’t do you any good.

If you are happy with the money you are making with your blog currently then maybe this isn’t for you but if Project Wonderful hasn’t made you rich yet or those crappy pay per play ads haven’t bought you a yacht then maybe you should give this plugin a look.

It won’t make you rich, but there is no doubt you can make some money from it.