Blogging - How the Money is Made

OK…. So you now have 5 topics with which you feel fairly comfortable or in which you have a great deal of interest and would like to become an expert on. Lets get closer to selecting the topic, the niche within which you will become expert and upon which you will write your opinions, reviews, and pass on your knowledge.

Before you go leaping for the one closest to your heart you need to know if the topic is something that others are interested in. If one of your sources for coming up with your five topics was Amazon then it is. Now some people blog just for the shear joy of blogging and have no intention of ever making a penny at it

…THAT IS NOT YOU!

I don’t think it is a stretch on my part to make the assumption that the reason you are here is because you want to have a money making blog. We call that monetizing our blog.

Before going over your list and making that final decision there are a few things you need to know. How are you going to make money on your blog?

There are many ways but at the beginning we will concentrate on the very basic ones and that is through advertising and selling other people’s products. Each of these can be and will be expanded upon as we progress throughout the year. Lets just go over our potential money sources:

Advertising: The most common and easiest source of advertising is Google. Have you noticed on this page that there are ads by Google? How does that happen? Think of your blog as a publication, a mini magazine if you will. Now, what do you see on the pages of a magazine that you pick up off of the newsstand? Ads of course.

Google has many clients who want to place their ads on the net. Google is always looking for online publications in which to publish those ads, the important thing here is that publication contnent and ad content need to be complementary. The ads that Google places on sites are called Adsense and you will learn hot to get these on your site too. This is probably the easiest and fastest form of online income but to earn a four figure income from Adsense alone is a long stretch for beginners.

You can also have private placement ads, that is when a vendor comes to you and wants to advertise on your site. This is not likely to happen early on. You need to have at least some web presence and traffic before this begins to happen.

Affiliates: This is when you promote other people’s products on your blog, and when visitors buy those products through your blog, you will get a commission. When you were checking all those categories with Amazon did you notice that it is not just books and magazines that Amazon sells. You can become an affiliate or an associate of Amazon, so that if someone visits your site and then goes to Amazon and buys a product there, you get a commission.

How does this work. For ease of following, lets stay with Amazon Supposing you are a master embroiderer and you blog about embroidering. Check out the embroidery category under both books and magazines. Here is an example of an affiliate link for an embroidery magazine:. Hover your mouse over it, click it on and see where it takes you. Now if you decided to buy that magazine, Amazon would pay me up to 15% of that purhase.

You could write a review on the books on your blog, if your review reader buys the book from Amazon you will get a check. Magazine subscriptions typically cost more so your income will be higher and people tend to order magazine subscriptions because it is more economical than buying by the issue at the news stand.

There are many more sources of affiliates. Depending on the products you will be paid a commission ranging anywhere between 10% and 75%.

Now that we understand how we are going to make money on our blogs, review your topics. Which of those is most likely to sell? Here is what you need to do next:

1. For each topic chosen, go to Google and put the topic in the search bar. When Google delivers the results write down this information:

How many results (this will be in the hundreds of thousand and quite possibly in the millions)

Now, take a look at the Sponsored Links on the right hand side of the page. How many sponsored links are there? These are paid ads and indicate that there are
advertisers for your topic. Some topics have only a few, others have pages. The
important thing is to make sure that Google does indeed have advertising clients for your topic.

2.You can also do a search on Google for your particular topic by entering
embroidery lessons in quotes and add + affiliate . Will look like this “embroidery lessons”+ affiliate and you will get a list of vendors who have books, CDs, videos on embroidering and other
products that you can now promote on your site.

3. Go back to Amazon and search not just the books and magazines on your topic, but do they carry other products on your topic, is there anyone there selling embroidery thread, fabric with pre-printed designs, embroidery kits? Do the same thing with eBay

4.There are other sources of affiliates. I like going to Clickbank. Clickbank manages affiliate programs for many vendors. Same with Commission Junction, We'll go over these in greater detail later on.

Judgment Day is coming … patience is a virtue and the early steps help you set up a strong foundation. Soon you will make your choice

ACTION TODAY: Follow steps 1 through 4

Till next time …. Rip Along With Me.