Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Notes from BWE08: Making Money Online With A Blog
I guess this is a little late, but better late than never. It has been a chore trying to keep up lately and yes, I do actually have enough material for two weeks worth of posts from BWE. But a lot of these will be about new products and some will be based on sloppy but very complete notes I took at the sessions.
This was the first panel I attended at Blog World Expo and the speakers included John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Shoemaker. Shoemoney was a little late and Jim Kukral had all of us in attendance tweet him that he sucked. Everyone laughed and some did. Hey, when do you get a chance to tell a top blogger he sucks.
The Affiliate Niche Blog Plan
Image via Wikipedia MMO Blogs
My blog is number 53 on the top 100 Make Money Online blogs. It has hovered right that number for a while. Amazing, considering that I have neglected this blog a lot. The reason: I have other blogs and while this one talks of making money, it doesn’t really make money iteself. I wiped banners out here and went back to my roots in affiliate marketing, leaving this blog a journal of making money rather than a “buy this now so I can make money” blog.
Who Gets A Cut
If you know your niche, that’s basically all you have to look at when you are searching for ways to monetize a site, along with "how big is the cut".
I didn’t start in internet marketing. I started before I had a computer in my teens with "Make Money at Home" offers. I never fell for any of them enough to sign up, but I got myself on every list I could. I would get an offer and follow the money trail in my mind. I realized why most MLM products are so expensive. Because everyone and his brother gets a cut. I approached it from the mentality of someone just getting an entry level job and telling his boss, "I want your job."
Blog Monetization Strategies
Last night I sat down and decided I wanted to list all the ways to monetize a blog. Not a list of websites, but a list of types. That way I could look at them all, weigh advantages and disadvantages, decide which work well together, and come up with a plan.
Up to this time, I have been an affiliate marketer. I have made a little money through Adsense, but this is nothing compared to what I made through affiliate programs. At the peak of my Adsense earnings, I was making about $1000 a month. But I used it to hedge my bets with people I drew into affiliate links. This was two years ago.
Monetization So Far and Alinks
This weekend was another research weekend, hence my last links post. I have been looking a lot at the alinks plugin.
This plugin allows you to assign urls to phrases within your posts. The plugin does it dynamically. It even has modules for such affiliate programs as Clickbank and Commission Junction.
By using this plugin, you can monetize your blog and link deeper to older posts at the same time. But I didn’t want to go about this manually, more like semi-manually.
So this is going to be one of my thought process posts where it go off on tangents trying to find an answer for what I am trying to accomplish.
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