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Day 8 - Monetizing Strategies: Part 1

One of your major tasks thus far in our course has been to produce high-quality, original content on your blog. Consistently producing great content is what will keep your visitors coming back, which will help generate traffic to your blog. However, simply generating traffic to your blog in and of itself will not produce cash profits. You have to develop strategies for converting your traffic into monetary profits.

There are a number of ways to generate profits from your blog, including Google’s popular Adsense program. The program is very easy to set up and implement, and can be extremely profitable. First, check out their website at http://adsense.google.com/, where you’ll find some excellent introductory information to the program. In a nutshell, here’s how it works.

When you sign up for an Adsense account (it’s free), you will be assigned a unique code. When you step through the process of creating an Adsense ad block, your unique ID is embedded in the generated code. When you incorporate this code into your blog, Google will display ads on your blog that specifically relate to the content that is on your blog.

For example, if your blog is about golf, the Adsense advertisements displayed may be about golf clubs, or how to improve your golf swing, and so forth. The advantage to this is that because your visitors are already interested in golf (that’s why they’re visiting your blog), their attention will naturally be drawn toward the posted Google ads. When your visitors click on these ads, you make a little money with each click.

Google’s Adsense program is a really useful way to monetize your blog or website. Once you sign up for a Google Adsense account, you can change the color of your advertisement text and links. You should customize them to match the colors on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s very easy to set up. Just be sure that you NEVER click on your own links, as doing so will get you banned from the program.

Effective ad placement is crucial to succeeding with this program. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Visit the following page to see the “heat map” which visually presents the areas of a website that tend to draw the reader’s attention. The ‘hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of clicking through one of the Adsense links.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors purchase from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and its greatest advantage is that you can begin to make money without having to invest any capital up front and without having to create your own products or services.

To understand this further, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate program. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a short review on this Gadget X. Do so honestly and sincerely, pointing out both its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link that has been customized with your unique ID for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track the link, and when it is confirmed that the purchase was referred by you, they will send you your percentage of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase. If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheck for you just for writing about ONE product. It will take a lot of hard work on your part to reach this level, but with persistence and determination, it’s possible. There are many affiliate marketers who earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in affiliate commissions.

Now, affiliate programs are very effective ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programs that are related to your blog’s theme? Begin by going to Google and search for <your niche> +”affiliate programs”. Another wonderful resource is http://www.associateprograms.com/search , where you can search for affiliate programs in your niche and read about recommended programs.

There are several internet affiliate marketing networks that you should join. Here are a few of the most popular:

»» http://www.clickbank.com
»» http://www.paydotcom.com
»» http://www.linkshare.com
»» http://www.cj.com

In this lesson, we’ve reviewed several ways in which you can generate profits from your blog. In our next lesson, we’ll be discussing additional successful profit-making strategies.

»» Day 9: Monetizing Strategies: Part 2