Blog Monetization or Four Steps to Finally Make Money Blogging

May 14, 2013 by Daniel Sharkov|

Blog monetization is without doubt one of the hot topics in the blogging world. After all who wouldn’t want to make something out of their free-time activity.

And although working from homeisn’t for everyone, if you really enjoy writing articles and have expertise on a topic, then you absolutely can make money blogging.

You know what the first step to the whole monetization process is?

To actually believe in yourself.

This means just ignore what everyone else is saying. If you are into blogging, you CAN earn. The only thing you probably need are some hints to get you started.

The topic of today’s post?

Namely giving you blog monetization tips!

In the below paragraphs
I have covered four of the most important steps that you need to take in order to reach that elusive first payment check from your writing , even if you aren’t the most serious blogger out there.

Okay, without further ado, let’s move on to the actual tips:

1. Get Into Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is whenever you promote some sort of product or a service and in exchange you are paid a percentage of its price once you make a sale.

To make it work you either sign-up for one of the services I overviewed below and then look for a product, or you directly browse a product’s website and look for a page for affiliates.

Whichever method you choose, once you are done,
you are given a special link, which you place within an article or use in the form of a banner.

As of now there are three big, trustworthy affiliate networks that are worth the time:

Amazon’s Associates- That is basically Amazon’s affiliate program. Signing-up for an account here
allows you to promote every single product that Amazon has to offer. At 10%, the commission isn’t all that high, but you have to keep in mind that a lot of the products there are quite expensive, which will compensate for the low rate.

ClickBank– That is hands down the biggest affiliate marketplace for digital products. ClickBank offers a huge variety of stuff to promote
ranging from all kinds of software, tools and plugins to eBooks, guides and tutorials on a huge variety of topics. Here the commissions range from seller to seller. As authors of the products are allowed to set their own rates.

E-junkie– Although smaller than ClickBank, E-junkie is the service from which I’ve actually made the most money. Once you sign up, you get simple instructions and how to get started and again as with ClickBank, you have thousands of digital products to promote.
Commission rates range mostly from 30% to 60%.

You Basically go for one of the above sites if you don’t know exactly what you want to promote. When you complete your registration, you set up your search parameters and start looking for something that suits your niche and topics.

If you have a product in mind, the simplest thing you could do is to go to that product’s official page and look for “Affiliates Sign-Up”, “Affiliate Login”, “Affiliate Program” or something like that. Once you find a link, click on it to sign-up for the respective program.

NOTE:
Legitimate bloggers and marketers only promote products they have actually tried, tested and that they find helpful.

2. Write In-Depth Product Reviews

Okay, now let’s assume you’ve chosen the product you are going to promote. Now what do you do? How do you actually promote it?

The first thing you can probably think of is including a banner image in your sidebar. And with every affiliate program, come a ton  of horizontal, vertical, small and big banners.

But are banners really effective?

Unfortunately not as much as we’d like to.

Now that advertisements are the main way for pretty much all sites on the internet to monetize their presence,
visitors are developing the so-called ad-blindness – since they’ve seen similar banners and ad placements all over the web, they have learned to ignore them.

So if you really want to make money blogging, you should embrace the alternative – product reviews.

Unlike a banner on the sidebar, writing a thorough review of the product out of which you’d like to earn some commissions
is a sure-fire way to prove you’ve actually tried it. Unlike a banner
product reviews are useful for the visitors, since they consist of how-to guides, descriptions of how it all works and an opinion. And unlike a banner,
a product review is a blog post, which can rank in the search engines and which people can share on the social networks.

So what should a review post consist of?

Overview of the product’s features Why the product is useful The things you don’t like A lot of images to supplement your writing An offer if possible A call to action at the end

Or just take a look at either the Market Samurai reviewI’ve written or my Tweet Adder reviewto see how I’ve structured those.

3. Start Building Your List Right Away

List building is the process of creating an email newsletter and getting people to subscribe to it. Once they are subscribed, they receive email campaigns – specific emails where you share a piece of content, you promote a product or you simply engage with the subscribers.

As they say money is in the list.
If you build a targeted list and share the right offers, there’s a pretty good chance to make some commissions. Of course this means that you need to first get into affiliate marketing as I talked in an above paragraph.

There are two big list building service right now:
MailChimp- The good thing is it’s totally free if you are a starter. The bad thing is that there are limitations.
There is a limit of 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails (six email campaigns if you have 2,000 subscribers). Other than that you have a lot of freedom – email templates, autoresponders, forms for your blog, great design utility.

Aweber– With Aweber you don’t have a free option. And even though a ton of marketers recommend it, if you are a newbie,
you probably wouldn’t want to pay the minimum 19$ per month. One of the bigger benefits is that you can create an unlimited amount of different lists.

Once you’ve made your choice for the mailing client, it is time to promote your list and start getting new subscribers. The number one thing a lot of marketers will tell you to do is to create a freebie – a report, an e-book or any other product that you offer in exchange for an email address.
As for me,  I don’t think that’s a necessity.

It is more about planning and placing multiple subscription forms within your blog.

There are four great places that seem to convert rather well:

In the sidebar above the fold Below the blog posts In the About page ( more on pages) In a page for first-time-visitors

And what about installing a pop-up?

Quite honestly I didn’t think a pop-up is really that effective…
Until a couple of months ago that is. Back then in the hopes to get more Facebook fans I set up a likebox pop-up.

The results?

I more than quadrupled the number of fans I was getting per day. From the usual 2-3 my stats went all the way up to 10-15 new fans PER day.

Then I looked for a pop-up plugin that would allow me to set up an opt-in and get people to join my mailing list.

Unfortunately there were really no free options available and still
at 18$ bucks I found what I was looking for – Ninja PopUps. Keep in mind that it’s a WordPress Plugin so it is meant to work on WordPress-powered blogs only!

So anyway I decided to give the plugin a shot, as it wasn’t that expensive…

Now around four weeks later I’ve been able to get more than 70 subscribers just with the help of the plugin.

In the screenshot on the right
you can see the difference the pop-up brought in my first month of using it. And I didn’t even buy it on the first of March. If I had the numbers would’ve been higher. As you can see from the average
30-40 , subscription rate went to
over 80.

NOTE:
The worst thing you can do is to configure the pop-up to display right after the page loads. Right now mine displays exactly 37 seconds after the user has entered a page.

And then again all of this is because you want a list of people with which you will share your content to get them browsing your blog and trying your offers or you will directly send them special offers for tools, plugins or anything you can think of.
Of course the latter should be occasional, since not everyone will be happy to get those kinds of emails.

4. Make Sure to Create a Rolodex

A rolodex is a static page where you include various affiliate links to products you are using along with a short description to each of the listed products.

My rolodex page can be found under the “ Marketing Tools” link in the menu below the header. I have also included a graphic-like image, titled “Useful Marketing Resources, which you can find in the sidebar. That one also points to the same page.

Of course
the idea is to get as much of the blog’s visitors to find their way to the rolodex.

If you didn’t check the page I linked to above, here are the main elements you need to include:

A short introduction
– mine comes at around 80 words. It needs to be short so that you don’t bore people before they reach the essence. An image
- images are important, as they keep people engaged and give them a better idea of what they are about to read. Disclosure
– it’s best if you notify people that you have actually included affiliate links. Make sure to point out that isn’t going to cost them extra. The product’s logo
– best would be to make all the same size (e.g. 125 x 125). You should also place an affiliate link for those who decide to hover over the logo. Description
– why you are using it, how it compares to similar products and if you’ve written a review post, make sure to link to it as well. Button-like links
– Using a button makes the links look more obvious. That way people instantly know they should click. It’s simple. You basically wrap a div element around the affiliate link, you add a class, go to your blog’s CSS file, add the class and place some properties like this for instance:[css].button-c {
background: -moz-linear-gradient(center bottom , #FDDF93 0%, #FFE59F 100%) repeat scroll 0 0 transparent;
border: 1px solid #E9A135;
border-radius: 4px;
box-shadow: 0 0 4px #FAB246 inset, 0 1px 1px #BFBFBF;
color: #BF7711;
cursor: pointer;
display: block;
font-family: "Times New Roman",Georgia,Serif;
font-weight: bold;
height: 35px;
line-height: 35px;
margin: 30px auto 70px;
padding: 3px 11px;
text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #FFEB7F;
}[/css]

Basically the rolodex in terms becomes one of your biggest blog monetization assets,
so as I mentioned, it’s worth promoting it within your blog as much as possible.

In Conclusion

I guess that’s pretty much it guys. I really hope you enjoyed the advice I shared in the previous paragraphs and if so, please take a minute to share the post with your friends! They might happen to find it useful too.

Now I’d like to hear your thoughts!
What are your favorite monetization techniques? What are your thoughts on using pop-ups? Should list building be your number one priority? Let me hear what you think!

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