By that I mean when it comes to the promotion and marketing of your blog, you have to keep up with your fellow bloggers. If you ease up, take your foot off the gas and let things slip even a little bit, you’ll do more harm than good to your blog’s chances to make money for you.
One of the best way of keeping up the momentum and to enjoy yourself in the process is to go and visit some other blogs in your niche. That way you get to see what other bloggers are doing to make money and to see what they’re blogging about. If some of them have posted something you know a bit about, then you can leave them a comment.
That has a three-fold benefit for your blog.
- If they have a “do-follow” policy then you gain a valuable one-way inbound link to your own blog
- Other readers of those comments will see yours and if it interests them, they’ll click you link to see what you are writing about on your blog
- The owner of the blog will also see your comment and may also visit your blog out of curiosity and may even leave a comment for you
That all increases traffic flow to your blog. It also makes you some friends of other bloggers who are happy to have you visit their blog for the same reasons you’re happy for them to visit yours. In fact, reciprocal blog visiting is a great way for lots of bloggers to boost their traffic stats. That’s why so many of them belong to some of the blogging social networking sites, like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog.
So not only are you keeping up with the Joneses and all the other bloggers in your community, but you’re all helping each other to make money and to prosper in the promotion game too!
Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY
After a long break, it’s time to get back to the small series on the many and varied ways to make money with your blog. This instalment covers affiliate marketing.
I know I’ve already covered the workings of Clickbank in an earlier article, but what I didn’t cover is the actual nuts and bolts of using affiliate marketing directly on your blog to make money. Now it’s time.
Often, you’ll have a real good selection of affiliate products that fit nicely with the theme of your blog and now you want to display them to show them all off in their best light. So where do you put them?
Well, I’ve found that it is counter productive to put a whole long list of affiliate products right on the front page (or homepage) of your blog or website, as your visitors will most likely be overwhelmed with an advertising blitz that could turn them off your site. Better to display a small selection of your better selling products on your main page and have the rest well displayed in a sub-page.
You’ll see that in practice right here on this site.
The blog is the main page and where 99% of visitors will land first – it being the page first displayed when you type in the top level domain name in your browser (or link from a search engine or whatever). On the navigation bar below the header banner of the site is a navigation bar with sub-pages such as an article page and, most importantly from this post’s point of view, a “resources” page.
This “resources” page is where all the affiliate products that I promote on this site are located along with a graphic of the ebook (or product) and a brief review of the product with a link to the sales page. That link contains my affiliate code so that (assuming they haven’t got cookie disabling software running on their computer) the potential buyer will alert Clickbank to the fact that my affiliate link has generated the sale and I will be credited with the commission.
That’s pretty much how it works from a blog like this one which is professionally hosted so I have more control over what I put where. But you can still do it on a free blog by creating separate “pages” and using them to list your affiliate products and make money from them.
I love blogging, don’t you?
Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY
