Tools and Tips and Ideas for Monetizing A Blog




Well, normally, we wouldn't write about this on movieEVERYday.com, however, there have been numerous requests from other bloggers seeking ideas for how to monetize their blogs. Since movieEVERYday.com has been amazingly successful at both vastly increasing traffic to the site over 1000% in the past year + increasing the money earned, perhaps there is something to what we've done and from which others can learn.

This page will be organized as a series of tips with new tips added to the top (sort of like a blog within a blog if you will).

Tool / Tip / Idea #4: Get Paid to Write!

Yep, you can blog and blog and blog and never get paid. Or, or, or, you can sign up with a site that matches your content and topics to advertisers that want you to blog about their products, write reviews of their content, and will pay you as soon as they approve of what you do. You will want to work to make their concept fit with yours, don't accept a concept that you cannot because it won't seem real to your readers, which is not what the advertisers want nor should it be what you want. Some niches fit better than others, in getting loads and loads for potential work, but pretty much every blog will likely get some business. Your blog will be rated on some metrics to help determine if advertisers are likely to be getting their money's worth, but why not try it and see if you like it?

Here's one company we've worked with on occasion and found that we like quite a bit:

As you can see, they've got attractive graphics that are eye-catching and allow you to attract customers as well as good affiliate program from which you can earn extra cash!


Tool / Tip / Idea #3: Real News on Your site

Are you currently paying for a news feed from some great company that charges you fees for their news content? Well, those days are over with Voxant. Now you can get paid to deliver news stories, videos, text, and images on your site. This can be an incredibly valuable asset to improving the quality of your site. Plus, you can blog about the stories in ways never before possible. Instead of linking to a news story and then writing about it, you can bring the story to your blog, get paid for that, and then blog about it! These guys are changing the way that bloggers can profit.

Here is a link to their program so that you can find out more:

www.thenewsroom.com


Tool / Tip / Idea #2: Affiliate Marketing

Not sure what it is? Well, it's where you do a lot of work to help advertise other people's goods and websites for free. Huh? Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense (cents) at first. Affiliate marketing pays you ONLY when there is a sale of merchandise from a customer you fed to the affiliate site. So, you do a lot of advertising and you may or may not ever seen a dime of money. Still, if you are choosing a well-targeted product that visitors to your site are likely to find interesting, then you may see a fair amount of income. The commission the affiliate companies pay out varies from company to company. Some of these will also pay you a commission for getting others to sign up and/or give you a percentage of all their commissions--this is kind of rare.

Here are a few of the affiliates with which we have had a good experience:
[note: Legally, we cannot guarantee that you will have a good experience, and we recommend that you consider your affiliate relationships carefully. If you have legal counsel working for you, have them check out the agreements to be sure you can be in full compliance if possible. By listing sites here we make no guarantees of any kind or representations of any kind that you will or will not be successful in using them to any degree whatsoever. Some of them are ones from which we do get a referral fee, some are not.]

Amazon.com Associates

Amazon.com provides a robust program for affiliates with all sorts of bells and whistles from being able to keyword like to specific terms in a blog to keyword cloud widgets.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is an affiliate marketing clearinghouse. Rather than each company having its own affiliate marketing program, big companies can sign up and use CJ to handle their program. Lots of big names operate here with some payouts that are listed as being very good.

LinkShare Referral Program

Link Share is another affiliate marketing clearinghouse. Rather than each company having its own affiliate marketing program, big companies can sign up and use CJ to handle their program. Lots of big names operate here with some payouts that are listed as being very good.

Does your site have anything to do with celebrities?

Well, if it does, or even if it doesn't, but you think visitors will be interested in celebrities and possibly trying to contact them, this affiliate program from Contact Any Celebrity.com can supply you with a variety of links toward the goal of trying to get conversions and commissions.

Contact Any Celebrity.com -- 50% commissions!



Bonus Tip: One of the things that can make affiliate links more successful is if you have their material deeply embedded in your site (which is code for saying, "their stuff doesn't look like an advertisement"). A great example of this is using posters to add images to your blog. When visitors click the posters, they get taken to a poster company site where they can purchase the poster. Poster companies tend to have good commissions and long-lasting cookies (meaning if visitors don't buy today, but return later, it's still possible for you to get the commission as long as a set of conditions they supply is met).

AllPosters.com

Here is some good recruitment text from our friends at All Posters.com:
Hey Webmasters! - Make $$$

The AllPosters.com Affiliates Program is a great way to make money with your website. All you have to do is place links on your site to AllPosters.com. When your site visitors click on your links and make purchases at AllPosters.com, you earn 25%-30% of the sale.

Sign up today!


Art.com

Here is another poster company. This illustrates a recruitment banner ad that you can click to get yourself started if you decide you want to put poster links and images on your site.


Visit Art.com



Tool / Tip / Idea #1: Auto Advertisements

Get Google AdSense or Yahoo or some other SE (search engine) ads on your site right out of the gate. This will start bringing you even small bits of cash right away. Then you can fine tune with other things later.

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