Theres no reason that your real estate website or blog has to be a drain on your finances or time.  Truth be told, monetizing your blog is a good idea.  It will boost your income when times are good and carry you when the real estate market lulls.  People really only care about two things, money and time.  Monetizing your blog can help you to save both.  For example, if your blog makes $300 per month for you- you now have recouped whatever fees you are charged for hosting and can save time by hiring someone to blog for you.   Makes sense right?  Well, lets look at the logistics of how to do it.
 

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes. According to Steve Pavlina, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal.  His 19 month old website generates a healthy $3000 per month.

Read also: Things Losers Say: AdSense and Affiliate Programs Don't Work

Rules of monetizing a real estate blog

Keep the content fresh and useful to drive the right kind of traffic in bulk.  You also want to be aware that implanting any of the following techniques before you at least 100 pages of content and some decent traffic will be useless.  Remember that traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation.  More visitors means more ad clicks, more product/service sales, more affiliate sales and more donations.

Commit to the plan.  This means that if you are going to put up ads-place them at the top of each page where they are visible and most likely to be clicked.  If youre going to request donations, then post a visible 'Make a Donation' link toward the top of each page or in the middle of your posts.  If youre going to sell products, then create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy.

Set a goal and make a plan.  Set a goal for your blog to generate $x/month within the next x months.  Then make a plan to achieve you goal by combining the available revenue generating tools like direct product/service sales, affiliate product sales commissions, pay per click advertising or donations.

Designing a monetized real estate blog.

Pay Per Click Ads

Consider where you will place your ads, products and donate button on your web page.  The number one reason people fail at monetizing their site is that they dont want to offend people and place ads prominently.  So, be blatant, place ads at the tops of each page near where the readers eyes will fall naturally like in the post itself not on a side block.  Be sure to display multiple ads per page- 3 is a nice compromise.

Donation

Similarly, if you choose the donation route- make sure people can see it and you write some quality text around it about how hard it is for you find that time to blog and you need to be compensated to keep the electricity on in your house because your husband is in an iron lung (just kidding- but you know what I mean- be sure that people know that quality content comes at a price).

Products/Affiliate Programs

For product displays, again either place them at the top of the page, within the main body of a post or in a side bar.  Strategically select products from Amazon that your market would like and say that you personally recommend these books on your local area or buying/selling homes.  It will funnel people to the shop and help conversion.

Select multiple streams of income

Make an effort to select more than one income generation tool so you dont put all your eggs in one basket.  Some of the most popular automated income methods are:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)  You can very narrowly target which ads get displayed on your site to filter out illicit or competitive ads.  This is by far and away the best revenue stream fro Realtors.  A good target to set for your site is to generate $300-500/month through AdSense revenue.
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail " yes, some people do mail a check)  By placing a link on your page you can collect small donations from visitors that enjoy your content and want to see you continue to post.  I do not recommend this strategy for Realtors, but some claim that they do cover their hosting through donations.  FYI: this will never be a very lucrative method of monetization for a local Realtor.
3. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books).  This one works well for Realtors.  You can select and recommend specific books or products to your visitors and sell them through your site.  You will receive a monthly commission check for all products sold through your site.

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