Blog Income Life

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

Welcome to Sunday Morn Musings.  This is my weekly free fall – writing about whatever it is that occupies the mind on a Sunday Morn.  The idea of a “no topic” posting is the stepchild to a blog I used to write:  Four O’Clock Thursdays which is still up there if you want to check it out – more likely, I will republish some of those posts here over time.  On Sunday Morn Musings the topic may be about blogging but  probably not.

Welcome to the first edition of Sunday Morn Musings.  A weekly post without a niche, continuity of topic or an agenda of any sort… well, that last one is not true.  There is an agenda.  It is to share, to tickle, to even provoke – the main thing is, I hope that my Sunday Morn Musings will get you to thinking, and hey, maybe I’ll be able to throw in a bit of humor here and there, or at least some witticism –  that would be a major for me, I’m not known to be a ha ha type of person, it is one of those things I try to work on as I keep entering the annual humorous contest at my Toastmaster club year after year and have  yet to win the top spot and to move on to the next level of competition … I just think that the club I belong to has a lot of “ringers”, at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

It’s a grey sort of Sunday morning.  The kind that makes you want to sit curled up on your sofa with a good book in one hand and  a cuppa still steaming coffee and indulge in some good reading.  I like reading.  I love books.  My spare bedroom is both my office and  a “library” a wall lined with shelves and shelves of books.  I have always wanted to have a real library in my home, you know, the kind where the books go from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall and of course there would be one of  those ladders that moves on a track so that you can reach the top shelves of your library.  Hmmm…. how would I categorize them, organize them?

As it is my books are currently organized in my own higgledy piggledy way.  Books I buy and read for pure pleasure: the best sellers, the authors that I like, the autobiographies and historical novels, the literary prize winners  - they are all at one end of the wall slid onto the shelves alphabetically by author.  I try to leave wiggle room at the end of each shelf so that I don’t have to go rearranging the books when yet another is added and needs to be slid into the proper alphabet slot.  It’s getting tighter and tighter.  I think I am going to have to buy another bookshelf and start on another wall … and that would mean a lot of rearranging!

At the other end I have the books that will make me grow – personal development, financial savvy type stuff, internet marketing.  I have made room at the bottom of one of the bookshelves for the internet marketing courses that I have bought, and the myriad of CD’s  - takes up 3 cram filled shelves if you must know (and then there are those that reside on my computer). This second grouping of books is relatively new in my life.  I have always been an avid reader of mysteries, romance, history and intrigue and even a bit of sci fi but the books on personal growth, on getting ahead in life were introduced to me well into my adulthood.

How did I get introduced to this genre of writing and what is it about these books that keeps me  going to the bookstore for more?  Certainly they are not particularly well written – at least most are not, no Pulitzer Prize winners amongst this lot, even if they have hit the bestseller list. Years and years ago, my personal trainer Nina casually mentioned that she was reading The Artist’s Way and recommended that I read it too. Now Nina – you’ll come to know her here – is one of the most gentlest of people that I know, yet, there is nothing ambivalent about her.  She has a quiet way about her that means business. Of course I went and bought the book.  Of course I immersed myself into it.  Of course I did the exercises.

Thus began my addiction with the  self improvement industry. If you haven’t read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron yet I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is a great excursion into self re-discovery.   Get your own copy.  You’ll want to write in it and as the years pass, periodically you’ll want to pull it off the shelf and do the whole dang thing all over again!

What about you?  Do you have a bookshelf?  What books have you got there?  Do you have a favorite?  Or is it a CDshelf (my husband has one of those).  Is it mostly music?  Of course, why bother with a cdshelf anymore – there are mp3 players and ipods and all sorts of gadgets.  Share your thoughts on books and authors and music and artists. Best………………Valentina

The three main stages for earning an online income are:

1. Blogging is the best introduction to internet marketing.
2. Affiliate Marketing is the best introduction to making serious money.
3. Developing your own product is THE best entry to online riches

Last year my focus was blogging – this year it will be on affiliate marketing. Stage three will be another year.

Just as with blogging there are fundamentals that you need to understand and implement if you want to be successful in promoting your selected affiliate products. There are people making serious income from affiliate marketing and you can too.

Blogging gives you a strong foundation and a basic understanding of how the world of the internet works.  As a recap, in the year that this blog has been up we have covered how to

- pick a niche topic for your blog
- choose a domain name
- select a platform for your blog
- set up set up hosting
- start posting
- submit articles to article directories
- get affiliates for your niche market
- set goals
….. more.  Those are just the main items.

Affiliate Marketing is one of those “disciplines” that internet marketers choose to specialize in and can be integrated with your blog – in fact blogging is often used as a marketing tool for affiliate marketing. In my view it is the natural progression as the next step in your online marketing career.

For a quick review on affiliate marketing please reference these posts:

Pump Up Your Blog Income with Affiliate Marketing – 04/11/09

How to Find Affiliate Programs for Physical Products- 12/11/09

Residual Income – The Holy Grail of Affiliate Marketing 13/11/09

You will notice that on this blog I have several banner ads – except for ABCs of Blogging (which is my own ebook), all the others are affiliates. What that means is that if anyone visiting this blog clicks on one of those ads and buys the product I will be paid a commission and that might happen from time to time, but to really maximize the potential income that these products offer, I will need to do more than just have them on this site.  I will need to market them.

The above articles should give you a basic understanding of why affiliate marketing is an excellent source of income.   If you have not read them yet I encourage you to hop on over and read them now.

The next post will cover five critical steps to successful affiliate marketing.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Increasingly people are turning to blogging as a means of earning an additional income.  The reasons vary but I venture that the economic meltdown of 2009 was a major motivator. Sadly many jump on the bandwagon expecting instant results – and who can blame them, what with all the ads promising the money truck to roll in overnight!

I was speaking with a retired gentleman a few days ago.  He took early retirement because he could.  His income was almost entirely based on his stock portfolio.  With last year’s debacle he finds that he now has to look for a job, not exactly a promising prospect.  He knows I blog and asked if this might be a good direction for him.

It might be.  He brings a wealth of knowledge from the corporate world.  He could launch a business to business blog, start a paid subscription newsletter, build up traffic and subscribers and sell ad space on his blog and newsletter.  He’s a quick study and I have no doubt that with laser like focus, consistent effort and bulldog tenacity he would succeed.  But it wouldn’t be overnight.

When speaking with would be bloggers who want to earn an online income, my advice to them is to keep the big picture in the background, and work towards small achievements that are part of the picture.  Yesterday’s post was on 5 milestones that are easy to achieve and a good starting point for any blogging career.  One of those milestones was to eliminate one bill.

Intuitively the mind jumps to the biggest bill – the mortgage, or car payment.  But what if instead of the big bill, you decide to tackle the smallest one first?  Here is what you do:

1. Make a list of all your standing order bills along with the monthly amount
2. Pick the smallest bill and make that your first target
3. When you eliminate that bill, take the next smallest one and add it to your blog income goal.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I’d like to take credit for this process but I believe I first heard it from Kevin Wilke of Nitro Marketing Its brilliant and here is why I think it is so:

1. It’s doable.  You are not starting out to conquer Mt. Everest, just a local hill.  You can relate to it.
2. It’s friendly:  you don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to scale this little incline in your neighborhood – just the will to step out and walk it.  Maybe you haven’t done any exercise for a long time and the top of the hill is a ways off.  Never mind, daily effort eventually brings you to the top of the hill.
3. Success:  When you look at your standing order of services/payments, I bet you’ll find something that is less than $10.  Mine is $1.96 for a membership to Problogger’s Forum (I got in at the first offer – even at $5.95 it’s a good value).  Well, that was easy.  I have several recurring monthly fees that are in the $9.95 bracket – bet you do to.  Decide which one you want to topple first.
4. Success builds on success.  A funny thing happens when you first experience success – your personal energy changes and that changes you forever.  It may be just $1.96, but that is one bill that your blog income is paying for and suddenly your backbone strengthens, suddenly there is a new will and resolve that keeps you moving to the next post and then the next.

Soon the process becomes a new habit – it’s now deeply embedded in your DNA, trust me.  The car payment and the mortgage?  They too will topple.  The debt?   That too will be erased as your blog income grows.

To An Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

A strong blog income does not happen overnight – for that matter what is a “strong” blog income?  For some a thousand dollars a month is manna from heaven, for others it is just a drop in the bucket.  The difference between the first and the second is where you are in your blogging career and how many milestones you have passed.

What does a blogging career look like?

If you are not currently employed, at some point or another in your life you have been.  When you got your first job you needed to present some credentials:  a diploma, a degree, or some experience at the very least, preferably a combination of the lot. Indeed, acquiring each credential was in itself a major milestone in your professional career.  The same applies to blogging.

While it is easy to start a blog, developing a blog income is an entirely different matter.  For serious newbies who want to become professional bloggers it is important to learn the most essential of the basics involved, just like you had to learn your alphabet, so too do you need to learn the ABC’s of  Blogging for Money.  After getting through the basics you need to keep your eye on the next step, or milestone.  It is a way of monitoring your success and keeping yourself on target.

Your success path will have many, many milestones but you have to get started somewhere.  Here are five easy ones to begin with:

1.  First 30 posts:
This is your entry into the world of blogging.  It tells the internet that you are serious.  Do you know that up to 90% of all blogs ever started have been abandoned after only a few posts?

Thirty posts also sets the tone for your blog, a culture of your own begins to emerge.  Now it will have an appeal to a certain audience. You begin to develop a style.  Blogging will always be a work in progress but this is your beginning, one to build on.

Hint:  post the30 as quickly as possible – one a day if you can, three a week at the very least.

next step:  100 posts.

2.  First 50 visitors

When you first begin to blog you will feel like the Lone Ranger.  No one knows who you are, no one drops by, even the spiders and bots are ignoring your efforts.  But lo!  One day the stats show that your site had a visitor, and the next day there are two.  For some the cumulative 50 visitors will be quick, for others it may take a month or even more.  Nevertheless, it is an important notch in your belt.

Next step:  first 50 visitors day

3.  First comment

This can happen before the 50 visitors, especially if you have promoted your blog amongst family and friends.  More than likely if you, like most bloggers, have decided to keep your newly embraced blogging career as your best kept secret from friends and family, the first comment will take a little bit longer (or a lot longer).

Getting comments on your posts is important.  It is a vote of confidence by your readers and a signal to the search engines that your readers like what you write and are willing to take the time to interact with you.  This is big in the eyes of the bots and spiders that come crawling through your posts.

There are strategies that you can employ to help this along.  Gabe Young over at Free Blog Help has posted an impressive lists of things to do to encourage comments on your blog.  I certainly found it helpful and rather than writing the list here, I encourage you to hop on over directly to his post for the whole meal deal.   “How I Get More Comments Than Blogs That Have 10 Times More Traffic”

Next Step:  Implement Gabe’s list, rinse and repeat.

4.  First Dollar Earned

Earning your first dollar on the internet is a validation that you can earn more.  It is so important that Ed Dale who hosts the annual 30 Day Challenge makes that the foremost goal of that free course.  If you have not participated in the 30 Day Challenge I encourage you to do so.  Every year in August Ed Dale puts up his 30-Day Challenge. The good thing is you don’t have to wait till August, he leaves it up for the entire year and you can go through it in your own sweet time, take months if you want to.

Next Step:  Eliminate one monthly bill with your blog income

5.  PR1 – Google Page Rank 1

While there may be  life without Google it is a difficult one.  Google is the world’s largest search engine and confers page ranks on blogs and sites from 0 to 10 -  the higher the better.  Yes, you can be below 0, it just shows up as “-“ when you look at your stats.  Page Rank, PR of 1 is a good starting point.  Google only updates a few times a year, so if you have been blogging for months and still nothing from Google, don’t despair.  Your tenacity will eventually be rewarded.

Next step:  PR2 and upwards.

There are other milestones that you will aspire to, but these are  good building blocks and should be included in the goals section when developing your blog income business plan.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

December they say is a dead zone for blogging, and particularly so the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  With that in mind I am quite pleased that on review Blog Income met its main goal for the month.

The goal for December was 200 visitors – DONE and bettered by 8.   What was interesting about December is that the traffic by and large was very even.  The search engine percentage however plummeted to an embarrassing 2%.  I had previously noticed a month over month decline in search engine results and mentioned it in my reviews.    Earlier this week I posted on bad links. My friend who found the bad links in the categories section thinks that this may have a strong bearing on the downward search engine results.  Now it seems I also have some dead Contact Us, TOS and Privacy pages so those need to addressed.  I’m thinking that this may have happened when I changed templates.  Hopefully once all the links are live and pages are up, this statistic will improve.

Staying on the conservative Darren Rowse plan of 10% – 20% traffic growth per month the goal for January is 250.  I’m going to stretch it to 300.

I did have a bit of an income in December – even Adsense delivered a smidgeon and an affiliate sale.  As mentioned in my last review however, I have decided for the time being to put the earnings aside and concentrate on traffic.  One thing at a time.  When that gets good, then the next one.

A reader who had downloaded my ABC’s of Blogging for Money wrote way back in September

“Absolutely Great !!!!!

I have just finished reading your ABC's..........

I believe your book is the best and easiest to understand of all the info
books on this subject that I have ever read over the past couple of years
or so.”  RD, Kitchener ON. 

That same reader was very disappointed when the results for September were posted a few days later.  Blogging is simple, but it is not easy.  When I started this blog I had no idea where it would take me.  I am not a guru, not even an expert (yet); what I am is an apprentice.  My ABC’s e.book was borne of information gleaned from taking courses, this blog is borne of experience and gained knowledge and the desire to share and to learn.

Let’s grow and live an Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

As one of the first investments in your blog income business for 2010 consider signing up for an offline bootcamp for online smarts.  Have you ever gone through a hair tearing blogging experience? You know, you go through the tutorials, put up the blog on Wordpress, check it, blow on your fingernails, polish them and give yourself a pat on the back.  Hah!  Success! … or so you think.

Monday, I am going through my Inbox and there is an email from Twitter advising me of a direct message from Steve Atwal:

“Valentina, happy holidays! Just checked your Blog – very nice, but lots of bad links. Buzz me if you want to chat over coffee..”

Steve and I belong to the same Internet Marketing Mastermind Group.  As mastermind members we of course support each other.  I know that Steve is an IT and an IM type  (good combination to have) and am at once pleased and upset; pleased that he visited my site, upset that there are lots of bad links.  Yes of course I buzz him.  It just so happens that we both have time and within the hour we are chatting over lattes at the local Starbucks, laptops up and running.

I visit my Blog Income Life and am horrified when a series of 404’s keep showing up in my categories.  A quick check in the categories section in my wp-admin shows that they are all set up properly.  Steve has another idea and quickly zeros in on another possible problem.  He has me go to the Settings, and walks me through several options.  It’s like having a personal trainer.  Within minutes the problem is corrected!  MINUTES!

Frequent visitors here know that I am a self avowed non-techie.  The mere thought of anything beyond the barest minimum in the world of HTML, c-panel, FTP and what have you is enough to give me a nosebleed and a crushing migraine.  I have in times past spent hours, no, really, HOURS on fixing a small problem and here, within minutes the problem was solved.

One of the issues at hand is that many of us who are into internet marketing are not into tech fundamentals.  We lose a lot of time trying to right a small error, time that could be put to better use.  It’s just like when we first got our computers, we learned by pecking here and there even though there were plenty of hands-on  introductory courses available.  How much faster would we have been able to navigate our computers and put the many available tools to use had we attended those introductory courses?

Returning to the question posed at the start of this post: have you ever gone through a hair tearing blogging tech related experience?  I have no idea how long those links were dead or if for that matter  they were ever live.  Steve holds a hands on bootcamp for people just like me. It is exactly what I need – a series of hands on evenings at the end of which I will be in the comfort zone when working with my computer , no more 404s or other strange messages that leave me gazing in clueless wonder at my  screen.

If you are a non-techie type who is blogging to earn an online income I encourage you to find a Steve in your backyard.  Register, tuck laptop under arm and heist yourself off to  a bootcamp to brush up on your online navigational skills.  Guaranteed.  You’ll be glad you did.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

The sun is streaming through my windows.  Hmmm – they definitely need some washing, but in the winter!  Even here in mild Vancouver washing windows in the winter is a futile exercise, not because it’s cold, but because of the rain!  No sooner are the windows clean than the rain “washes” them again, leaving them splattered with raindrops.

Had a wonderful Christmas.  Quick jaunt to LAX for a few fun days with my daughter, back in time for local festivities.

Typically my Sunday mornings are given to musings on whatever it is that  captures my thoughts on any given Sunday morning. Today it is my blog income life that is top of mind.  As the year draws to a close I find that I am examining my blog income life in greater detail – both in terms of the blog itself and indeed, the life that I am leading because of blogging.

As mentioned in a previous  post, I am nominally pleased with the progress of the blog and am confident that it will continue to improve in the coming year and beyond.

Now the life.  The money truck has not rolled up the driveway so drinking fine wines and dining out on epicurean delights has not happened with any regularity yet. I do spend a good deal of my time writing, oh heck, most of my time.  Blogging is addictive and I love it!

One of the things that keeps niggling on my mind is time.  I am fortunate that I derive enough from my businesses so that I can spend a lot of time writing.  Reading is also something I enjoy.  I have an ever lengthening list of books to read.  On the list for the longest time has been The 4-Hour Workweek.  I never bought it – other books kept taking precedence – until last week.

Whenever I fly I buy a book at the airport bookstore.  Last week I was on my way to Los Angeles – that is a good two and a half hour flight, enough for a good read.  I walked into the bookstore and what should be there front and center but The 4-hour Workweek!  Expanded and Updated yet!  A whole100 pages more than the original, of course I snapped it up.

Days later I am visiting Pat’s Smart Passive Income Blog and lo!  The 4-hour Workweek is prominently featured again. The Universe is sending me a message, right? Right?

Now it’s got me in a conundrum.  Of course I buy into doing less and getting more – who doesn’t?  The idea I have nurtured whilst taking internet marketing courses  was that I would build an online business that would allow me to be anywhere I wanted to be at any time and if I needed some additional funds all I would need to do – as the gurus say –  is press “send” and make money.

Reading Tim Ferriss’ book however has put a whole different spin on my idea.  My business plan for 2010 is pretty much complete.  Throughout the year I always tweak as needed. I suspect that much of that tweaking will be centered around The 4-Hour Workweek.  Dan Lok , a local internet marketing wunderkind once told me that he worked like the devil the first year in internet marketing, but now he is down to 4 hours a day, 4 days a week (he is in his seventh year in the biz). Maybe I can just “tweak” down to not working past a certain hour in the day for starters but still have better and better results.

For now, from my mental meanderings to yours … what’s on your mind when it comes to the time you spend blogging?

To an Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Something different today but very important. If you are blogging because you want to develop a blog income, it is that time of year to review your current situation and set goals for the coming year.  In corp speak that would be working on your business plan.

Why is goal setting important?

The most obvious reason is that it gives you something to work towards, a destination that you want to reach by the end of a certain time line and it must be committed on paper.

Why on paper?

One, the very act of writing something down has neurological implications.  There is a connect between the brain and the writing, a greater commitment and a message to the brain that this needs doing.  The goal is then accepted and submerged into the sub conscience.

Two classical studies underline this importance of writing down your goals.  The first dates back to the 1953 graduate class of Yale.  Armed with impressive degrees the graduates were eager to take on the world, to redefine the meaning of success.  Twenty years later the graduates were contacted as a matter of interest to measure their level of success.  While most were found to be doing well, a small group stood head and shoulders above others – a mere 3% had achieved enormous financial success, more than that of the 97% combined. When interviewed further one commonality was found amongst this elite 3% group: each one had written down their goals, something none of the others had done.

A subsequent study at Harvard had similar results.  The year 1964. Once again all graduates stated that they had lofty and clear goals to achieve.  Only 5% took the trouble to write down their goals.  A follow up twenty years later showed that of the 5% who wrote down their goals, 95% achieved their goals, while of those who did not write down their goals, a mere 5% did.

Goals can have different time lines:  lifetime, 10 years, 5 or maybe just one.  Daily factor in as well.  Goal experts recommend 5 year goals, with checkpoints along the way, usually at the 3 year mark and 1 year mark.  They can be complex or simple.  I like simple.

Set a goal for each area of your life for 2010.  Make it doable but not a gimme – it needs to be something that you have to stretch for.  Start with the current situation, and end the year with where you want that situation to be.

In terms of blogging my goal for Blog Income Life for this year was to be at a four figure income at the end of 2009.  I had nothing to base this on.  It was a figure I thought would be nice to achieve.  It’s not going to happen.  What I have achieved however is a stronger understanding of the business of blogging.  On review I know the mistakes I made, I know what works, I know what I need to concentrate on to make the desired income.  I now have a base from which to work for my 2010 goal.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned is that an income goal is not the best to get started with, I would leave the income goal to a longer term.  Here are some benchmarks that may help you with your goal setting

-         frequency of posting:  3 times a week or more

-         first 100 visitors

-        first 1000 visitors per month

-         first 100 subscribers to your newsletter/email list

-         backlinks:  1000 backlinks

-         first $100 from adsense

-         first affiliate sale

-         first affiliate campaign

-         first 1000 Twitter followers

-         first e.book written

There are plenty more but the above should get you started.  Begin with where you are right now and determine where you want to be on December 31, 2010.  If your current situation on traffic is an average of 5 visitors per day, you may want to look at an average of 100 visitors per day.  Now make a plan for achieving that.

What will it take?  What do you already know on generating traffic?  What more will you need to learn?  Where can you get that information?  Is there a Traffic Generating course that you can buy?

I subscribe to The Goals Guy to plan the year ahead and to keep me on track with my goals.  When you draw up your plan for achieving your goals for 2010, make sure you set up review dates, I make mine quarterly.  It is a good practice to see what is working and what is not.  For that which is not working identify, correct and take action.

Here’s to great goals and great achievements!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
The cheese is in the goal.

Since my last posting on affiliate marketing I have had readers email me with several questions.  The two that I will address today are:

1.  Why affiliate marketing
2. Where do I find affiliate products?

1. Why affiliate marketing?
Just like I think that blogging is the best way to get started in internet marketing because you learn the basics and build on from there, affiliate marketing in my view is the obvious next step if you are to build a blog income.  What I like about affiliate marketing is that it is a “done for you” step, yet, there is enough new stuff to learn and apply if you want to do it right that it will definitely pack on some internet marketing smarts.

The done for you part is that you do not have to develop a product of your own – someone with a proven track record has already done that.  Your job is to find products that are on the topic of your blog.  For instance this blog is all about blogging and my current focus is on affiliate marketing,  so the ad that you see on the left sidebar is  on blogging and the one the right hand column is  on affiliate marketing.

Now affiliate marketing is more than just putting up ads on your site.  If you want to make money on your affiliates you have to learn how to market them.  I will be touching on the basics of affiliate marketing on this blog in the future, but if you want to get your mits on some powerful, easy to follow instructions I highly recommend Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon – its not going to break the bank and will get you on the road to understanding affiliate marketing and how to profit from it.

2. Where do I find affiliates?
My last article on affiliate marketing focused on digital products.  Today, lets talk about physical products.  You can have a mix of both on your site.  For example, if you have a site that has to do with dogs, an example of digital affiliates would be dog training, or an ebook on how to ensure a healthy and beautiful skin and coat for your dog.  A physical product might be a special type of training collar or a pet balm that soothes and heals a dogs skin problems.

The big difference between digital and physical products is the commission.  With digital you can make as much as 70% (50% is common), while as with physical products a 25% commission would be tops, more likely in the 15% range.  That’s why I recommend a mix and match, you’ll be appealing to those who want informational products and those who want to buy a physical product.

If you haven’t already done so, Google Adsense should be given some of your valuable virtual billboard space.  Google will place ads congruent with your topic, they could be digitial products or physical.  You need not do anything with them.  When visitors to your site click on the ads, Google will pay you a small commission.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, click on the ads yourself or have friends and family click them on for you.  That is both unethical and contrary to your agreement with Google.

Now trust me, Adsense is not going to have the money truck
come up to your driveway, not even a Tonka!  You need to start monetizing your site with substantial revenue sharing affiliate products.

There are plenty of ways to find affiliates in your niche market – Amazon sells more than just books.  Just go to www.amazon.com, scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a section there that says “make money with us”.  Click on the Associates button.

Commission Junction www.commissionjunction.com is a good affiliate directory for  physical goods.  As with all affiliate directories you need to open an account.    Linkshare www.linkshare.com and ShareASale www.shareasale.com are two others that you might want to look into.

Not all affiliate products are listed in directories.  If yours is a niche product you can search for it by using your favorite search engine using the keyword for your niche and the word affiliate with it  i.e., “pet ointment affiliates” and you will be taken to a page with lots of options for you to choose from.

This bears repeating – make sure that when you select an affiliate that it is trustworthy and delivers on its promise, a 100% satisfaction guarantee or money back is just a starter.  I recommend that you do some due diligence before putting up a banner on your site and going the full 9 yards in promoting it – remember reputation is often judged by association.

Here’s to your profitable affiliate marketing!

Valentina
The cheese is in the affiliates

If you are blogging for money, then you have opened your own blog income bank, or, as I prefer to call it, The Bank of Blog Income.  I rather like the thought and the image it brings to mind, but I tell you, I am absolutely, positively in love with the notion that blogging and banking are the same thing and I don’t just mean the money.

What with all the hullabaloo on money and banks these days, I decided to attend a seminar on wealth creation. To get us thinking in the right direction, the speaker started off by telling us about the rule of 72.  You’ve probably heard about this but just as a refresher, the rule of 72 estimates the length of time it will take you to double your money at a given compound interest rate by dividing that rate into 72, so, if your interest is 12%, you divide that into 72 and the answer is that it will take about 6 years to double your money.

The interesting thing with this rule is that once you begin to double your money it begins to take on a snowball effect as each year thereafter is a rolling 6 years.  That’s when your money begins to grow at increasing rates of speed.

It struck me then that a blog is much the same.

Never mind the paltry interest rates banks pay us today.  Just stay with me.  The more frequently you make deposits into your bank, the better the balance.  The better the bank balance, the more interest accrued each year which means more money.  The early deposits are the most powerful even though they may be smaller than later ones.  The early deposits are the ones that gather most steam.

That’s what got me thinking that a blog is just like a bank – your bank!  The most basic fundamental of a blog is posts, consider them as deposits or investments of time and talent.

The more frequent your posts, the more notice your blog will get from the search engines which in turn means more traffic which then turns into conversions or sales.  Its hard work at the beginning and at times may seem that you are standing still maybe even going backwards.  Eventually consistent effort begins to pay off: traffic increases, visitors begin to post comments, your blog begins to gain credibility which means more traffic.  It’s a numbers game from there on – more traffic, more conversions be they Adsense, affiliate or sponsored ads.

Just like the example that our seminar presenter gave us on money doubling every so many years, your blog results will be more significant if the hard work is put in at the beginning and by beginning I mean it could be a year, two or three.  From there on as your results multiply, the amount of time and attention given to the blog can be reduced somewhat and still bring you growing results.

Here is what I really like about this, the investment/deposit is your time.  Everyone has  the same amount of time.  How you use it determines how you live.   Carve out some time, take it away from watching TV and put it towards growing your blog income. It’s the best kind of return on investment that I can think of.

Life gets good.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging is the big cheese!