Promoting and Earning Money with Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs, when used properly, can be a huge money earner. However, promoting an affiliate can be difficult as well as uneffective. Don’t get frustrated. It can be difficult for a blogger to find the right affiliate and earn money with them. You don’t earn money for impressions or clicks, you usually have to get your visitors to do something, whether it’s to join a website, or purchase a product.
Selecting your Affiliates
The key to promoting an affiliate is to make it look like you aren’t. Writing about cats and dogs then promoting a diet pill is an obvious advertisement. That’s why the Text-Link-Ads affiliate program has been so successful with bloggers in the past. Since it is on the topic of blogging and earning money with your blog, it’s easy to promote and fit into content.
Affiliates that may be good for a blog like this one (blogs about blogging etc) would include ways to earn money with blogs, hosting services as well as website designs and themes.
Our latest affiliate we’ve been promoting is Domaining Manifesto, which is an ebook that teaches you everything you need to know about buying and selling domains. As well as other helpful tips for domains.
Promoting Your Affiliate
If your affiliate is on topic of your blog and website you can write an entire post about them. By having a great title and keywords in that post when people are interested in joining them they will go through you to join etc.
You can also use the PPC method to drive traffic to that post, which ZacJohnson has seemingly perfected. He has earned over 50,000$ just by using NeverblueAds. I have yet to grasp the PPC strategy, but you can definitely learn a few tips from him.
Creating Niche Blogs
By creating niche blogs for your affiliates that you want to promote should make it easier to convert. On Its All Free Online, my freebie site, I promote loads of free offers that I find all over the internet. Can you tell which are freebies and which are affiliates?
We run banner ads on the sidebar that convert with by visitors entering their email or zip codes on the landing page. Each convert is worth about 1-2$.
I am also in the market to set up a few recipes sites where I could promote healthy affiliates as well as other recipe sites and recipe books. There is life without Adsense.
If All Else Fails…
Refer yourself. By referring myself to Hostmonster we got about 90$ back I believe (it was a long time ago). There are tons of free trial offers out there that you can participate in, then even blog of experience if you want. NeverblueAds is full of free trial offers that you can refer yourself to and earn money. Some as high as 20$+. Just remember to cancel before the free trial expires.
Other websites like TreasureTrooper and CashCrate pay you to do the same thing, but they take a cut.
I think this years blogging resolution for many is to cut out the middleman. It has been ours.
BAYB Goes Direct with Advertising
Update: I had written this post, then gave members of our email network first shot at advertising. At first I intended for 4 advertisers, through the network I ended up getting responses from 5 people. The first banner is already being displayed by Andrew. Our advertising is already full and sold out. If you’d like to reserve space for next month please let me know. With such a success on the direct advertising we will be opening up another ad spot soon.
Looking at our adsense totals I noticed that we should be making a lot more money with advertising. One of our spots on single posts received over 11,000 impressions but only made about 5$.
Last night I searched and found a great adrotator plugin called WPAds that is exactly what I want. It rotates banners evenly in whichever spot you want.
To start I am looking for up to 4 advertisers to place their banners on our single posts under our comments section. Everyone who leaves a comment will see your banner. This should be especially useful for Comment Fridays. Our blog has 6x more comments than we do posts (639 posts and 4,231 comments).
Have I sold you on the advertising yet?
The banner dimensions can be anywhere from 125×125 to 250×250, basically any banner you have available. The price is only going to be 8$ to start and we’ll see how it goes. We also may look into selling our adsense space directly under the post.
Please leave us a comment if you are interested or contact me directly.
MyBlogLog Pro Subscription Winner
The MyBlogLog contest was good for them sparking interest back into the old community site. MyBloglog has lost some ground with other new sites coming up like BlogCatalog as well as Entrecard really being a force in the blogosphere.
The contest was even better for those who won, and were close to winning. Feedest edged out my friend over at SEOLogs, for the win. Leo from Feedest won loads of prizes and has also decided to give some of them away.
The first prize that has come up for grabs is a One Year Pro Mybloglog Subscription. The value is worth about 25$ and it basically just offers real time stats for your blog. On Thursday I received a message notifying it that we won!
Since winning I had to reinstall the code for MyBlogLog, I had removed everything completely. Might as well give MBL another chance!
Thanks to Leo for giving us the prize, we haven’t won anything in a while.
Who’s the Feedest?
Feedest is actually an interesting website, so I thought why not tell you a little bit about the site. Feedest is a website where you basically can share your blog feed. You can check out that Blog about your Blog page on feedest. It displays our feed as well as how many saves and views we have.
After you register to feedest make sure to save our blog and I will do the same for you. As you can see we haven’t had many views on Feedest however I believe the more saves and tags you have, the better it is ranked.
$70 Design Contest In Association With UK Webmaster World
Hi everybody, I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years.
I’ve been a bit busy over the festive period preparing to launch a new blog: Retro Garden, the only problem is I need a logo, so I launched a competition, in association with UK based Webmaster forum Webmaster World!
The prize is $70, with $50 put up by myself, and $20 put up by Temi.
For more details: click here!
(This contest is not affiliated with Blog About Your Blog)
Comment Friday for January 4th
Things are settling down around here, but we have another funeral to attend. My girlfriend Emma’s grandma just passed away. It’s been rough on Emma and her sisters, but everything is okay. With our hectic schedule I hope to get back on track this week.
Even with everything being busy that hasn’t stopped us from getting dugg and putting our entrecard on John Chow.
If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 50 entrecard points.
Leave us any comment you want, tell us about New Years or anything else going on. I have some upcoming posts about making money with affiliate programs, what else do you want to read?
Sponsor next week’s comment friday for only 2$
Advertising on John Chows Entrecard Widget
Bloggers have felt the greatness entrecard is, can be, and will continue to be. Entrecard has been able to increase traffic for all bloggers as well as allow them to expand.
We all know about entrecard and we all know about John Chow’s advertising. Just by being mentioned on his site will drive you traffic. He even has posts about advertising their advertisements. Lately thats what his entire blog has been about. So how about the advertising you don’t have to pay for?
John Chows Entrecard Widget
Late one night I was lucky enough to find that John Chows entrecard had room to advertise on. I wiped out my entrecard account and dropped 250 credits (it’s about 300 credits to advertise now) hoping to be approved. Within a few days it was approved and set to run Jan 2nd. Perfect.
According to the entrecard stats, John Chow sent us 83 visitors. That works out to be 3 credits per visitor. Since the credits are essentially free, I thought it was a pretty good “investment“.
What it also did was increase our entrecard price. Remember that your price is determined on how many people on average, drop their card on your widget. Basically I will be able to recover the cost of the widget, so it really is ‘free’.
John Chow has sent us the most entrecard traffic by far. Who’s sent you the most?
How We Were Dugg
It’s been a goal of mine for a long time to be on the front page of digg. I have gone to ‘great lengths’ and many hours spent promoting articles. I’ve even gotten my own account and blogaboutyourblog.com banned. However, before the new year came, my goal was achieved.
Step One
Well as I mentioned our blog is banned from digg, so you can’t submit any of the content to it. Mistake I know, but there are ways around it. The easiest way I know is a simple redirect. You know how you see and make redirects for affiliate links? It’s just as easy, just have to have another domain.
What I did was redirect from cfrais.com to blogaboutyourblog’s digg article. I’m not sure if anyone noticed, so there wasn’t any problem with it.
Promoting the Article
I have stressed that networking is very important for any blogger to be successful. This blog would be nothing without the team of authors, and the relationships I’ve built with my fellow bloggers online. Regardless of how big a blog is, you need to network.
Since networking is so important I’ve set up our own voting network. You can read more about our voting network. These networks are very underground and usually secretive. I may belong to other ones.
Another way to promote your digg is to hit up the freebies section at Digital Point. This originally got me banned, however there are better ways to do it. If you are redirecting like we did, it doesn’t really matter if you get banned. Just get a new domain to redirect from.
However to be safe don’t start a thread asking for a digg. Wait until other people do then PM them. Some don’t like this but it will keep you off the digg radar. Also, don’t hyperlink to your digg take out the “http://” so people have to copy and paste instead of clicking.
Watch the Traffic
It’s not as easy as it sounds, obviously it’s taken me a while to put this plan in motion. The sad part is that the huge surge of traffic will take down your blog. After about 1500 unique visitors within the span of an hour or so, our page was down. Before I could get it back up, I think the story was buried.
On our digg comments we received quite a few good and bad comments. Remember diggers can be harsh, don’t take anything too personally.
Best of 2007 on Blog about your Blog
It’s been a long and productive year for us. We have grown up into a great popular blog, as well as gotten some great writers and regular readers along the way. Pulling in about 10,000 unique visitors a month and 500+ RSS readers is nothing to sneeze at.
Daily Blog Tips listed their top posts of 2007, I thought it was a great idea to do. So I’ve done the same. I took about 4-5 excellent posts per month. Some were left out, but I did my best to give you some good reading.
January
- No Comments? Why Bother?
- This is NOT a sponsored post
- Confessions of a Blogging Veteran
- Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability
February
- 5 ways to get more comments and make you smile
- Why is it that people send spam still?
- Dodgy Money Making Schemes
- A few sophisticated directories
March
- Here’s a quick way to make your long posts more readable
- Displaying your RSS Feed Count: What is the Big Deal?
- Hey!? My Blog is a Transformer
- Hi My Business Name Goes Here and This is My Blog
April
- To tweak or not to tweak your blog?
- Finding Cost Per Visitor: Are Your Ads Paying Off?
- Are you using your RSS to promote your other blogs?
- The Benefits of De-Lurking
May
- It’s Not Always About Traffic
- Increasing Blog Traffic by Using HTML in Comments of Other Blogs
- 4 Steps To Becoming A Bad Web Parent
- Top Five Reasons for Blogging
June
- Join the iReply Revolution
- Round ‘Em Up!
- Make Money Online with SurveySpot
- Business blogs – how personal to get?
July
- 6 Great Tips for Hosting a Blogging Contest
- 5 Must Have Comment Plugins for WordPress
- Don’t Underestimate The Power Of Link Love
- 9 Reasons for a Blogger to Use a Desktop RSS Reader
- 9 Reasons to Use a Desktop Blog Editor
August
- 10 Quick Blogging Tips
- Using Craigslist to Promote your Website
- 6 Spanking New WordPress Plugins You Haven’t Seen
- 6 Firefox Add-Ons That Boost Productivity
September
- 10 Firefox Add-ons to Supercharge your Blogging
- Blogger/Blogspot Next Blog Warning
- Two Free Font Utilities You Should Check Out
- Bloggers Are the Biggest Copy Cats
- Isn’t Email Marketing Spamming?
October
- 5 Things You Can Do With Your New PageRank
- Blogging The San Diego Fires
- Affiliate Marketing With NeverBlue Ads
- Getting ‘Scammed’ Got Us Mentioned on John Chow Dot Com
November
- 3 Magazine Themes For WordPress
- Top 20 Contest Blogs
- Making Money With Videos
- Does McDonalds Pay More than Blogging?
December