When it comes to blogging there’s the question of making money and whether you should blog for money, accept paid reviews, have advertising, and if it actually works. Frankly, I’m experimenting with all of this myself. Can I promise you it works and it’s the best business in the world? No. Is it working for me today? Yes. Do I make a ton of money? No.
Here’s how I see it…I’m going to blog regardless because I just love the networking, researching, creative writing and learning. If I’m going to do this, I might as well make an income. Enough to pay a bill or two pay for my internet, hosting and anything else is just great. If I actually clocked my time spent verses money made, yes I’m making pennies per hour but like I said, I’d do it anyhow. I have many things in the works and many social experiments taking place that are being made into an e-book, I hope to have out for my first anniversary of blogging, September 2008!
I continue to get emails and questions about what services I personally use and how I am making money. Most of these are going into the e-book but I know that many readers are just moms like myself and to help save some of you time and money I’m going to offer a few suggestions.
If you have a newsletter I hands down recommend icontact. The reason being they have an auto responder system that works wonderful and this saves me time. Time is money. They have a great support team, easy to use templates, surveys and a great tracking system. Many systems don’t offer auto responders but icontact does. To read more about newsletters and whether they’re for you and your blog or business I recommend this reading an article from Pro-blogger.
Hosting
The wordpress hosting I chose was Aiso. They are completely solar powered and they don’t just buy carbon offsets. I run a green blog so I wanted 100% green hosting. They were more expensive but if you look at who uses them and that they never go down because of they’re awesome back up system, it is worth every penny. They’re service has been awesome and I personally know most of the people there on a first name basis because I call so often. Yes, you get a real person and that make the money worth it too!
Blog Advertising
Advertising is a tricky subject but if you look at who uses what and who’s making money it comes down to three options. 1) Google adwords 2) Sell your own advertising 3) Go with an advertising agency to sell ads on your blog. So what is best and what should you do? I do all three but I have the traffic so it works for me. If you do Google adwords you have to do some learning about how to optimize it. Again, I direct you to Pro-blogger. I personally have not optimized this avenue and make next to nothing with Google. I use blogads and they take 30% of everything I make but so far I like them. You have to get an invitation to join though. Most networks require invitations or 25,000-50,000 page views per month if not more. For selling my own advertising I use OIO Publisher because it’s a plug in and it works. John Cow uses it and he makes tons of money online. I think this is hands down the best way to go because nobody but you profits. Again, you have to have traffic to sell advertising. Traffic and how to get it is another topic for another day but just because you slap an ad up doesn’t mean you make money! So for OIO Publisher you pay a one-time fee for the plug in and then it’s yours. You have to be using wordpress.org for this and have a self-hosted blog.
Affiliate Programs
The next thing you can do is sign up to be an affiliate. I use share a sale and Affiliate Future and with great results. I only use what pertains to my site and I try to switch it up and not use what I see everyone else using. To make money with affiliates you really have to do a lot so it isn’t a great moneymaker for everyone, from what I can see. For more great information on how to make money as a affiliate, Sparkplugging is the place to go. Again, there has to be traffic, you need to put affiliate links in your posts and newsletters and work it or nothing comes of it.
Sell a Product of Service
Another useful tip, sell something yourself and this happens to be my biggest money maker and source of income. I have a business completely separate from blogging and I integrate it into my writing and blogging. Yes, it’s a MLM but it isn’t evil and neither are MLM’s! Just because you do a network marketing business doesn’t mean you have to hound people and be obnoxious but I’ll write more about this later. Donald Trump even admitted on national television that if he wasn’t doing what he was doing now, he’d do network marketing. People laughed at him and his response but he simply replied that the laughs explained why he was where he is and the people laughing are sitting where they are. Ponder that. This business allows me tons of freedom, no stocking and no inventory. As a Shaklee Independent Distributor and business leader I can teach others to do what I’m doing, make money from it and have a separate source of income from blogging. Multiple sources of income with this economy is necessary.
I have many more tips and things I have learned in the last year (almost) of blogging, internet marketing and networking. Such as moving to wordpress from blogger, blog design, search engine optimization, Google page ranking, social network sites, how to have a giveaway, how to find giveaways, starting a social forum and more. Until the e-book or next time (which ever comes first) happy blogging!
By Sommer
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