Our advice to making money in this new year: diversify your portfolio. It’s a good idea to get your hands on as many things as you can, though work on one thing at a time. Once you become a pro at one thing, keep doing it, but then try out another online venture. Below are some of our favorite ways to make great cash online:

1. Start a Blog

Don’t think people want to hear what you’ve got to say? You’ll be surprised by just how many people want to know what you know and share in your life experiences. Blogs are a great way to make some extra cash, but they will take a bit of time to get started. This is why we say you should start up a blog first and get it rolling before you move on to any other ventures.

Blogs aren’t just about having people stop by and read your stuff. You can turn a blog into a profit by selling ad space, creating AdSense ads, doing affiliate marketing promotions, and more. You should learn about SEO (search engine optimization), themes, templates, and where you can get some great royalty free images too so you can create the best blog ever.

TIP: Your first blog may be a total bust, but don’t give up. It often takes people 2-3 times before they create a blog that they love and that will start making them some serious cash.

2. Become a Micro-Jobber

Never heard of microjobs? Microjobs are little tasks that people need to have done, so they go onto the internet, post an advertisement for a small job to be done, and those interested can then respond by submitting a proposal, a resume, and/or a sample of their work. Microjobs are quickly becoming a way for people to earn a great supplementary or even full time income!

There are a number of micro job sites out there, like oDesk and Elance, and Craigslist even often has microjobs posted too. Most of these sites list jobs by category, and there’s a category for everyone, from web design to freelance writing to sales and marketing. Most of these sites require you to register first and it can be a bit hard to get going, but once you do you’ll soon be easily making an extra $500 a month.

3. Sell Things Online

A great way to make cash is to sell things online. People are buying online more and more these days, but the market isn’t so saturated yet that there’s no room for you. Sites like eBay, Craigslist, Amazon and Kijiji are full of people whose full time occupation is just selling stuff over the internet! Each website has its own pros and cons and may work better with some items than others, but test it out and see how it works.
You can sell:

- Stuff around the house you don’t need any more
- Stuff that you find a great deal on, and then flip it and sell it online for market value
- Wholesale items (there are a ton of websites online that sell wholesale, so you buy brand new things for under market value and can then sell them at market value)
-
Check into any shipping deals that you can offer too if you plan on selling online. People love to hear the words “free shipping”!

TIP: If you’re crafty and good at making things, definitely start selling your stuff on Etsy. Etsy is one of the biggest sites for selling any homemade items, so you will have a large audience checking out your stuff on a daily basis.

4. Do Surveys

Okay, so this is one of the less fun ways to make money online. No one wants to sit at their computer, slaving away and completing surveys. Not only that, but there are survey sites out there that promise to pay, but they never, ever do.

Surveys do take a bit of time and sure, it can take a while to make more than just a few bucks. But once you find reputable sites and start filling them in, you’ll be surprised by how quickly the money ads up. That extra $5-$10 a day you make filling out mindless surveys quickly turns into hundreds and thousands of dollars a year. Check out Opinion Outpost and Cash Crate if you’re interested.

5. Earn Swag Bucks

Swag Bucks are quickly becoming THE currency of the internet. Swag Bucks is an online portal that helps you earn “digital dollars”, which are referred to as Swag Bucks. These Swag Bucks can then be redeemed for a number of different things that you can find in the Swag Store, like Amazon and Starbucks gift cards, downloads, and a number of different products.

There are a number of different ways that you can earn Swag Bucks. One of the easiest ways is using the Swag Bucks homepage as your search portal. Whenever you enter in a search query, you then have the chance to make some Swag Bucks. Another way is to just simply watch videos that you’re interested in. Your “Swag Bucks” meter increases by the number of videos you watch. Once your meter is full, you then have the chance to earn “Swag Bucks”.

But that’s not all. You can also earn Swag Bucks by:

- Taking surveys
- Playing games
- Filling out time sensitive offers
- Checking out special offers
- Recycle stuff like your old cell phone and game systems
- Make referrals
- Answer polls
Check out their website for more details on how you can make some easy extra cash.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Follow your passion

Affiliate marketing can be a highly lucrative way to make money off your blog, but how do you find the best products to promote? That’s what we’re talking about today…

Now that you’ve learned how to start a blog and found a reliable web hosting, you probably want to start reaping the benefits of affiliate marketing. Follow your passion. Doing something just for the money never works, so why not promote something you actually believe in. Start by choosing products you actually use yourself. That way you can confident write about its benefits.

People are most successful at promoting products that they have a passion for and that they can get excited about. So, the first thing to do when you are taking your first step in affiliate marketing is to choose your niche. It means you have to choose in which industry you want to grow your affiliate business (e.g. health, finance etc).

You can choose a category based on your own passions and pick those areas where in which you can perform well and give most of your effort to. Potential customers feel your passion for a product or service can when they read the marketing copy. So, the best products to sell online are the things you enjoy and have the most interest in.

Play to the room

If you have a pet care blog, and you try and sell computer products or services in your affiliate program, how do you think that’s going to work? Not so well. Tailor your product offerings to things that people who read and enjoy your blog would actually be interested in.

But before you do anything else, survey your target market first. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to judge their potential success on what someone else did. You need to talk to your own target customer base.

If you don’t have one, aren’t established as an expert in your field, then you need to tackle these things first, before you even think about online product offerings.

One of the most important things as an affiliate is to build a list of potential customers. Regardless of what products you decide to promote, you want to make sure you feel comfortable recommending it so that you don’t destroy your reputation.

There is a great tool you can use, it’s called Google Trends and it helps you analyze the potential products you want to promote. It also allows you to monitor the search volume of keywords over time, which is a great way to check how well the products in your niche sell.

Stick to virtual products

Next, you must decide whether you start selling digital or physical products. Which is best? Physical products like cosmetics and gadgets or virtual products like e-books, music or software? Which products are more profitable and can get you fast and guaranteed profits?

We believe that digital products in almost all cases are more beneficial to promote. Why? Well, to start with, you have nothing to ship, there is no postage or handling and once the payment is made, your client gets a download link and simply downloads the product.

So, less hassle, worries and best of all, you never run out of stock. What we mean by that is avoid anything that requires you to purchase stock, and stick to things like software, ebooks, or things that don’t require any initial inventory or cash outlay on your part.

You could sell 1,000 copies and you do no more work than if you sold just one. But what if you sold 1,000 physical products? Well, that’s a lot of work… Think of all the postage and handling and if you need to make each product, it gets even harder.

Start with ClickBank

The fastest way to find profitable products to promote online is to sign up for an affiliate marketing site, such as ClickBank. You gain access to a database with thousands of products to promote in almost any niche. The commissions are usually between 50-75%, with a higher price tag.

They have a huge selection of electronically downloadable products to choose from and they handle all of the payment processing so you know you’ll get paid on time. Plus they provide real time reporting of all of your products. The site also provides good feedback on products that are selling well and have high commission rates.

A special feature you should consider when choosing your Clickbank products is Gravity. This is an indicator of how many affiliates are making sales with a specific product. The higher the number, the more people are selling it. However, you may want to stay away from products with 100+ Gravity, because this is a very competitive field.

Final thoughts…

Choose products that at least 20 other people are already promoting. This proves that the product has a sales letter that converts well and also it’s also trusted by other marketers.

Also, pick a product that’s not very expensive or very cheap. Low cost may lower down the product value, while higher price may result in fewer sales. It’s always a good idea to start your affiliate journey with no more than one product.

Stick with one, research and learn different strategies to become successful. Use whatever strategies work best in your 2nd and 3rd campaign and grow your online affiliate business gradually.

One last thing… Always try to find products that really serve people and solve their problems creatively. You’ll find that it doesn’t really matter about the product’s price or if your product is really unique. All you need to do is show your target prospects how your product is a key to their success.

These are just a few tips to consider when looking for the best products to promote online. Your ultimate success in creating a successful affiliate business will rest on each product you choose to promote and the way you turn its features into lifesaving benefits.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now here’s one more thing about Clickbank Affiliate Marketing , they actually pay you on time! You can sign up to 20 affiliate program and hope that at least some will pay, or you can use Clickbank and have a single source that reliability pays you once you’ve made sales. So it’s a great platform. You know that the money is coming.

Be Selective

As we mentioned earlier, there are a LOT of products out there. Because they are very easy to create, many product owners figure that they just throw a bunch of information together and someone will sell it. This result in tons of crap! It’s basically a bell curve like just about everything in life. A lot of them a going to crappy or at best average.

So choose very carefully. Look at the product. Look at the website , the landing page, the sales copy. Does it make you want to buy? Does the product really solve an actual problem? If the product sucks, then the conversation to sales will be poor too. You’re going to be associated with this product, so don’t ruin your reputation! Maintain a concept of quality. Do things well will be much better for your than be branded together with something crappy. Think of Apple. Their products rock, so other people want to be associate them. By promoting quality products, you’re also more likely to make sales in the converting funnel.

How do you Pick?

Well you can simply pick by category, and select one that’s similar to your niche, but by itself, it isn’t really the best way. So here’re some additional steps to help you. Go to Clickbank.com. Login to your account. Well technically you don’t even need to login, but it’s nice thing to do especially if you’re going to create an affiliate link later. Click on “Marketplace.” Use the “Advance Search” option. Select the category that most closely matches your blog, and then sort by gravity.

Grav, short for Gravity is a numerical representation of how likely people are making with that product, so usually the higher the gravity the better. But don’t be turned off entirely by low gravity scores. Some could be “Diamonds in the Rough” waiting to be discovered. There are fewer competition in promoting these products, but the risk is higher. You’d have to use your gut feeling instead of raw number to decide whether each particuar product would sell well.

So to play on the safe side, you might want to pick a Grav of at least 60+. It gives you an idea what products are best sellers, but you also want to pay attention to the percentage that you get from each sale, and how much that it. You can get that information by paying attention to the “Avg %/Sale” and “Initial $/Sale.”

While some product has a really high gravity number, you might make very little per sale. Instead, set a minimum payout amount, such as $30 for example. There are some products that pay hundreds of dollars, but often the conversion and gravity score could be low.

For affiliates who wish to expand into non-English speaking markets, you have the option to filter by language with French, Spanish, and German,.
Additionally with Advanced search, you could be searching by keyword, by title, gravity, average rebill total, average rebill percentage. Rebill is really interesting because it allows a subscription model, which means you make money both on the initial sale and also h ongoing revenue. It’s kind of like insurance really. The recurring commission makes it really attractive and lucrative.

The Avg %/rebill is a good statistic to inspect since the average commission rate on rebills might be lower than the initial sale.

Other Tips

Promote high quality products that you would personally enjoy and buy. When you actually like the products, you come across as more authentic when you’re preaching its merits to others. You will share a similar understanding and passion of other potential customers. It adds to your credibility.

Be sure to review the tools and tips that the product owners offer on the Affiliates descriptions of their programs web page. Many offer helpful advice on how to best promote their product, and also banners and marketing collateral that you could use.

Test the affiliate links (Hoplinks) periodically to make sure that they are still working correctly. Obviously if something is wrong, you won’t be making any money, and should contact Clickbank and the product owner immediately.

Also check out your competition. Are there other affiliates who are already promoting these products. How are they doing it? The Goldilocks Principle actually applies nicely here. There shouldn’t be too many or too little.

Review the seller’s landing page. You can do this by clicking on the Hoplink also known as the affiliate link. That’s when the rubber meets the road. If you’re diverting your traffic to their site, they should be able to convert. Read their sales copy, and ask yourself whether it’s convincing, true, and believable.

Watch out for hype and exaggerated promises, for example, “lose 50lbs in 1 week.” If for any reason you’re not comfortable, move on, there are plenty of others who have their acts together. Don’t waste your time with someone who has a sloppy affiliate program!

You can also filter by how the vendor have had their products by using the “Vendor Activation Field.” Working with new vendor carry the risk that they’re using you to test any rough spots in their online selling process.

So how do you find the best digital product for your blog? Leave a comment and let us know.

But before you read on, you really need to think about whether or not monetizing your blog is the right thing to do. Some topics don’t lend themselves well to monetization. If you are not sure, then you could always ask your readers, especially if you have a mailing list.

If Your Blog Isn’t Right for Monetization

Some people will find that their blog isn’t right for monetization. In these instances there is still a way that you can make some cash from your hard efforts. Putting a donation button on the blog will help you in this way.

Not all of the buttons are directly related to donations. Some of them have cute little names like “buy me a coffee” or “buy me a beer” and they allow readers to donate set amounts of money through Pay Pal or other similar sites. These buttons can work on blogs that are suited for monetization, too, though.

Affiliate Products

This process lends itself best to sites that have an active mailing list community. Making sure that you keep in touch with your community on a regular basis will make it easier for you to sell them the affiliate products that seem most suited for them. This is a great way to make a lot of money without a lot of work.

One of the hottest sites for affiliate products is ClickBank.com. This site will provide you a lot of details and statistics on the product you are getting ready to sell. Make sure that you find the ones with the best reputation and the highest payout.

Some products pay as much as 80% commission. That means if you sell it for a hundred bucks, you get eighty in your pocket. Make sure you consider this when choosing products to sell, but don’t over look quality.

Adsense (or other contextual advertising)

The big contextual advertising product is Google AdSense. This is a means through which you can designate sections of your blog for ads. Making sure that you get the most from this involves making sure your blog is geared towards keywords that have a high online commercial intent.

OCI is a term that came and went in the world of Internet marketing, but it is still relevant. You can do some research on it and see how to apply it manually. Most of the automated methods are long gone.

There are a few alternatives including AdBrite, if you don’t like the Google Adsense terms of service.

Amazon Reviews

This is a popular one. Many people include reviews to amazon.com products scattered throughout their blog. The good thing about Amazon.com is that a person doesn’t have to buy your product for you to get credit.

Let’s say that on your flower blog link to a vase on Amazon.com. A reader clicks through but decides not to buy. She comes back a few hours later and buys a dress that she had forgotten to order.

Guess who gets credit for that sale? That’s right, you! The thing is, if she buys anything within 24 hours of clicking your link, then you get a commission (so long as you were the last person whose affiliate link she clicked).

So what are some of the best ways to monetize your blog with this method? Well make sure that you are constantly publishing links through your referral account. Don’t be shy with them and include two or three in every blog post.

One of the best ways to do this is by including a footer at the bottom of every single one of your posts. You can include two or three links right there. For instance, if you publish a blog in which there is any discussion about your personal life you can include links to what you are currently reading.

If people find you interesting, then you can easily incorporate other things from your daily life into your blog that link to your Amazon.com affiliate account. There are a lot of ways if you get creative.

Sell Your Own Products

Don’t forget about selling your own products through your website. If you have a lot of viewers that love your content, you might be able to create a special report or a product that will help them in some way. It doesn’t take much more than some common sense to figure out if your blog lends itself to this.

The trick is, most blogs can be turned into some sort of product. For instance, if you regularly write a blog about fish, you might want to write a small guide on how to care for fish. This will give you something to sell that gives you all of the profit.

The best thing is that you don’t have to share the profit with anyone. Well, you may have to share it with eBay, but that’s because they take a cut out of any money you receive no matter what.  Figuring out how to write a special report or e-book can take a lot of time and effort.

The thing is, you have already created thousands of dollars worth of content on your blog, so just look through there for the best ideas on how to make your e-book. If you have a lot of comments, then you are definitely at an advantage, as this will provide you with the most ideas possible.

You can also check websites like Yahoo! answers to find good suggestions for special reports and e-books.

You just need to put a little time and effort into it. A Pay Pal button on your site will enable you to sell the product without setting up a major storefront on your site.

Many people have found that having the right idea is even more important than having the right traffic. If you work hard enough you will inevitably find yourself with a lot of traffic. The search engines take care of it as long as you are putting the right content on your site.

But what about getting people to actually give you money once they are on your site? You need to make sure you have the right business model in place before you get started. Here are five ideas that you may not have been aware of before but could get started on today.

Sniper Sites

These sites require a significant amount of research, but after that they are easy to run. They take advantage of any sort of monetization strategy that relies on heavy traffic, including Google Adwords and affiliate programs. So how do they work?

Start with a product (affiliate product or keyword) that has a decent pay out. Then start looking for search terms that have a high amount of traffic without a significant amount of competition. If you are curious about doing this efficiently, search the Internet to find more ways in which you can get started.

Once you have the right terms a site of five or six pieces of content, all focused on the right keywords, can get you into first place on Google. This requires no back linking or other processes and can start leading to money immediately. Since they are fast, you can easily make one per week and generate thousands of dollars per month.

Affiliate Sales Sites

By making a site that focuses solely on reviews of products through sites like Amazon.com you can sell their products. You can make a hefty commission, especially if you can make a lot of sales. This business takes practice, but once it is set up you can easily make hundreds of dollars (or more) per month.

Most people focus on selling high item electronics. But one trick that is really important to note is that if you sell a lot of smaller products you can make a lot more money. Your commission rate is determined by your total number (not volume) of sales.

Reseller Sites

If you find that you are good at keyword research then you could easily start a website where you are reselling someone else product. There are many products out there that offer affiliate or reseller options. It’s important that you inform the readers of your affiliation, though, as this is required by the FCC.

Once you get started with the process of creating your site and putting it together you can provide a number of options to those who are purchasing from you. By presenting them with many options and encouraging them to purchase the product, they are more likely to buy.
ClickBank.com

This is a site that could give you the opportunity to create your own products and sell them through Click Bank. You could easily put together a special report or an e-book and put it on Click Bank and have others sell it for you. This will allow you to relax while you make some cash.

It’s important that you focus on the products that are currently selling on Clickbank.com. The thing most people don’t understand is that Click Bank is not only marketed through sales pages and websites, but also on mailing lists. For most people who put together a mailing list, they are going to quickly find that they need to sell different products on a regular basis.

Offer a Service

The world of Internet marketing is one that relies heavily on outsourcing. While many people prefer to work with websites like Elance.com and Scriptlance.com there are many more who prefer to have a regular connection with someone that is able to provide their service on a regular basis.

Providing a service to Internet marketers will require that you have a good grasp of the types of services that they need. Here are three that they regularly use to build up their own online business. You are going to need to master all of these skills and more in order to take advantage of any of the ideas listed before, anyway.

1. Content Writing. This is a skill that many Internet marketers lack. If you find that you have a knack for putting together words, you can make a fortune writing articles for others.

2. Article submissions. Many people make money by submitting articles to article directories. The process can be tedious, but can pay well if you learn to do it fast and cheap.

3. Back link building. Whether you are providing comments on other blogs or links from websites you own, you can easily provide back links to a number of sites and make a good amount of money doing so.

4. Keyword Research: A lot of Internet marketers want to simply set it and forget it. If you have found that you are good at keyword research but don’t have the stomach to take a chance, then this might be a good spot for you.

Regardless of what type of business you start on the Internet, you are going to need to spend a lot of time working on it. You can easily find yourself immersed more than full time, so don’t get into these ideas if your goal is to slack off.

You want to make sure that, in the beginning, you allot at least 40 hours per week to these tasks. As time goes on, you may find that your business runs with only a few hours each week. But in the beginning hard work will pay off.

For those who can make a product, Clickbank gives you plenty of opportunities to get your product sold. It provides a great platform for you to identify the niches that are currently selling big time. It also gives you exposure to those who are good at selling as affiliates.

But for those who are able to market, but just can’t put together a product, click bank comes to the rescue. If you have developed a large following of readers, you have the perfect platform to sell some of these products and make huge affiliate commissions. And the best part is – it’s simple.

Setting up your mailing list

First of all, you need to make sure that you have a mailing list of people that will actually be interested in buying your products. There are a couple of ways you can do this, but the most popular is using the Aweber platform. The platform is far too involved for us to provide a detailed explanation in this article.

Once you are set up with Aweber, start driving people to your list. Entice people who are interested in extra special information by offering a free report or special content only for those on your list. From there, it becomes pretty easy.

Provide value to your list

Make sure you constantly provide solid value to those people on your list. You can do this by creating free information rich reports and sending them to your list. Heck you don’t even need to write the report yourself. Either get a ghostwriter, and establish partnerships with bloggers to provide these reports. Get creative and make sure that you are providing these valuable things regularly.

It’s also important to make sure that you communicate with the people on your list in an effective manner. Never refer to it as “my list” or anything like that. Instead, whenever you are referring to the members of your list, call it “the community” or something similar (think about Seth Godin’s Tribes).

Selling Products

Once you have established your list and a regular pattern of providing extra special bonus content, you can offer them products for sale occasionally. This is totally acceptable. If you are regularly providing great content and you decide that there is a product that will really blow them away, then you should offer it to them.

If the product is really worth it, then you will easily be able to show the value to the members on your list and make a pretty decent percentage of sales. You can typically expect that between 1% and 10% of the members on your list will purchase the product. It doesn’t matter if your list has a few hundred people or a few thousand – that equates to a lot of cash.

Selling your own products through Clickbank

Here is the biggest secret to making a ton of money with your blog and Clickbank. Take a look at all of the content that you have created. You no doubt have thousands upon thousands of words on your blog. Some bloggers literally write more words in a month than a novelist writes in a year.

Buried within all of that content are dozens and dozens of special reports and ebooks that others could sell to members of their lists. You just need to setup your account at Clickbank, scour your content, create a products, and go.

It’s really that simple. Remember earlier, when you sold a product to your list, and you had a few people purchase it? That was assuming your list only had 100 people. If your list had 1000 or more your sales would have been far more impressive.

Since it’s going to take a long time to increase your list by multiples, you can harness the lists of everyone in the affiliate community to make a lot of cash in no time at all.

If you aren’t sure what kind of product you want to make, then you can browse the Clickbank product list to determine what the hottest products are right now, and which are going to work the best for your existing content. Once you know, it doesn’t take long to make a product.

Creating your product – what’s the best kind

Understand that most people don’t want to waste their time reading tons and tons of content. The best products are those that sell for $20 to $30 and are no more than 20 to 25 pages. These are known as special reports and contain rich pieces of information that are culled from tons of research.

That’s exactly what you have on your blog. Go back and look through the comments on your site and all of the posts over the years. Grab a notebook and start writing down all of the ideas that come to mind. Once you have a good idea for a special report in mind, you can easily start collecting the information that you need to piece it together.

Your product can then be put on Clickbank and you will be able to start selling tons and tons of products. But it’s better to take it to the next level by looking for individuals who are already in your same niche with a mailing list.

Start going around to all of your “competitors” and look around to see who has a mailing list. You want to contact them and let them know that you also have a mailing list and wanted to know if they were interested in doing some cross site promotions.

You show them your product and give them a sneak preview, and they will review it on their blog and to their list. Get creative here, as this is one of the best ways to maximize exposure AND make yourself a ton of cash.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially when you as a blogger sell other people’s products on your blog and receive a commission for each sale made. The commission rates vary depending on the product and are based on wherever the product owner chooses to set them.

Finding Affiliate Offers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different sites out there that allow product owners to set up their information products and promote them to affiliates who can, in turn, pick which ones they want. These types of sites are a good place to start when looking for products.

A few of the largest sites out there that offer these types of affiliate products include ClickBank, Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, and Amazon Associates.

ClickBank

ClickBank is made up mostly of information products – ebooks, online courses, video series, and the like. It has been around for a long time and has several great metrics and resources that you can use to decide what is the best selling product and what is the most likely to do well on your site. You can also track how many times your link has been posted and how many sales were made.

Of course, as mentioned above, ClickBank does have its limitations. There are no physical products sold there, so you can only promote online products. If you want to join ClickBank, just head over to their site and follow their approval process. It usually takes a few days to get in.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is a huge marketplace that many of the larger retailers use to get affiliates for their products. Most of what is on Commission Junction is physical products, so you have a bit more choice in what you can make a commission on.

Signing up to Commission Junction requires a website plus a fairly rigorous application process, but once you are in, you have all kinds of retailers to choose from. The only downside is that you must get approval from each retailer to be able to promote their products for a percentage. However, many of the retailers in the system auto-approve everyone who applies, so it is not that hard to find something that you would like on your blog.

Google Affiliate Network

The Google Affiliate Network is very similar to Commission Junction. In fact, the entire setup and process is almost exactly the same as above.

Amazon Associates

This is one of oldest on the Internet. The Amazon Associates program allows you use basically anything that is sold on Amazon plus items sold on the other sites that they manage.

Think about all the products out there on Amazon.com! There is bound to be something related to your niche that you could blog about and sell! Amazon, also has a fairly rigorous approval process, so you will want a site with some good content on it, and maybe even some decent traffic, before you apply.

Once you are in, this program does not need you to get approval for every company or product that you want, so you can get right to it!

What Items You Should Choose

When you are trying to decide what type of affiliate marketing products you should promote on your blog, you need to consider very carefully your readers. Do not ever choose anything that is not a high-value, high-trust product. You do not necessarily need to own the product yourself, but you should certainly do your homework and make sure that the product is legitimate.

Also, think about what will really be pertinent to your readers. If your site is about bunk beds, find some bunk beds or something related to bunk beds. Do not choose to use say, an ebook about making money online. You probably will not get any sales on a product that is not relevant to your blog.

How You Can Do It

Once you have found a few products, now you obviously need to promote them! The first thing you will need to do is make sure you get the correct links so that any sales that are made are registered to your account. Each affiliate network has a different way of doing this, but in general, they will give you a link with some data in the URL, so that when someone clicks on the product from your blog, that visitor is registered as someone you sent, giving you the credit if that click turns into a sale. Most of these systems also register the click, and even if the person leaves and comes back, if they buy within a certain time period, you can still get the sale.

Most of these product owners and retailers also have marketing materials that you can use, especially ad banners that you can put on your site. These can make the process of selling a product much easier on you.

Once you have your unique links, there are several ways to promote the products. You could just put a link or a banner in your advertising space or in the sidebar of your site. This might get you a few clicks and sales, but you are going to want to do more than that to get even better sales numbers.

One of the best ways to promote these products is to write a review of them on your site. Write an honest review in a blog post specifically for a product that you are promoting and put it on your site. This way, people feel more comfortable about buying product having gotten their information from a third-party source.

If you will follow the steps outlined above and get signed up to one or all of the networks mentioned, you are bound to find something that you can promote!

However, how do you go about putting something like this together, especially if you have never done so before? Here are a few tips on how to do just that.

Consider What You Needed To Know

Of course, the first thing you are going to need when putting together an information product is a topic, and not just any topic, but something that people are interested in and would want to read or watch. A great way to know what this might be is to think about what it was that you needed to know when you started out in your niche.

Think about what you wished you would have known, or what you would have done differently when you started out in your niche if you had all the knowledge that you have now. These could be great starting points for an information product for your readers.

Ask Them What They Want

Another great way to come up with an information product that is going to be a hit would be to just simply ask your readers what they need to know about your niche! You might be surprised by their answers, and they may come up with something that you never thought of before!

You can go about this in a few different ways. First, you can simply ask in a blog post and have people leave comments on what they would like to know more about in your niche or what their biggest questions are. Second, if you already have a few ideas in mind and you are just trying to pick the best one, you could have a poll on your site and let your readers vote on which one they think is the best potential product. You could also ask your readers via social media what type of products they would be most likely to buy or read.

Do Thorough Research

Once you have your topic in hand, make sure you do your thorough research before you put out a product. Even if you are an expert on the topic, brushing up on the subject certainly will not hurt, and having a few sources mixed into your information product will only serve to add to its validity in the eyes of your reader.

You do not have to put together a dissertation here. Just make sure that you read up on the latest in this particular subject before you are ready to write about it. Check and see if there are any news stories about the subject. Has anything happened recently in your niche that readers really need to know about to thoroughly understand the subject? Also, if someone else has put out a similar information product recently that you could use as a guide as you create your product.

Decide On A Presentation Method

When people think of information products, they often think of an ebook in pdf format. However, there are plenty of other mediums you can use to do a product like this today.

Many presenters will now use video for their information products. It could be in the form of a recorded video, or it could be a slide show presentation done in real time while the presenter speaks into the microphone. Some people will douse audio or a podcast and present the information in that format for listeners.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with an ebook format, and many if not most folks still use it! You could, however, attach an audio presentation or a video to it as well.

Keep It Interesting

If you are going to be presenting facts and figures as your information product, make sure you find a way to keep it interesting so that you do not lose your readers or viewers in the process. If it is an ebook, include a few pictures along the way. If it is a video, keep the slides changing or break up the monotony somehow by adding a bit of humor.

Hire A Freelancer If You Need Assistance

Maybe you have the information you need, but you do not feel as if you have the skills or the time to put it all together as an information product for your readers. This is where a freelancer can be a huge help. You can hire someone to write the ebook for you if you want to go that route. You could even hire someone to do a voice over or a video for you if you plan to go in that direction. In any case, whatever format you pick, you can probably find someone on a freelancing site to do the work of packaging it together for you.

Decide How To Sell It

Once the product is done, you need to decide what you want to do with it exactly. Do you want to sell it to your readers to monetize your site? Do you want to give it away as just a thank you? Do you want to use it to have people opt in to your email list? There are several ways to go with this, and all depend on what you hope to accomplish with your product.

Get It Out There

Finally, get it out there in front of your readers, and do not wait until it is absolutely perfect! It does not have to be perfect. It just needs to be a good, informative product.

If you will follow the above steps, you can bet that you will have a killer information product that you can be proud of in no time – something that will be a hit for your readers and will keep driving traffic to your blog for a long time.

If you want to get in on this incredible growth within the business world, then it’s time that you learn how to self publish an ebook.

For most of the twentieth century, you basically had two options when it came to publishing books. You either had to go through a major publishing house, which meant that someone would decide whether your book was worth their time and effort, or you had to choose a vanity press. The latter choice meant that you would have to pay money to get your book published and then on top of that, you would have to try and sell it.

Thanks to technology, it has become simple to self publish an ebook. You do have options available that can make publishing this ebook either free or expensive, depending on what you’re looking to accomplish. For example, a high quality cover will cost you several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Many small businesses have decided that the quality of the cover is negligible because people are more interested in content. If that’s the case for you, then you can publish for little to no money out of pocket. It doesn’t matter the length of the ebook, either.

What is an Ebook?

An ebook is basically a book that is published through electronic media. The most common form of ebook for small businesses today is still the pdf. However, ebooks are being published in a variety of formats for different types of reading devices, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle e-Reader.

While traditional ‘books’ generally contained 50,000 words or more, ebooks can be anywhere from a few thousands words to hundreds of thousands of words (though you’re not likely to get people to read a massive book unless you already have a great reputation). To topics that are covered through ebooks can be anything from How To books to novels, biographies, discussions, and more. If you can think it up, you can make it into a digital product.

What Format to Choose to Publish

When it comes to ebooks, as mentioned already, there are many different formats to choose from. Pdf formats, which need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view, is the most common. However, the more formats that you offer when it comes to ebooks, the more you increase your exposure to potential customers who will be willing to read your material. At the end of the day, it all comes down to exposure.

If you decide to go with the pdf format or a multi-format approach, using free platforms, then you are basically taking the reins of promotion and marketing, along with sales, on your own. Many small businesses offer ebooks to their customers for free. They do this so that they can show their passion and expertise to the customer in order to build trust.

If your goal, however, is to make money with your ebook, then you will be selling it. While it is certainly possible to sell it on your own, using the services of Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and a hundred other sites can place your ebook on their servers for a fee. Some of these companies will give you the information on how to format and post your ebook.

It’s important to note, though, that with these major companies, you will be earning a commission on every sale of your ebook. That means that if you want to earn two dollars per sale and the company takes 50% of the sale price, then you will have to charge $4 for your ebook. Whether your target customers will pay that amount is something you’ll have to decide through research.

Protect Your Work

The Internet is a wide open super-highway filled with people looking to steal content from others. It’s important to understand the copyright laws of different countries and how you’re protected. While many governments have been slow to protect electronic media, they have been coming around and are helping to protect people from intellectual theft.

When you have completed your ebook, before you post it online for sale, make sure that it is protected by law. In the United States, for example, any original work that is created is automatically protected. However, it’s still a good idea to register with the Copyright Office in that country so that you have proof of its original creation.

There are always going to be risks when it comes to publishing online. You may protect your work but someone from a foreign country steals it and begins selling it for themselves. Your home country may not have any jurisdiction within that foreign country to stop this crime.

Yet web hosting companies have done well to protect original works and if you have proof that your work is being stolen, the web hosting company can step in and take down the site if the theft continues. If you are too concerned with theft, then you’re not likely to publish at all.

The Cover and the Price

Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover?’ Well, in the world of ebooks, that’s exactly what people do. The more attractive your cover is, and the more it represents the content of the book, the more success you will have with it. For example, if you wrote a book titled, ‘How to Start a Blog,’ and the cover showed a blogging platform, you’ll grab casual viewers’ attention much more readily.

When you have a cover that attracts attention, then you need to establish a marketable price. I’ve seen ebooks selling for $70 from unknown authors. If you’re going to charge a premium price for your book, you’ll need to increase your marketing efforts and make sure that you deliver on your promise.

In our modern economy, finding more ways to make money is important. In fact, being able to increase your earnings on your own is one of the most important aspects to surviving such treacherous economic times. Knowing how to generate Google AdSense revenue is one way that you can boost your bottom line every month.

While Google AdSense was initially designed with website and blog publishers in mind, anyone who creates and maintains their own blog or website can take advantage of the incredible opportunity. Whether you have a full-time job and are building a web presence for yourself in your free time or run a web design business, for example, you can generate a great deal of revenue using this tool, if you know how to use it to your advantage.

By allowing advertisements on your blogs, you create a static revenue stream. It’s basically that simple, yet there are important considerations to be made.

The Advertising Effect

Traffic coming to your blog, regardless of how they found it, is going to judge you and your business based on many factors. The design, layout, and navigation of the blog is one factor. Another factor has to deal with any advertisements that you post on the site.

If you visit some of the larger media outlets in the world, such as CNN, you have probably seen plenty of advertisements throughout their sites. When an ad is front and center, though, it takes away from the purpose of the blog itself and can drive visitors away.

You’re not CNN, so any new visitor to your site will be important. Some blog owners don’t understand the basic concept that consumers can and often are turned off by too many ads on a site or ads that overtake the blog itself. Ads need to be secondary to the content of the blog.

It serves no purpose to you or your business to have ads that grab more attention than your blog design or content. You haven’t worked hard on internet marketing and done all the legwork to bring visitors to your site only to have them click on an ad and leave your site, never to return again. You want them to focus first and foremost on your site, and then take a look at the ads you post.

Building A Quality Blog

You may not consider the design factor of your blog to be all that important, at least not when it pertains to ads, but it is crucial to success. The design of your blog should always be directed toward keeping visitors on your site. There are three main areas to which you should focus your design efforts.

The first is where a visitor looks as soon as the page loads on their web browser. Most people look to the upper left corner of the screen. This is where your business name and/or logo should be. Placing an ad here is tantamount to saying, ‘Thanks for stopping by, but why don’t you check this other business’s website out instead.’

Next, the eyes will travel toward the upper center of the screen. You’ll find that most websites tend to place their mission statement or slogan here. This is where you tell your visitor why this website is exactly what they’re looking for.

This is also where navigation tends to originate, and for good reason. You want your visitors to be able to find their way around relatively easily; you don’t want them to struggle to find the other pages of your site. Having an ad within this zone may work, but if it gets in the way of your message, or the navigation, then it’s being counterproductive.

Then a visitor’s eyes tend to drift down the page. Many visitors won’t scroll down unless they really like the content. Placing ads below the bottom of the viewable area will often mean that your visitors never even see it.

The best placement for ads will be to the right and bottom of the screen. That way your website and your message still remain the focus of attention. Then, if an ad captures attention, then when someone clicks on the link, you earn money.

Keywords And Google AdSense

When it comes to Google AdSense, you will be building your campaign around your website. While you don’t want to have ads for your direct competition on your site, you want to keep within the same genre. In other words, if you sell auto parts, advertising for used car dealers would be a good fit.

If you choose the represent keywords or keyword phrases that have nothing to do with your website, then visitors to your site are not likely to follow those ad links and you’ll be wasting valuable space. It’s a balancing act to choose the right keywords to represent. But when you get it right, you will be earning revenue every single month.

The More Traffic You Get, The More Money You Will Earn

Google AdSense revenue will not happen by simply being static with your website. Just because you build a website, have a web hosting company maintain it, or take care of some of the other aspects of launching it does not mean that anyone will come to your website. If they don’t come to your website, then they will not see the ads that you have posted on it and therefore you won’t be earning any extra money.

It’s important to keep in mind that you can have up to 3 ads on your site at any given time. Some people would want more in order to maximize the potential earnings, but more than 3 and visitors will begin to navigate away from your site before they even have a chance to see what you offer. You don’t need to post 3, either; you can post 1 or 2 ads if that’s your preference.

You still need to employ all of the same marketing strategies for your website that you would normally do. Google AdSense revenue is all about earning money from visitors who might be interested in other topics than what they searched for. If you bring in visitors who realize they should have entered something else into your search, they can certainly go back to the search engine or they can follow an ad from your site to something more in line with their needs.

Evaluate Your Strategy Monthly

When you are looking to generate Google AdSense revenue, there will be a balance between targeting the right keywords to supplement your website and avoiding giving your business away to your competitors. Determine whether you’re targeting the right keywords every month and make changes accordingly. It’s much better to make changes quickly rather than wait and lose out on all that potential revenue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Internet has become the place where consumers prefer to purchase things. If you want a piece of that multi-billion-dollar-a-year business, then you need to have an online product that people will want to buy. You can certainly market and sell products manufactured by other companies and individuals (affiliate marketing), but when you produce your own information products, you earn the largest profit margin.

Once you understand the basic fundamentals, you will be able to determine what information product will be ideal for you to focus on. Creating your own product is fairly straightforward and don’t cost a tremendous amount on money to produce – it’s just information in product form…

Make Sure You’re Information Products Offer Both Quality And Value

If you want your product to make an impact, you will want to focus on quality. Just as in the world of brick and mortar stores, merchandise that is made with cheaper materials tend to detract from the quality. The manufacturer will be able to charge less for it, which attracts consumers looking to save money, but it will not earn a positive reputation.

When it comes to information products created for the Internet, quality is measured differently. They can include e-books, videos, music, applications, games, and other downloadable items. Generally, when a consumer makes a purchase, they can have them downloaded to their computer within minutes. That the huge advantage of this type of product – it’s available immediately.

As a result, quality will be determined by the content and composition of the information. If you take time to produce a quality product with polished content, an attractive cover or image, and something people will find useful, then you will tend to find more success with it than with something that is just thrown together.

Deciding On What Information Product To Create

You may have some great ideas to market online, but you’re biased. Each of us thinks that we have the best ideas and that all it will take is investing in it with time, effort, and money, and people will be flocking to buy it. The problem with this mentality is that innate bias.

We tend to become too excited about certain ideas we have that we believe are winners. It’s important to get some opinions from people who won’t have a vested interest in the idea. Friends and family can sometimes be ideal to ask, but it will be important for you to make sure they know you will want their honest opinion.

If your idea is considered unique or ideal, then begin to research anything that may be similar already on the Web. You may think that it’s unique, but other people may already have something similar out there. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon your idea though; instead, determine how your idea is different and better than the others.

The Power Of Online Information Products

Products that are specifically designed for sale online are unique in that they can be downloaded by the consumer as soon as their transaction is complete. That means that marketing will be as important as the product itself. When you market your product, you will want to speak directly to a need your target audience has and how what you are offering fills that need.

Blogging is a great way to promote your information product. Knowing how to start a blog or becoming involved with web hosting is essential to online marketing. Keep these thoughts in mind as you move forward with your idea.

Know The Market

It is critical that you know the market you will be targeting. What age range will be most interested in it? Will it be men, women, or both?

It you create something that would be perfect for middle-aged professional women, but you focus on young, college-aged men, then your merchandise will not sell. Even if you realize that you targeted the wrong audience, make adjustments to the product and your marketing campaign; don’t simply abandon it. The great thing about most things created for Internet sale is that they can be altered without a tremendous amount of expense or effort.

As mentioned, marketing is as important to the success of your product as quality. Before you put together this incredible information product that is going to sell like crazy, you should think about marketing. If you promise something of value to the reader, the marketing will become much easier.

Develop a balance in which the marketing complements the product. Testimonials are a great way to show prospective buyers that what you’re offering is worth the investment. If you don’t have customers yet, then consider giving some copies away in exchange for those valued testimonials.

Solve A Problem

As noted earlier, anything marketed for consumers needs to solve a problem. A novel solves the problem of quiet entertainment. An e-book on how to become a successful affiliate marketer solves the problem that inexperienced professionals may have.

You should conduct market research to determine precisely how to solve that problem for the consumer. See if there are other products similar to yours that were successful as well as any that weren’t successful. There are often great lessons to be learned from both.

Creating a product that you intend to sell online demands a great deal of research on the market before it is actually created. An adage by Benjamin Franklin states that, ‘Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.’ That idea you have may be incredible, but you still need to do a serious amount of work before you will achieve success with it.

You can get rich solving other people’s problems!

• How do you find advertisers?
• Should you go with individuals or ad networks?
• What’s the best way to get started?

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Traffic Matters

If you want to make money online by getting someone to advertise on your site, the first thing they’re going to want to see are your traffic numbers. If you get only 10 visitors per day, you’re probably not going to get many advertisers. They want to see that you have a considerable amount of traffic (visitors) to make it worth their while. If you have that, you can start soliciting advertisers. If not, focus on building traffic first. We like at least 10,000 page views per month, but if you want to get into ad network, you will need even more (20,000 for basic ads and at least 100,000 for traditional advertisers).

It also helps if your blog is focused on a particular niche. This makes it easier for advertisers to reach their desired audience.

In many ways it’s like a popularity game. People will respect you more, or in this case willing to advertise on your site if they see that you have a huge following. Politicians and corporations do it all day long when they seek to influence others through opinion leaders. Learn from them and be the central hub, then leverage your expertise into money.

Make It Easy For Advertisers To Contact You

Going back to answering the original question of how to find advertiser, one of the simplest things to do is make “advertise with us” a tab on your website. Advertisers will actually compose a percentage of your website’s visitors. Why not make it easy for them to contact you?

You can also publish a blog post letting your readers know that you are looking for advertisers and the spots and location available. If you have an email list (which you should), you can email your subscribers and mention you are looking for advertisers.

Go to the popular blogs in your niche (there are usually 4 to 5 major players in any industry), find out what companies advertise with them as well as which ad networks they use and contact them. Come up with a proposal of what they’re going to get and why. Basically you want to find and sell to receptive potential customers.

Also based on our experience the more you grow your audience the more likely advertisers will come to you, which is a lot easier and more awesome!

Join An Ad Network

Google AdWords is by far the biggest and most popular ad network for advertisers. On the flip side, the Google AdSense program is designed for publishers like you. It’s fairly easy to sign up. You’ll need a legitimate telephone and mailing address. Google will confirm on both.

Once approved for AdSense, you will then determine the size of your ad units which comes in different shapes. You can even add tags that will allow advertisers to target a particular ad – for example, a Leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels) in top center of your home page.

You’d most likely get paid by each click (CPC) instead of impressions (CPM) or the result of a sale (CPA). This is fine at the beginning. But eventually you want to reach the point where you will get paid simply by showing your ad to your customers. The advertisers would determine that based on the perceived desirability of your blog.

How You’re Going To Get Paid

Let’s review really quickly the three payment models in online advertising. Cost Per Click or CPC is payment by each click. The price can range from a few pennies to tens of dollars. With proper planning and research by logging on and using the AdWords Keyword tool, you could start a blog whose niche overlap with a high paying keyword. The downside is that high paying keywords often have low traffic, so again proper research to balance two is highly recommended.

CPM is the cost per 1000 ad units. In other words it’s how much the advertiser would pay you every 1000 times the ad is displayed on your website. For example anywhere between $0.50 CPM and $8 CPM. If you have a high traffic website, this is an excellent earning model for you as the publisher because it doesn’t require action from your visitor for you to earn money!

CPA also known as Cost Per Action pays a lot more for each instance than CPC & CPM, but is also harder for you to get paid because it requires your visitors to take a particular action such as buying a particular product.

There are plenty of other networks out there, but nobody beats Google AdSense for simplicity and ease of use. Plus there’s no minimum traffic requirement – many ad networks require that 100,000 page view minimum. It’s probably the best way to get started especially if you don’t have much of an audience yet.

Should You Go With An Individual Advertiser?

Ad networks are easy – individuals affiliate programs are a LOT more profitable. This is a middle person fee, and you will only get a percentage what the advertiser is willing to pay – especially if you combine advertising with an affiliate arrangement. This is something that we do a lot on AskDanAndJennifer.com.

You can have both passive advertising and active promotions so that you get the best of both worlds. It’s a win-win for both you and the advertisers. You’re building a true long term partnership that will grow and become ever more lucrative. Essentially you move from an unknown affiliate to their preferred superstar. They might even design custom commissions for you that pay much more than their standard.

In conclusion remember to focus on growing your site and providing great content. Don’t focus on monetizing from day one because you’ll be disappointed with the results. Once you’ve demonstrated authenticity, and build a sizable following, advertisers will find you! They’re PART OF your audience already – be awesome and they’ll want their brand behind you.

Once you have your blog running, you will begin to accumulate affiliate marketing partners. Not counting any potential drama, there’s a logistical downside of having a lot of affiliate partners, you’re going to have many extremely long, terribly looking URL’s that might make you barf. It can be a nightmare trying to manage (and test) all of the different URLs to the affiliate products you’re promting.

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Why Long Affiliate URL’s Won’t Work For You

We appreciate finesse, and obviously don’t like messy URL’s. Your readers are less likely to click on them. So how do you promote these long URLs effectively in different platform like email and social media? Many won’t fit in a Twitter stream which only allows 140 characters! On a quick side note, you do use Twitter & Facebook to promote your blog, don’t you?

Here’s another common scenario. You meet an attractive affiliate marketing partner who offers products that would be fantastic for your readers (kind of sound like dating, doesn’t it?) You start promoting their products. After some initial success, you expand the relationship and place their URL’s on more and more pages.

Then one day all of a sudden, the partner stops responding to your email, and you no longer get that commission check. It turns out the partner has gone out of business. What happens then? Would you want to change a bunch of their URL’s to a variety of products that are coded in dozens of different places? Do you have to change them all individually?

How You Can Manage Your Affiliate Links Quickly And Easily – All In One Place!

If you’re like us with hundreds or even thousands of affiliate marketing URL’s on your website, while testing different ads and campaigns, it’d be a freaking nightmare, and just not feasible to do it one by one! This is what we’ll discuss today. Not the bad dream part, but how to make your life easier!

Drum roll please, ladies and gentlemen, we present to you, Pretty Link! So what exactly is Pretty Link? The short answer: it’s a simple tool that allows you to manage your URL’s in a simple easy way. You can just make a single change at a central location and update all the places where you had that particular link.

Here’s a longer answer. Pretty Link is a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage and shorten those big, huge, confusing and nasty URL’s into a small, pretty link that is easy tweetable, sharable, etc. You input the long affiliate marketing link, and get a much shorter one in return that points you to the same page that you want to go. This could essentially replace tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service.

There are other link management tools like LinkTrackr, which is a hosted service. But we’re not yet 100% confident of their reliability. It needs to be as steady as a rock for us to incorporate it in our business, in part because we’re fanatical about perfect uptime for our websites. At the end of the day, if something goes wrong, it would mean real money down the drain. Many internet marketers do recommend LinkTrackr so it’s definitely worth checking out however.

You can also use Pretty Link to mask affiliate marketing on your site. For example, if you have a site about car parts, and you have an affiliate marketing deal with an auto supply store, you can use it to mask the URL.

So the original long link might look like:

http://www.auto_supply_store.com?product_id=52kkdoijaadsfjwekjlkj3ejv9997u32wi342

Pretty Link might shorten it to:

http://www.YourDomain.com/Cool_Product

Why Should You Mask Affiliate Links?

Why would you want to mask your affiliate marketing URL’s? Well other than the purely aesthetic reason of making the links look better, for some reason some people think that you should NOT make money online because it’s somehow wrong.

Going to a soul draining job and getting paid a meager wage is fine, but earning a profit from publishing information products on the web is bad! They believe that the information on Internet should be free and won’t click on a link if it “looks like” an affiliate link.

Shocking isn’t it? We know! In our opinion if you provide quality content, there’s no reason why you should not profit from our recommendation. To paraphrase from The Godfather movie – the scene where the five crime families got together to discuss business – “we’re not communists after all”! Shoot, did we just compare ourselves to the mob?

So to get around the unfair perception of being greedy capitalist pigs (now we kind of sound like a communist propaganda), Pretty Link can make the affiliate marketing link look like another page on your site. That person would then click on the link, go to the product page, and ideally find what they’re looking for, and buy something. You’d then get a referral commission from the merchant. Everyone is happy.

On a darker note, there are those who try to profit from other people’s efforts and attempt to steal your affiliate marketing commissions by hijacking your link. For example hacking into your website and changing the link code to theirs. When the sale occurs, they’d get paid, instead of you! Pretty Link essentially makes it a lot harder for this to happen.

Should You Go Pro?

If you’re looking for more features, the pro version gives you a centralized place to manage and track all your affiliate marketing URL’s over your website, your twitter, etc. This is what we use. You can see all of your URL’s from within your WordPress admin panel. It also allows you to automatically tweet your new blog posts, saving you time, and eliminating steps.

You also get a ‘social button’ which will allow your users to spread your posts across all social networks. This can be a very effective way to get the word of mouth traffic coming to your site.

It also has the “Pretty Bar” which keeps your iframe (and logo) on top of page when you refer visitors away from your site. The reason for is so that they know how to easily get back to your site. It’s also more convenient for them to share that affiliate marketing link. The only gotcha with that Pretty Bar is that some merchanges (primarily ClickBank) as of this writing frown on any intercept of their website order page, which is technically what this is.

The pricing is very reason at $37 for a single web site, or $97 for unlimited websites, but in our opinion the best way to start is with the Lite version which is free and allows you to try the basic link management features right away.

And alternatively give LinkTrackr a try for yourself, there are some definite benefits to a fully hosted service, where someone else worries about managing the software and you focus just on managing your links and promotions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click (CPC) is what an advertiser pay to search engines and Internet publishers for a single click on their advertisement, which directs one visitor to the advertiser’s website.

Google’s Adsense program is the biggest player here. It’s pretty simple to get running as a publisher/blogger. You sign up for an account, use their tool to build an ad code, and then paste it onto your site. People click on those ads and Google pays you x amount per click. Hence the name “pay per click.” This is a great way to make passive income.

Basically they bring together advertisers and website owners and in return you split the profit with them. Google pays 68% of the money that they typically receive. They’re basically charging a third in commission, but two-thirds of something is a whole lot more than 100% of nothing.

The ads are contextual which means that they are selected based on your website’s content. They come in both text & graphic banners, and have various ad sizes.

Microsoft & Yahoo use to have their own Publisher programs, but have since exited that market. Yahoo recommended Chitika as replacement to its former publishers. Here’s a list of top 10 alternatives to AdSense.

Basically this type of cost per click blog advertising is great until you get big enough to attract direct advertisers – and that should be your goal!

Banner and Text Ads

Banner ads could be super lucrative and really help you make money online, but not always the easiest to get the off the ground. They range from simple logo to various ad unit sizes. It is what it says it is. Say you know Al of Al’s Health Foods and he wants to pay you ‘x’ amount of dollars a month to put his logo somewhere on your site. That my friends, is a banner ad…

It might seem like easy money, but there is a barrier of entry. As we said repeatedly, build your audience first, then the advertisers. There are also tons of ad networks out there, but most of them require that you have at least 100,000pageviews per month. Furthermore most of them pay pretty low ad rates, depending on your niche.

A text ad is similar to a banner ad but you are putting text (similar to a Google Ad) on your website. This is not the same as paid links which we highly discourage!

The difference can get blurry, but essentially if someone approaches to buy a link placement, you should be careful. Yes it’s easy money, but if search engines like Google ever catch on, then your website could be harshly penalized in lowered ranking. Many webmaster found their website traffic slowed to a trickle as the result.

Paid Product Reviews

Basically, when people are going to buy something, they go online first to see what people are saying about it. Companies know this and now often pay bloggers to review their products. Nothing wrong with it – just be sure to disclose that you are being paid to review it, or have a general disclaimer in your terms of use.

In late 2009, the FTC began to legally require bloggers and online publishers to have such disclaimer on their websites.  However, bloggers get make money online, so we have to play by the rules!

Amazon Affiliate Program

Amazon is the original granddaddy of affiliate programs. It’s where if someone goes to your web page and sees a little widget that says “Bob recommends this book on puppies” and that person clicks on that link and buys the book, you get some money.

Of course these days Amazon carries a lot more than books. You can find almost any retail item on their site. It’s a great way to earn money when you start. It’s easy because you can find items similar to your niche.

The downside of the convenience is that the payout is relatively poor with many items paying as low as 4%.  So you might want to pay attention to specific affiliate programs as you begin to grow.

Sell Stuff (Yours or Other People’s Stuff)

This is our personal favorite way to make money online! For example if you’ve got a dating blog, and you have a rabid, dedicated following, and you’ve got tons of great posts that people love to read, why not collect your posts and make them for sale in a book/e-book format?

Plenty of sites like Chuck Norris Facts or Texts from last night make a ton of money off of this. Or you can even build premium content available only to paying members. Viola, now you have recurring income!

The numbers can add up dramatically if you offer substantial value and keep your members satisfied. This can lead to other sales opportunities such as coaching sessions, workshops, and other products.

You can even hire ghostwriters to create the product. That way you just sat back. Let them do the hard work, pay a fixed amount, and then collect a potentially lucrative payoff down the road.

Or if you don’t want to mess with your own product – because there are things to manage like sales pages, additional web hosting, customer service, & creating the product, then sell other people’s stuff. (affiliate programs)

The key is to partner with some of the really successful people in your niche to sell their products on your site for a commission. Hopefully they have a turnkey system setup that result in a high probability of sales. You don’t want to be a guinea pig to help someone unproven to work out the bugs in their sales process.

Many eBook authors will give you as high as 75% – 100% commission for each sale. (They make their money with repeat sales and memberships). So take advantage and build your success!

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

So where did affiliate marketing come from? Back in the pioneer days of the online commerce – also known as the mid 90’s – Amazon came up with a program where they paid people to refer clients to them.

For example, if you went to a blog and clicked on the Amazon link and bought something, the owners of said blog got paid a commission. Today, there are tons of affiliate programs out there for everything under the sun, no matter what your niche is. Companies will happily split the profit with you for referring customers to them.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation and a great way to make money online. They have the products and you have the audience that might be interested in what they offer. They’re basically giving you a cut of their profit that otherwise would have gone to advertisement. A lot of them have back end products as well, so you’re likely to get a high commission percentage of sales.

Choosing The Right Affiliate Program For You

So you’ve built up your blog, email list, and gained an audience. Now you need to decide which way you want to go in terms of monetization. There are many different types of affiliate programs that can help you make money online.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a popular option because it’s an easy program to apply for and it is simple to set up on your blog. All you need to do is apply for the AdSense program, then insert a snippet of code into your blog. Google will then display contextual ads, or ads that are related to your blog’s niche. They usually have decent click through rates. This is an amazing way to earn completely passive income!

However, the bar for getting paid is lower – it’s based on every click instead of a sale. Just don’t violate the program’s terms and start clicking on your own ads. That will get you banned from Google! You may think you won’t get caught, but Google has some very sophisticated programs and smart people with degrees in statistics checking for potential fraud.

Or perhaps you want to sign up some other affiliate network? They basically match merchants with affiliates. Instead of getting paid from like 100 different merchants, you get the money consistently and timely from just one source.

ClickBank

ClickBank connects digital product owners with website owners. We strongly recommend them over traditional affiliate networks Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network and Share Sale which typically cater to traditional physical products that they’d then have to ship.

Digital products tend to result in faster transaction, thus resulting in more commissions and less potential headaches.  Physical products are often hinder by logistics that are beyond your control.  Web hosting companies and online software companies also enjoy the benefit of instant gratification on the part of the user.

Individual Affiliate Programs

Finally, you can also sign up to individual affiliate programs which often pays more than the networks, but the downside is that it might take longer to get paid. You’d have to be a lot more organized to track each merchant, and the corresponding logins and passwords.

Do your homework and pick the partner that’s right for you and who will help you make money online and meet your goals. Don’t just signup every affiliate program in sight. The product owners should be hooking your followers up with products or services they are actually interested in.

To avoid seeming “spammy,” make sure the products are related to your niche. Stay on topic. It has to fit in with your branding – or you’ll lose customers. You don’t want to have ads for sports cars on your dog food blog!

Promote, Promote, Promote

The more people you send to your partner products, the more you can make money online. It’s simply the law of probabilities. Use links, banners, directory listings and written article product reviews to promote your affiliate partnership.

If you don’t feel comfortable promoting your partners then you’ve picked the wrong partners. We never promote a product or service that we cannot truly recommend it to our friends and families! Basically, only promote products that you believe in. Otherwise, you’re going to feel bad and not really able to sell them well. Who needs the guilt when there are so many options out there?

Monitor Your Blog

When you start your own blog, you need to optimize it and constantly improve your numbers. We watch the whole sales funnel very closely from the impressions to clicks, and finally conversions. Make sure you’re getting good conversions from clicks to sales – you don’t want to promote a product that doesn’t convert. If your affiliate partner isn’t working out for you, find a new one! That’s why we like to have a few partners in each sub-niche of our site, then work closely with them to improve their sales funnels, because the more money they make, the more you will make. But if any of them doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal.

Your affiliate partner should provide you with accurate metrics. That’s the other thing we love about ClickBank which has all the detailed stats.

When you find something that works, try to make it work better. As an affiliate you can ask the merchant for higher commission percentages, money on back end sales, custom promotions, even white labeling their product. That’s where you re-brand it and sell it as your own.

In the age of uncertain economy and massive corporate layoffs, many people are looking for alternatives to support themselves and their families. Making money with affiliate marketing might just be that flexible option to help you make a few extra dollar, build a passive income, and perhaps even one day become financially independent! So take those steps.

Learn how to start a blog, then build an audience of dedicated readers, and join some affiliate programs. Remember to be creative and never be satisfied!

On one hand the ClickBank network offers some of the best converting affiliate products anywhere. So, we all work with them. They also reliably make payouts every 2 weeks, yet another strong point in their favor.

But the major problem until just recently – they refused to show you how much traffic you’ve sent them, so you could never accurately figure out which affiliate products are converting better than others. AAAhhhhh!

So what’s the problem?

While this may not matter much to someone who’s happy to get a $50 ClickBank check every few months, for those of us who bring in several thousand dollars a month from affiliate revenue (from sales of many different affiliate products), optimizing your conversion funnel matters.  It matters A LOT.

Can’t you track affiliate conversions yourself?

In short, no. The best you could do was to use OpenAds to track your outgoing clicks for each affiliate product, and then compare that with the actual sales at the end of the month. But that’s error prone.

What you want is to see a per-product breakdown of how many clicks you’ve sent and how many sales you made. THEN you can see what’s actually making you money, so you know where to focus your energy the most. Read: do more of whatever works the best.

So how can you see product conversion stats from ClickBank?

Well, this is a new feature, and it’s buried down deep. But, if you look deep within their reporting tools, and select just the right combination of options (see the image), you’ll get… drumroll please… conversion stats broken down by product! Yeah!!!

Note that currently this is only available for the “by publishers” report, and only for the past 30 days.

And this is what you’ll be seeing… Note how neatly the crucial numbers are computing for you. You see “clicks per order” and how much money you actually made per click. Looking at this graph, can YOU pick out the obvious winner?

While we found it quite by accident while reviewing our top money makers for the past several months, we’re very happy and grateful to see this new feature.

Any great tips to optimize affiliate conversions?

Absolutely. More on this in a future article, but here are some big ones…

• Use OpenAds to split-test ad headlines, and see which attract more clicks to each affiliate products. Every couple of weeks, choose a winner, and add a new contender to “beat the control”.
• Use “goals” in Google Analytics to track how well your pre-sale review of the affiliate product is performing. You can see how many clicks to the product sales page you generate, and what your abandonment rate is. You DO pre-sell your affiliate products, don’t you?

Ah, the mysterious and sometimes black art of affiliate marketing… the well kept secret of the most successful Internet marketers.

Many people have tried and failed to make any money online with affiliate marketing… usually because they give up way too quickly. Fact is, affiliate marketing takes some up front effort to get optimized and working right, but when it’s working, life is very, very good.

Most bloggers only use Google AdSense to monetize their sites. AdSense is a great revenue option, but affiliate marketing can easily bring in double your AdSense revenue, WITHOUT impacting your AdSense earnings.

What’s more, the work you put into developing a good affiliate marketing strategy will pay off for months and years to come. You only do the work once,  and it keeps on giving! Now that’s working smarter, not harder.

Passive income, and Blog Monetization Zen.

The best kept secret of affiliate marketing…. Shhhhh!

The biggest secret to successful affiliate marketing is this… It’s all about the pre-sale.

Putting up banners and links will get you some conversions – if you’re lucky. But if that’s your main attempt at affiliate marketing, then it’s a big waste of your time and effort.

People visiting your site (your readers, web visitors) are looking for information. And if you’re doing your job well and putting together great information, then your articles and reviews will be indexed and well ranked by the search engines – making it THAT much easier for these searchers to find your site instead of someone else’s. The more search engine traffic you’re getting, the better.

This is because people WHO ARE MOSTLY READY TO BUY search for reviews and articles about their products of choice. Sometimes they want to see their options for a product category, but often times they just want to justify to themselves why it’s OK to buy that product they really want.

So – they want to see an honest, objective review of a product before they buy it. They want your personal seal of approval. So find great products, provide and honest review with benefits and weaknesses, recommend the product, and offer affiliate links to purchase them.

But what if you don’t like the product you’re recommending? Is that dishonest? Will it still work?

A question plaguing most beginners with affiliate marketing… “Isn’t it dishonest to recommend something you don’t like?”

Of course it’s dishonest to recommend something you don’t actually believe in. And here’s a little secret. If you write a dishonest review, your readers will pick up on that, and they’ll probably move on and NOT buy using your affiliate links.

So here’s a radical solution. Focus on doing reviews and writing articles for products that you LIKE and can actually RECOMMEND.

Where to find the BEST affiliate products to promote

You know your niche inside and out, don’t you? If not, go back to the drawing board and learn it!

To make thousands of dollars every month in passive income from your blog, your information must be top notch, and for that you have to be an authority on your topic. It’s that simple.

OK, so now that you have an idea about what types of products MIGHT be interesting to your niche, you set out to find the best performing products. No, not just any products… you want to find the ones that are performing well for others, and you start there. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

ClickBank tips and tricks – how to start making money today

ClickBank is a huge marketplace for selling digital products. And it has the easiest to use affiliate program out there. You literally just sign up, search for products to promote by keyword, and get the code to promote them on your site.

You can also see how much you’ll get for every sale, and what percentage of the sale amount that is. Hint – - don’t look for the larger total price, but rather the program that offers you the highest percentage of each sale.

The downside: ClickBank has the worst stats tracking of any affiliate network out there. They don’t show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a product, which can be really frustrating. They only tell you when you’ve made a sale, and how much you made. This approach also doesn’t allow for testing to make sure your links are good. But alas, it’s basically a must for any serious affiliate marketer. So go sign up for ClickBank and find some products to promote.

Commission Junction

Comission Junction is another top affiliate network. It provides great stats for clicks sent, and also gives you great comparative numbers on how much others are really earning for sales across all merchants.

But their products are generally not as juicy as those on ClickBank. Nevertheless, sign up for Comission Junction as well to round out your list of affiliate products, and find yourself some well converting products to try out.

Other affiliate marketing networks and programs

There are some other affiliate networks out there that are worth paying attention to, but it’s very important to not spread yourself too thin. Do your research and find the programs you’ll be focusing on, and go from there.

SharePayNow vs. Clickbank

Another affiliate network similar to ClickBank that’s starting to gain some ground is SharePayNow.

This network is very similar to ClickBank, but unlike ClickBank, it DOES show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a campaign – which is always nice. However, unlike ClickBank, it doesn’t show you which programs in their marketplace are converting and how well. But SharePayNow is definitely worth checking out when you’re choosing products to promote on your site.

AzoogleAds vs. LinkShare – alternate affiliate networks

If you’re looking for some banner ads to check out, you’ll need to find an affiliate program that provides those. AzoogleAds and LinkShare are both large affiliate networks that are worth checking out.

But there’s a big difference, and having dealt with both we’ll be avoiding LinkShare in the future. LinkShare feels like a large, sluggish company, while AzoogleAds is young and on the ball. The AzoogleAds support is great, and you get your own very responsive dedicated account manager that’s actually eager to work with you and help you find well converting campaigns for your site. Wow, imagine that.

Here’s a major difference though – AzoogleAds tends to offer well paying promotions for affiliates, which pay out significantly better than their counterparts on LinkShare.

Check out AzoogleAds and see which of their promotions could work for you.

The Amazon affiliate program

And of course, the most popular affiliate program of all time, the Amazon affiliate program.

For some truly bizarre reason, the Amazon affiliate program is one of the most popular and successful affiliate programs in the history of Internet marketing.

Maybe it’s because it’s downright easy to set up Amazon affiliate links for your site, and start making a little money. More likely, it’s because we all BUY books and other products from Amazon regularly, so we’re comfortable with it. And we know that others buy from Amazon as well.

Here’s the catch though. Amazon pays you roughly 5% of the revenues you generate for them. That is lower than just about ANY website and blog monetization scheme out there.

While it is another monetization option, there are just too many other better options with much higher payouts.

Knowing this, should you still sign up for the Amazon affiliate program?

Yes, you should definitely still sign up for this program. You will eventually either refer to or actually review various books on your website. These books will likely not have direct affiliate options, so the only way to monetize these referrals will be through a quick link to the Amazon product page.

Also, that Amazon affiliate link is a great way to provide your reader more information on the book you’re talking about, and make it easy for your readers to purchase the book.

Amazon also has a really neat feature for affiliates, which creates a dynamic preview of the book when your readers hover their mouse cursor over the book link on your site. All it takes is a tiny JavaScript snippet you’ll get from Amazon.

For an example of the Amazon product preview pop-up, check out this post on AskDanAndJennifer.com answering a reader question about steamy date night DVDs – hover over the DVD titles.

So go ahead and sign up to the Amazon affiliate program as well, but don’t spend a lot of time putting up their banners and other sales tools. Instead, us this as a laser focused way to monetize reviews and references to popular books that you include in your articles.

And suddenly you have ONE MORE revenue source paying you every month…

The eBay affiliate program and AuctionAds

Yeah, the whole “make money with eBay” thing was and still is a great opportunity for some, but it’s become more of a fad. Starting a blog is a solid way to make long term income – just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. Imagine that!

Unlike Amazon, eBay shows some serious lovin’ for it’s affiliates. In fact, in June 2007, eBay nearly doubled it’s affiliate payout amounts. That’s some serious affiliate lovin’.

eBay pays you both a flat reward for each referral you send them (a customer who creates an eBay account and eventually buys something) and also a percentage of the sales generated from the referrals you send them. Now that’s pretty cool.

What’s the best way to add eBay listings to your site and make money?

Until recently, it’s been a challenge to add eBay listings to your site in a visually appealing way, so as to really get your visitors engaged. But AuctionAds makes it very easy to do this, with their easy to customize widgets. You can customize the ad unit on their site, copy the little code snippet, and add it to your site. Done – you’ve got eBay auction ads.

Can you make more money with eBay by using AuctionAds?

YES! The eBay affiliate program is tiered to pay you a lot more money as a high traffic affiliate. So if you have a lot of sales and referrals every month, you make much more PER REFERRAL than someone with just a few sales / referrals per month.

By joining AuctionAds, your commissions are based on the entire AuctionAds member base, not just your own sales. So each referral and sale you generate are compensated as a very high traffic affiliate. Again, this is working smarter, not harder. Sign up for AuctionAds to add eBay auctions to your site – and make money as a high traffic eBay affiliate.

Adult affiliate programs – web cam girls, kinky adult personals, and more… Oh, my!

Wait a minute – is there really money to be made in the adult industry?

Where’ve YOU been? Oh yeah, most definitely. Where there’s demand (as in 50% of all the web traffic today), there’s money to be made.

OK kids, everyone who’s going to be offended here please cover your eyes and skip this section like good boys and girls.

What’s the best adult affiliate program to get started with?

One of the most successful and best paying affiliate programs in “the business” is ClickCash. They’ve been around since the mid 1990′s. Their iFriends site connects people with webcams (a.k.a. cam girls, or “content producers”) with web surfers (a.k.a. “consumers”). They provide web cam streams for every possible sexual interest that might have enough consumers who posses credit cards. And they provide a way for many content producers to make a LOT of money from the privacy of their own homes.

And get this… you actually make $40 for every FREE signup you send them. These referrals only have to sign up with them and provide a valid credit card, but they’re not charged anything. This person is signing up for a free membership, and they’re asked for their credit card to “verify their age”.

Admittedly, getting a credit card is indeed a more accurate way of verifying adulthood than asking your visitors to “click here if you’re over 18″.

Anyway, their profit margins are so high, that they will pay you $40 or more (up to $80) per sign-up you send them. And the pay scale is graduated – for more than 5 referrals in a week, you get $45 each, and it goes up to $80 per FREE referral.

Downline referrals

Oh, and if you get other affiliates to sign up, you’ll receive an extra 10% for all the money THEY make. So, you refer your friend who gets 10 conversions next month. That’s $400 for him and $40 for you more than you’re making now. Think of it as a gift for referring your friend to such a successful affiliate program.

So if you’re a little adventurous and open minded, sign up with ClickCash and start making cash for sending FREE signups to ClickCash and iFriends.

But what about adult personals sites, like Adult Friend Finder?

An adult personals site is an excellent complement to promoting ClickCash streaming video sites. Providing more options for your visitors is Always a good thing.

Adult Friend Finder is the most popular adult personals site on the Internet today. What many people don’t realize is that AdultFriendFinder gets more web visitors every day than Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals put together. Hmmmm… perhaps there’s money to be made in this niche anyway.

Adult Friend Finder pays between $30 and $85 for EACH paid membership you send them, depending on the promotion they’re running at any given time.

But remember – unlike ClickCash, these visitors need to actually buy something. Regardless, the conversions here are much better than traditional non-adult online dating sites.

Must have affiliate marketing tools

Don’t waste your time and money fumbling around in the dark. You can so easily waste too much of your already scarce time and energy. You should be spending that time laser-focused on doing the things that will MAKE YOU MONEY!

Don’t re-invent the wheel. Find successful affiliate marketers and do what they’re doing!

Check out Paula Mooney’s great round-up of the top money-making bloggers

The top few slots are actually people making money online who aren’t bloggers per-se, like Markus Frind who runs the PlentyOfFish.com free online dating site.

But should recognize number 4, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, followed by many other familiar blogger names and faces, like Matt Drudge, Steve Pavlina, ProBlogger Darren Rowse, John Chow, and of course Dan and Jennifer.

So is blogging income Salary or PASSIVE INCOME?

The article talks about blogger salaries, but let’s clear up that definition a bit. Unless someone is paying you to sit there and write blog posts, blogging is passive income.

Salary is when you’re working for a company and they pay you regular wages

You go to work, they pay you. You don’t go to work, they don’t pay you. That’s selling your time for money, hour by hour, for a fixed amount, and with very little freedom.

Blogging is Passive Income, which means you keep making money from work you’ve already done

Basically you do the work once (i.e. write an article) and it keeps making you money for years to come. The more great articles there are on your site, the more traffic you will get, and the more money you will make.

This is a very important distinction for perspective bloggers to understand – because you can make A LOT MORE MONEY with passive income, and it’s A LOT EASIER to make.

It’s a wonderful feeling to wake up in the morning and count the money you made while you were asleep!

Anyone who hasn’t experienced this is seriously missing out.

A blog is your very own small business, doing something you enjoy

If operated in that way, a blog can be very profitable. The great thing is that with a blog you can really help people by putting out really great content, and you don’t have to try to sell it to them. Rather, you get vendors and advertisers to sponsor your site with ads and so on. What a great deal!

Check out Paula’s Cover of Forbes!

And yes, we’re on it – bottom left.

So, if you’re not on this list yet, what are you waiting for?

No excuses. Here’s How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online – in 10 Easy Steps.

Above all, have fun!

How to get started with Text-Link-Ads in 5 minutes or less

1. Go sign up with Text-Link-Ads right now. It’s a short form.
2. There’s no real work to do whatsoever. You just fill out a form, install their small code snippet (or activate the WordPress plugin) on your blog, and your site shows up in their marketplace.
3. Then the fun begins… Whenever someone purchases an ad for one of our blogs, we get an automated email to approve the ad. We log in to Text-Link-Ads, look at the new link and it’s ad text, and we approve the ad. Whew… time for a break!

THIS definitely qualifies as passive income – talk about Blog Monetization Zen.

What’s the downside? Any gotchas?

Yes, Text-Link-Ads keeps 50% of the link cost as their fee. That’s a little high, but fact is that’s the cost of being in their catalog of links that advertisers go to IN ORDER TO BUY LINKS.

If your cut isn’t enough for you, raise the price until you feel happy about it. If that 50% still bothers you, then get over it and do something about it. Later on, when you get around to it, you can ALSO offer links to advertisers directly for the same price and keep ALL the profits.

But you should have your site in the Text-Link-Ads marketplace, so that people shopping there will see your blog and buy your links. If you’re not there, those happy link shoppers will buy links on another site.

One mistake many people make is to leave a very low price for links on their blogs. Of course, don’t set it too high… just value yourself appropriately as compared to other advertisers in your niche. Remember – if you don’t see your own value, nobody else will!

How much money can I expect to make?

We consistently make over $500 per month from Text-Link-Ads these days, with very little effort. Other bloggers we know make between $100 and $1,500 per month just from Text-Link-Ads. The higher the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank your blog has, the more advertisers will want to buy space on your blog, and the more money you’ll be making.

This is just like real estate. In fact, think of your blog as Virtual Real Estate. And the more you develop it, the more it will be worth.

This means start early, develop the property, and stay the course!

Go sign up with Text-Link-Ads right now. This is a real no-brainer option for blog monetization.

When you complete the short Text-Link-Ads sign up form, they MAY ask you if you’d like to participate in a cool new “beta” program called “In-Links” or something to that effect. What they don’t tell you is that this new program REPLACES the regular Text-Link-Ads program. Just say NO! Some of our friends have tried it and had all kinds of bizarre problems. Keep it old school, skip that new “beta” plan and do the regular Text-Link-Ads program! And let us know how it works out for you.

We’re not talking about making $2.47 a month from your hobby. We’re talking about making hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars every month doing something you enjoy.

Selling your time for dollars is one of the worst ways to make a living, but people do it because it SEEMS safe. But how many times have you seen hundreds or thousands of people without a job because of some corporate layoff? And do you really enjoy fighting traffic twice a day and barely getting an hour or two with your family when you get home exhausted and ready for bed?

Whether you’re seeking freedom or just some extra money, this is the best time to start a blog and make real money online.

Is Passive Income a Myth?

Well, it depends on your definition of passive income. Many people think that passive income is sitting around doing nothing while the checks roll in. This is not passive income, this is free money, like winning the lottery! Our definition of passive income is doing the work once and reaping the benefits (read passive income) for years to come. We call this mailbox money and making money while you sleep. There is nothing more refreshing than taking the day off and checking stats at the end of the day to see that, even though you were not working, you still made money!

Can You REALLY Make Money Online With Your Blog?

Absolutely! But, there’s a catch, the golden rule: it’s all about CONTENT. If you provide extreme value with great content, people will come back again and again, and you’ll make more and more money. It’s that simple.

Some people spend tons of time trying to trick the search engines only to find their income stream ripped out from under them the next time Google updates their search algorithms.

Content is king! Provide lots of good, relevant content for your readers and Google will love you for it.

What about all those people making $2.47 a month with THEIR blogs?

As with everything in life, there are people who are very successful, and there are people who are not successful. Those who make a meager effort and quickly throw in the towel end up just wasting their time and telling everyone else that this blog thing doesn’t work.

But the successful ones, the ones who are willing to put in the effort, have escaped the corporate world and set themselves free!

And what about choices? There are many who choose to keep their corporate jobs and enjoy making a few thousand extra dollars every month.

Which group do YOU want to be in?

In just a few months we went from nothing to bringing in over $2,000 every month with our Dating & Relationship advice blog. We have personal friends making anywhere between $500 and $40,000 per month, all from their blogs.

STOP! Think about that for just a minute. What are the possibilities for you? What do you enjoy talking about, writing about, reading about? Why not turn your hobby, or obsession, into a passive income stream?

What TYPE of monetization will work best on your site?

Depending on whether you have a product-focused blog or an information blog, different monetization options will work best. But regardless, the most important concept here is to make an educated guess and actually implement a few of the following money making options. Only then will you know what will work best on your blog.

And remember – test, test, and test some more to truly optimize. We are constantly testing and trying new monetization schemes.

Top 10 Tips to REALLY Make Money with Your Blog

Tip #1: Make Money by Showing Ads

Is it right to show ads and make money with your blog?

Hmm… the age-old question that’s been plaguing bloggers for years.

Should you provide great information to people free of charge? Do ads make your blog seem cheap and of lower quality?

To be honest we never had this problem, in part because we started our blogs specifically to help people and make a good living at it. Why go to a job when you can make better money actually enjoying what you do?

Visitors expect to see ads on successful sites. In fact, not showing ads can make your site seem small and unimportant because people EXPECT to see ads on popular sites. Every major website shows ads. Just look at Netscape.com, Amazon.com, About.com, etc… They ALL show ads.

Another example. You go to a job every day, and ask your employer for money if they want you to show up for work. Really, would you show up if they didn’t pay you? Nobody has a problem with that and yet many will not ask for money or show ads on their blog for fear that it will devalue the content.

Get over it and monetize your blog. You don’t have to market products or charge a subscription fee, but to us, ads are a no-brainer.

How soon should you put ads on your blog?

Ok, now that we feel fuzzy about making money online with our blog, where to begin? Should you place ads from the very beginning? Do you need to wait a minimum of 90 days? How about waiting until you have 2,000 visitors a day?

The answer is simple – do it now!

You COULD wait until the magical day when you receive 2,000 visitors a day, or even 10,000 visitors a day. Unfortunately it’s likely that day will never come unless you monetize your blog to help it pay for itself.

How would you like to see 1,000,000 people visiting your site every single month?

Guess what – that type of busy site costs money to run, and takes a LOT of time invested on your part. But here’s the wonderful part – if your blog is well monetized, you can quit your day job and work on your blog full time, writing about and promoting things that make you happy.

What is the best ad placement?

Different placement works better for different niches and for different ad networks.

Test, test, test. Changing the placement of an ad can make you dramatically more or less money, so test and track your results carefully.

What types of ads are NOT OK?

It’s all about relevancy.

Ads that provide value to your readers are generally welcomed by them. For example, recommended books and services that are truly related to the content your visitors came to see are great. But ads that are NOT related to the content your visitors came to see, will annoy and alienate your visitors – and will NOT make you money.

Use quality, relevant, ads that actually provide value to your readers, and you’ll be surprised at how well the ads are received.

Make it easy for advertisers to buy ad space on your blog.

This is the first step to making money with your blog – make your intent clear.

Always make it EASY for people to take whatever action you’d like them to take.
Create a visible page on your site to tell people exactly HOW to go about advertising on your blog. The easier you make something, the more people will go for it.

If someone comes by your site and would like to advertise, but they don’t immediately see how to do it, they’ll lose interest and move on to someone else’s site – and they’ll advertise with THEM.

Create a page that explains in simple terms what types of advertising spots you’re offering, what the rates are, and how someone can go about purchasing your ads right away. Don’t make them email you to find out the details. They won’t.

Make it simple and it’ll happen.

Tip #2: Make Real Money with Affiliate Marketing

Ah, the art of affiliate marketing… the well kept secret of some of the most successful Internet marketers.

Many people have tried and failed to make any money with affiliate marketing… usually because they have given up too quickly. Fact is, affiliate marketing takes some up front effort to get optimized and working right, but when it’s working, life is very good.

Most bloggers only use Google AdSense to monetize their sites. AdSense is a great revenue option, but affiliate marketing can easily bring in double your AdSense revenue, WITHOUT impacting your AdSense earnings.

What’s more, the work you put into developing a good affiliate marketing strategy will pay off for months and years to come. Now that’s working smarter, not harder.

How do you find affiliate products to promote?

You know your niche inside and out, don’t you? If not, go back to the drawing board and learn it!

To make thousands of dollars every month, your information must be top notch, and for that you have to be an authority on your topic. It’s that simple.

OK, so now that you have an idea about what products MIGHT be interesting to your nice, you set out to find the best performing products. No, not just any products… you want to find the ones that are performing well for others, and you start there. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

ClickBank

ClickBank is a huge marketplace for selling digital products. And it has the easiest to use affiliate program out there. You literally just sign up, search for products to promote by keyword, and get the code to promote them on your site.

The downside: ClickBank has the worst stats tracking of any affiliate program out there. They don’t show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a product, which can be really frustrating. They only tell you when you’ve made a sale, and how much you made. This approach also doesn’t allow for testing to make sure your links are good. But alas, it’s basically a must for any serious affiliate.

So go sign up for ClickBank and find some products to promote.

Commission Junction

Comission Junction provides great stats for clicks sent, and also gives you great comparative numbers on how much others are really earning for sales across all merchants. But their products are generally not as juicy as those on ClickBank. But sign up for Comission Junction as well to round out your list of affiliate products.

The secret to affiliate marketing

The secret to successful affiliate marketing is that it’s all about the pre-sale. Putting up banners and links will get some conversions. But people want to see an honest, objective review of a product before they buy it. They want your seal of approval. So find great products, provide and honest review with benefits and weaknesses, recommend the product, and offer affiliate links to purchase them.

Must have affiliate marketing tools

Don’t waste your time fumbling around in the dark. You can easily waste too much of your already scarce time and energy. Find successful affiliate marketers and copy what they’re doing!

Tip #3: Create True Passive Income with Paid Text Link Advertisements

Don’t sit around waiting for advertisers to come to you. People are out shopping for link ads RIGHT NOW in marketplaces like Text-Link-Ads. If you’re not in there, then someone else is going to get paid to put links on THEIR site today.

Go sign up with Text-Link-Ads right now. This is a real no-brainer.

There’s no work to do whatsoever, you just fill out a form, install their small code snippet on your blog, and your name shows up in their marketplace.

Yes, they keep 50% as their fee, but fact is that’s the cost of being in their catalog of links that people to go IN ORDER TO BUY LINKS. If you’re not there, they’ll buy links on another site.

One mistake many people make is to leave a very low price for links on their blogs. Of course, don’t set it too high… just value yourself appropriately as compared to other advertisers in your niche.

We consistently make over $500/month from Text-Link-Ads these days, with very little effort. We get an email to approve an ad, log in to Text-Link-Ads, and approve the ad. Whew… time for a break! THIS definitely qualifies as passive income – talk about Blog Monetization Zen.

Check out our review of Text-Link-Ads and how well it really can work for bloggers.

Tip #4: Make Easy Money with Contextual Pay Per Click Advertising

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is so successful because of their ability to show ads that are truly relevant to your site. Irrelevant ads annoy readers and also won’t make you any money.

For a blogger, Google AdSense is the easiest option to implement.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

YPN is the major alternative to Google AdSense. In fact, many publishers have changed from AdSense to YPN because YPN tends to pay more on a per click basis. But their content targeting is nowhere near as effective as Google’s, so in the end you’ll likely bring in less money with them.

Test your AdSense and YPN placement

Test, test test… start with Google AdSense and try out different placement options around your site. Track all your changes thoroughly, and make only one change at a time. Literally, only make one change at a time to placement, link color, and text color. If you change the placement and the link color at the same time and your click throughs go through the roof, how do you know which change worked?

When you’ve figured out what placement is the most effective for your site, you can try replacing AdSense with YPN for a few weeks, or few months, depending on your patience levels, to see how your bottom line results differ from AdSense.

Tips #5: Make Money with Related Search Results from Ask.com

Ask.com just launched a really great monetization tool that can be implemented alongside AdSense and the other monetization items already in place on your site.

Your visitors click on these related search links, and they are presented with Ask.com search results. You make money when they click on the sponsored results at the top.

How can you sign up for this monetization tool?

Currently this program is invitation-only. Ask.com is also limiting the program to publishers with over 50,000 visitors monthly.

If you have a quality site and receive 50,000 total combined monthly visitors between all your sites, send us a message and we can make a personal recommendation which should get you accepted.

Tips #6: Get Paid to Write Reviews for Related Products and Services with Sponsored Reviews

Your readers can feel your credibility in everything you write. Think of it this way – if you’re not telling the truth, the person you’re talking to can tell. It’s the same when you’re writing. People can smell BS a mile away. So keep it real and talk to your readers like you would to your friends.

There are several major sponsored review marketplaces today, but our best experience has been with ReviewMe.

Go sign up for Sponsored Reviews with ReviewMe right now, this is a real no-brainer. There’s no work to do whatsoever, you just fill out a form and your name shows up in their marketplace. When someone purchases a review for your blog, you get a notification to log on and review this offer. You can accept it, reject it, or ask for different terms. It’s literally that easy.

While this is not passive income, it can be a nice boost for your wallet.

Tips #7: Monetize Your Content Automatically with Dynamic In-Text Advertising

Services like IntelliTXT and Kontera can dynamically embed ads in the text content of your website or blog.

Unfortunately these sites are generally difficult to get up and running, and we consider these dynamic text ads to be intrusive in the body of your articles. More importantly, our results have been less than impressive. In fact, this was he least fruitful of all our monetization efforts, even below the Amazon Affiliate Program.

We do however know bloggers who make good money with this type of advertising – as much as a 20% increase in revenue. These sites are focused on technology and gadget topic. Basically product and technology oriented blogs tend to do well with this type of in-text advertising.

Tip #8: Make Money with eBay AuctionAds

Unlike Amazon, eBay shows some serious lovin’ for it’s affiliates. In fact, in June 2007, eBay nearly doubled it’s affiliate payout amounts. That’s some serious affiliate lovin’.

eBay pays you both a flat reward for each referral you send them (a customer who creates an eBay account and eventually buys something) and also a percentage of the sales generated from the referrals you send them. Now that’s pretty cool.

What’s the best way to add eBay listings to your site and make money?

Until recently, it’s been a challenge to add eBay listings to your site in a visually appealing way, so as to really get your visitors engaged. But AuctionAds makes it very easy to do this, with their easy to customize widgets. You can customize the ad unit on their site, copy the little code snippet, and add it to your site. Done – you’ve got eBay auction ads.

Can you make more money with eBay by using AuctionAds?

YES! The eBay affiliate program is tiered to pay you a lot more money as a high traffic affiliate. So if you have a lot of sales and referrals every month, you make much more PER REFERRAL than someone with just a few sales / referrals per month.

By joining AuctionAds, your commissions are based on the entire AuctionAds member base, not just your own sales. So each referral and sale you generate are compensated as a very high traffic affiliate. Again, this is working smarter, not harder.

Sign up for AuctionAds to add eBay auctions to your site – and make money as a high traffic eBay affiliate.

Tip #9: Make Money Online with a Product Review Blog and Chitika

Product Blogs are focused on discussions and reviews of products, such as electronics and other goods, as opposed to providing information and advice. The readers visiting these product blogs are generally in the market to purchase the products they’re reading about. So you’re inherently writing to an audience of perspective shoppers.

In contrast, information blogs are visited by people who usually have no particular goal of purchasing anything. For these blogs, the publisher has to be much more creative in selecting very compelling offers that tie directly in with the content presented, so that the reader will immediately see the benefit and consider making that purchase.

Chitika

Once you have your product blog set up, you’ll want to make it EASY for people to purchase the products you’re talking about.

A great way to do this is with Chitika. They provide all kinds of graphical widgets, dynamic product photos, interactive product comparison shopping widgets, and even custom shopping portals, for most any product you could be talking about on your site.

A comparison shopping widget is a great way to engage the reader of a product review. And get this – you make money when your reader just CLICKS on the product widget. Yes, this is a CPC program. So even if you don’t have a lot of site traffic, you should see good results from adding Chitika to your site.

Chitika is a natural extension for any product blog, and it’s also quick and painless to set up.

Click here to sign up for Chitika, to easily add interactive product comparison shopping to your site and product reviews.

Tip #10: Don’t Forget to Include The Amazon Affiliate Program

For some truly bizarre reason, the Amazon affiliate program is one of the most popular and successful affiliate programs in the history of Internet marketing.

Maybe it’s because it’s downright easy to set up Amazon affiliate links for your site, and start making a little money. More likely, it’s because we all BUY books and other products from Amazon regularly, so we’re comfortable with it. And we know that others buy from Amazon as well.

Here’s the catch though. Amazon pays you roughly 5% of the revenues you generate for them. That is lower than just about ANY website and blog monetization scheme out there.

While it is another monetization option, there are just too many other better options with much higher payouts.

Knowing this, should you still sign up for the Amazon affiliate program?

Yes, you should definitely still sign up for this program. You will eventually either refer to or actually review various books on your website. These books will likely not have direct affiliate options, so the only way to monetize these referrals will be through a quick link to the Amazon product page.

Also, that Amazon affiliate link is a great way to provide your reader more information on the book you’re talking about, and make it easy for your readers to purchase the book.

Amazon also has a really neat feature for affiliates, which creates a dynamic preview of the book when your readers hover their mouse cursor over the book link on your site. All it takes is a tiny JavaScript snippet you’ll get from Amazon.

For an example of the Amazon product preview pop-up, check out this post on AskDanAndJennifer.com answering a reader question about steamy date night DVDs – hover over the DVD titles.

So go ahead and sign up to the Amazon affiliate program as well, but don’t spend a lot of time putting up their banners and other sales tools. Instead, us this as a laser focused way to monetize reviews and references to popular books that you include in your articles.

And suddenly you have ONE MORE revenue source paying you every month…

Bonus Tip #11: Add CPM Banners and Make Money With Every Single Page Viewed on Your Site

CPM banners are banner ads that pay you a certain dollar amount for every thousand impressions shown on your site.

Nobody has to click on any link, buy a product, or anything else. You’re guaranteed that revenue for just showing those banners on your site. That’s it.

You will, however, have to reach a certain traffic level (normally around 100,000 page views per month) before most CPM agencies will approve your application. So once you’re established this is a great way to add additional revenue.

One of the more popular CPM ad companies, especially for bloggers, is Tribal Fusion. The application period takes about a week, and then the implementation is very simple.

Bonus Tip #12: Make Money While Helping People – Answer Questions and Give Advice

Once your sites starts to grow in popularity, you will gain a regular reader base and a growing following. Many of your readers will start asking you questions about how to do this, how to do that, how you you would solve this problem, and so on.

This is an opportunity for you: offer to help your readers in exchange for monetary compensation.

Yes, you could help them for free, but you’ll quickly see that all your time is spent solving other people’s problems, and you won’t have time to run your site and grow your business. All this while you’re probably still going to a job every day, working for someone else. Yuck.

Also you’ll likely not have time to help every person who asks you for help. Adding a paid options helps to prioritize which questions to answer first.

Take control of your time AND give your readers a chance to get a guaranteed response.

Some people have issue with asking people for money to help them. But understand this: you can always help as many people for free as you CHOOSE to.

Now think about your readers, from their perspective. Why not make it fair to them, and offer them a guaranteed, helpful, well though out, and timely response to their problem, for a certain fee. Your employer pays you for your time, and that’s OK. Then why not allow your readers to decide for themselves if they are willing to pay you for your time, to help them with THEIR problems?

Check out www.AskDaveTaylor.com and www.AskDanAndJennifer.com for some great examples of how this can work.

Your next steps…

1. Bookmark this article to be sure you implement all the choices above.
2. Are there any great monetization options we’ve left out? Leave a comment below and let us know what’s worked best for you.
3. Then, sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss the great series of follow-up articles. We’re going to be delving into the juicy details of EACH monetization method above – hot insider tips, what works best, what will just waste your time, and what to really watch out for.

Rich sent us an email this morning with a blog post that he felt our reader might be interested in. I almost didn’t read it because BlogSuccessJournal blog has nothing to do with credit cards and finance.

But then I actually took a few minutes to read the post and I realized that they’re all bloggers…

If you’re like many Americans, you probably have some concerns about your personal finances. You may be worried about credit card payments, high interest loans or whether your retirement plan is going to provide you and your spouse with enough money to sustain you. The bloggers highlighted in this article used to have similar problems, but they’ve all decided to make a change for the better. Although many of them haven’t yet achieved what they set out to do, they can all be considered successful. They’ve changed the way they think about money, and that’s the most important step you can take. In this article we have collected 100 of the most inspirational stories of financial turnaround from around the web in order to provide you with the inspiration you need to make a change in your own life

Read the full post to see how 100 other bloggers have turned their personal finances around.
The 100 Most Inspirational Personal Finance Turnaround Stories Online