How to Monetize Your Blog

moneyIf you want to monetize your blog, you have to ask yourself a series of questions, starting with what kind of blog is it, and do you have any readers? If you’re not getting readers at your blog, you might as well put all your money-making plans on hold. Even if you got the greatest pay-per-click program in existence with the highest rates (which won’t happen if you don’t have readers) you can’t make money because there’s no one there to click the ads. Generate traffic first, and then worry about monetizing your blog.

If you have a steady stream of traffic, then the best ways to make money from your blog depend on the type of blog you have. If your blog is a general interest blog, it’s probably harder to make money from that than a specialized niche blog. Of course, if you have thousands and thousands of readers, you can run general advertising for things people typically need like credit cards, mortgages, insurance and very general basic things.

If your blog is general interest, though, no one is coming to your blog searching for cheap insurance, the best way to refinance a mortgage, or a better rate on a credit card. They’re coming to read how you burned the cookies, your thoughts on today’s politics, and the latest celebrity gossip, or whatever you’re blogging about.

But if you pull in thousands of unique visitors over a month, you could still make some money from these kinds of advertisers because a certain percentage of them will click the ads, and a certain small percentage of them might buy. This is a hard way to monetize that requires thousands and thousands of readers.

If your blog is smaller and more of a niche blog, you have many more options. Lots of people use Café Press or other sites that will print custom t-shirts, mugs and items for you. You could have some principle of your blog, your logo, or some great concepts you created printed on these items and link to them from your blog.

You can use the mother of blog money-makers, pay-per-click ads like those through Google and Yahoo. Don’t just sign up and assume it’s all automated, though. You have to watch the ads that show up, the click-through rates, and your pricing. If the ads that are showing up aren’t targeted closely enough and aren’t getting good click-through rates, you’ll get less per click than otherwise .So watch your statistics and make adjustments as needed. These pull off your keywords, so be keyword focused when you write posts.

Affiliate marketing is a top way to monetize a blog, too. If your blog is about how to lose weight, for instance, you can promote a weight loss product or information that has an affiliate program. When people follow your link to that product and buy it, you get a commission. The more narrow your niche, the easier it is to monetize your blog because the people coming there are looking for specific information and products.

Photo Credits: borman818

Originally posted 2009-06-10 05:06:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Best WordPress Plug-Ins

plugsBlogging with WordPress offers users so many choices, including a variety of plug-ins that meet different needs. Some are for fun and others are very functional and useful for a variety of purposes. No one would want all these plug-ins in their blog, though, and some are more well-suited to some types of content than others.

But all of them when used with the right blog can make the blog more dynamic and easier for the reader to use, as well as keep them interested and coming back.

Related Posts: This plug-in shows a linked list of related posts at the bottom of a post. This is excellent for keeping readers at your blog. They’ll finish one post and see list of others that contain relevant content, and keep clicking through and reading as long as they’re interested in your content. This plug-in is great for any blog, especially those with many older posts that they still want to bring to the attention of readers.

Adsense Deluxe: This plug-in allows you to place Adsense ads on your blog. Adsense is Google’s pay-per-click program. If you run Adsense ads on your blog, when people click on them you get paid. The amount of pay varies by ad, topic and a variety of other factors, with ads ranging from 1 to 3 cents per click up to several dollars per click. Adsense uses the content of your page to determine which related ads will run, making it more likely that your audience will click on those ads. These are best for very niche blogs on a specific topic.

All in One SEO Pack: This plug-in helps you optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. It will help you choose titles, descriptions and keywords to help you get better listings with the search engines.

Feedsmith: Feedsmith sends your blog to Feedburner. This allows those who prefer reading blogs via RSS feeds to do so without having to visit your site. Many people will sign up for feeds rather than have to visit every blog site they read every day. If you don’t get your blog in a feed, you’re missing out a valuable chunk of readers. There are dozens of plug-ins designed to help you copyright and optimize your feed, including advertising on it.

Askimet: Askimet stops spam in its tracks. When comments and trackback links are spammy, Askimet catches them and asks your approval before posting. You can search comments then by IP to find all the comments by one person, as well as searching by user name. This can really save you from spam on your blog.

WP Captcha-Free: This plug-in stops automated commenting without requiring each commenter to type in a hard-to-read captcha. This blog plug-in is designed more for bot and automated spam comments, while Askimet catches individually posted comments, too.

WordPress Popular Posts:  This plug-in adds a widget to your blog similar to the Related Posts that you can customize in a variety of ways to show the information that you want it to. The plug-in shows your most read blog posts.

Photo Credits: myuibe

Originally posted 2009-06-05 05:55:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Effective Ways to Get Traffic to Affiliate Sites

Traffic is one of the most difficult things to get as an affiliate. How do you get it without wasting your money and how do you get traffic that actually converts into sales or leads? One thing is absolutely clear to any affiliate who gets started promoting products: it’s virtually impossible to make money without a substantial stream of consistent and targeted traffic. Some methods and channels are more effective than others. Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to get traffic to affiliate sites, without going crazy in the process.

Method #1 – Web 2.0 Marketing. What are these exactly? It’s a blanket category that includes everything from article directories like Ezinearticles.com to social and informative sites like Hubpages or Squidoo. These sites can be used to promote your site by building valuable and informative content and then linking back to your main site. If all goes well your web 2.0 properties will rank well in the search engines, get traffic and then you can help direct that traffic from your web 2.0 properties right to your “money” site. You can use these web properties to pre-sell the traffic and get them warmed up for a full on sales pitch, so in many ways this is superior to just sending paid traffic straight to a landing page or blog.

Method #2 – Pay Per Click Marketing. This comes in many different forms. You can purchase traffic through pay per click networks like Google Adwords or even purchase banner space on a site that gets traffic related to your audience or demographic. The idea here is to instantly get traffic, but you pay a premium for it. The only way to make this work is to earn more then you’re spending on traffic. The difference becomes your profit. In many ways you’re simply brokering traffic when you get into paid traffic sources but this is arguably one of fastest and most efficient ways to make big paydays online. Some of the most popular pay per click networks is Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Small Business Advertising.

Method #3 – Viral Reports. A great way to get more traffic and get attention that draws in even more traffic is to go viral. This is easier said than done, but once it’s done right it works for years to drive traffic. Depending on your niche write up a short PDF report you can give away on your blog or via mailing list and encourage people to give it away and distribute it. Throughout the report include links back to your site and maybe even an affiliate link. If you put effort into making a quality report that answers a lot of questions or solves a problem, you can expect the report to get distributed and draw in more traffic to your site.

About Author: Jason Acidre is a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates. You find Affilorama  on Twitter.

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Originally posted 2010-10-20 06:55:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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