Day 5

Today, you’ll learn about monetizing your blog in different ways.

So we’re going to talk about MO-NEY 😀 Isn’t this exciting?

People, me included, make money on the Internet in different ways.

My ways are AdSense, affiliate marketing, my own products, and paid reviews.

Today, you’re learn how to add AdSense to your blog and get paid when people click on your ads. You’ll hear a little about affiliate marketing. And you’ll discover paid reviews, which can mean money to you in the next few days.

AdSense

When you use Google, you’ve probably seen adverts on their site above and to the right of your results.

Google make money, when people click on these ads, because the advertisers pay Google for each click they get.

A lot of home pages also have AdSense on them. That’s because Google share the click price with the owners of these websites. In fact, Google pays 68% to the site owner.

That is NOT the best thing about AdSense.

The best thing about AdSense is that it’s so easy to deal with.

You only have to create the code once and add it to your blog, and Google will serve you different ads, automatically, and related to the content of your blog.

There’s one thing I would like that you keep in mind. And that is: Who’s really paying you when you have AdSense on your blog?

Google?

No.

You will get paid by the advertiser. Not directly, of course, because he’ll pay to Google, who’ll pay you, but indirectly. But the advertiser is the one who pays you.

That means you should keep his best interest in mind, or he’ll stop paying you.

He’ll only want genuine clicks, for one thing. So don’t try to trick somebody into clicking on your ads.

It’s against the rules to ask people to click on your ads, and it’s against the rules to have pictures next to your ads without some kind of line that shows that the pictures are unrelated to the ads.

You can also only have a certain number of ad blocks on your blog. How many? Google changes rules from time to time, so keep it at a minimum, and read the rules. You can find them here:  Terms & Conditions . I’m afraid that I cannot tell you what they say at the moment, because Google, in its divine wisdom, thinks that when you live in Israel, you’re fluent in Hebrew. Well, I’m not. But apparantly no way to switch to the English version of their terms and conditions.

But enough talk. Let’s see if we can get you an account, shall we?

How to Get an AdSense account

The fastest way to get an AdSense account is actually by having a blog at Blogger, so you’re in luck! (No, rule luck out – you took action! Bravo!)

So log into your Blogger account, and go to Earnings on the scroll-down menu.

Click on Get started to sign up for AdSense.

Click on Create account.

You’ll be asked about the account type (Individual or Business), and your country. Choose the appropriate options.

Fill in your name, address and telephone number, and check the policy fields, when you’ve read them.

Finally, click on Submit Information.

You’ll have to wait a while, before you’re accepted in the AdSense network.

If You Already Have an AdSense Account

After you’ve clicked on Get Started (see further up), your screen will look a bit different. You’ll be able to use your existing account with Blogger.

The easiest option is to use the email you logged into Blogger with, so click on Link AdSense account to the left.

When Your AdSense Account is Approved

You should now be ready to ad AdSense to your blog. So log in again, and go to Earnings.

I cannot tell you exactly what you’ll see at this point, because I already have an AdSense account, and it’s against Google’s rules to get a second one.

You should see an option to show ads on your blog.

If you choose to show ads on blog, you have four options, and I recommend that you use the top one. It will give you the best AdSense placements and therefore more clicks, which, in turn, leads to more money.

The orange spots are the ad-placements.

That’s it. Click on Save settings (top right), and you’re done.

After a few minutes, you should be able to see ads on your blog.

Paid Reviews

Paid reviews are great. You’re getting paid to blog. How cool is that?

The better  your blog is, the more you’re getting paid.

Now that your blog is new, you’ll not get as much, but so what? Money is money 🙂

I use this place myself. It’s called BlogsVertise.

I also, sometimes, use a newer place, but suddenly they don’t accept new blogs.

BlogsVertise is the old I’ve received a lot of relevant jobs from them, but it probably depends on your topic as well.

You sign up and give them the URL to your blog.

At BlogsVertise, you’ll need a link to a disclaimer.

Log into your Blogger acount, and click on Pages on the scroll down list.

Click on New page and pick Blank page.

Write Disclaimer in the title, and open a new browser tab and go to http://www.easyriver.com/free_disclaimer.htm

Fill in fields, and copy everything from the result to your disclaimer page.

Publish your page, and click on Disclaimer -> View to find out where Blogger put it.

Copy that link (click at the URL in the address bar and type Ctrl+C), and paste it in the related field on BlogsVertise.

At BlogsVertise, you’ll get a lower price, until your blog is 90 days old. At that time, you’ll have to ask them to take a look at your blog and upgrade you to a higher payment rate.

Next, you’ll have to wait. Your blog will be pending, until somebody takes a look at it and decides either to approve or reject it. Hopefully, your blog will get approved at both places.

Update: My blog was approved on BlogsVertise after about 15 hours.

When your blog is accepted, you’ll get assignments that should be related to your blog’s topic. It isn’t always. I’ve gotten plenty of jobs for sites who sell t-shirts. But well 🙂 I’ve managed to write about them.

If you get an assignment, try to find an angle that would fit your blog.

When I wrote about one of the t-shirt sites, I told my readers how they could brand themselves by using unique t-shirts. It ended up being one of my most read blog posts.

Read the assignments well. Often, you’ll only have to write 200-300 words (maybe less), but you’ll have to be careful to include the links with the anchor texts they ask for. You can check Day 3 on this blog workshop to see how you create a link with an anchor text.

Make sure to ask questions in the comments, if there’s something you would like to know more about concerning the paid reviews.

Affiliate Marketing

You’ll love affiliate marketing. It’s all about selling other people’s stuff.

Imagine this: You add a link or a banner to your blog, somebody clicks on it and buys the product you’re linking to. And you get paid.

Well, to be honest, it’s rarely as easy as this, but it happens.

There can be written many books about affiliate marketing, and there are already a lot of them out there, so as you can imagine, you will not learn everything about affiliate marketing here.

But you’ll learn enough to get started.

Like I said: affiliate marketing is selling other people’s stuff, so you just have to find those other people, and start selling their products.

How do you find them?

Well, it depends on your topic. You can sell things from Amazon by becoming a partner there, or you can find products on ClickBank.com.

In short, you join either Amazon as an affiliate here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
and/or join ClickBank here: http://www.clickbank.com/accountSignup.htm

When you pick a product to promote, you should ALWAYS choose one of high quality. Teach your readers that they can trust you.

Write about Your Chosen Affiliate Product

The most effective way to make money with affiliate marketing, is by writing about the products you have chosen.

It doesn’t have to be much. But you have to write something.

I’ve had great success with only a headline and a few words of introduction to a product. But if you can write more, it’s good.

If you’re supposed to write about an Amazon product, you can find inspiration in the product description as well as in the customer’s comments.

When you write about your product, think about what questions the reader might have about it, and what objections he might have.

He might be thinking: This is too expensive, or this will take up too much room, or this will be too difficult to clean.

If you can guess what objections he might have, you can tell your reader why these are not a problem.

You can tell him that even though the price is high, he’ll be able to use this products for years to come. And that it doesn’t take up much space in the kitchen. Or that it’s really easy to clean, because you can put it in the dish washer.

Things that people would worry about.

How to Link to an Amazon Product

Once you’ve joined the Amazon affiliate program, you’ll get a nice and handy toolbar on top of your browser.

The two features you’ll probably be using the most from the toolbar, is “Link to this page” – to create your affiliate links – and “Your Earnings Summary” to enjoy the fruit of your labor.

The toolbar will only be visible, when you’re on Amazon’s pages, by the way.

You can search for a product on Amazon’s pages, just as if you were a client. When you find something that could be interesting in regards to your topic, you have a little research to do.

• Check how many stars it gets from the clients. I prefer products that have at least 4 stars.
• Check what people are writing about it. If there are hundreds of comments, you cannot go through them all, but look at the ones who gave the product 1 and 2 stars, and some of the comments from people who gave 4 or 5 stars. You’ll want to know both the good and the bad about a product, before you decide if you’ll promote it.

For my case story blog, I found a nice toy cookware set for toddlers. It’s not that expensive – $19.99 – so I’ll not make a lot of money per sale. But that might not be a problem.

When people buy through your Amazon link, you earn 4% from your first sale, but the percentage goes up from there, until you reach 8.50%. And it’s easier for people to add a $19.99 product to their cart than a $499 one.

To get the link for the product I’ve found, I click on Link to this page on the Amazon toolbar.

This will open up a dialog box, from where you can grab the code to add to your blog post.

There are MANY ways to do this, but we’ll only do the most simple ways in this workshop. So I recommend that you either take Text and Image, Text Only (for a link) or Image Only.

For my blog, I’ll use the image only link, so I click on the right tab, and then on Highlight HTML. Now you can copy the code (Ctrl+C) and paste it into your blog post.

Oh, by the way, you’ll often be able to choose between a small and a large image.

You’ll have to click on HTML on your blog post first, just like you did on Day 3.

If you need some inspiration, you can see my finished blog post here:

http://toddler-parenting.blogspot.co.il/2012/10/cooking-with-your-toddler.html

Get an Affiliate Link from ClickBank

When you’ve joined ClickBank’s affiliate program, you can find products to promote on their marketplace.

After you’ve logged in to your ClickBank account, you’ll see Marketplace at the top. It’s a small link up there.

Do a search for products for your niche.

You’ll get very few indicators from ClickBank about the quality of a product. I can only recommend that you look at the sales page, and that you try to contact the product creator and ask for a review copy.

Remember to tell him who you are, and give him a link to your blog and tell him that you’re going to write about his product and promote it from your blog.

A lot of product creators want to help affiliates, because they know that if you like the product, you’re going to promote it, and it could give him more sales.

After you’ve chosen a product from the marketplace, you can click on Promote to get your “hop-link”. That’s really the affiliate link you need to put on your blog, and again, you’ll have to click on HTML first, before you can add the link.

After you’ve clicked on Promote, you’ll get sent to a dialog box where you should be able to see your account nickname already added. If it isn’t there, you must write it in the top field.

The lower field is for advanced use. You can write anything there, and you can use it, later, when you check the statistics to see which blog posts or articles you sell your articles from.

For instance, I have The Ultimate Parenting Toddlers Today Package for sale on a blog already, and if I want to check if it’s selling from my Toddler-Parenting blog, I can add a tracking ID (I could write TP – or Toddler, or whatever). When I see sales for this book, I can verify whether they come from my other blog or from this.

You don’t need to use the tracking ID. It’s totally up to you.

Click on Create to get your code.

That’s It

You are no longer a newbie. You’re an Internet marketer on your way to your first dollar – the first of many, I hope.

There’s one thing I would like to repeat here at the end of the course.

I think it’s the MOST important thing of everything you’ve discovered here. And that’s:

HAVE FUN

Don’t do anything just for the money. Money are nice, but not everything.

It should be fun to make money online. And it’s my philosophy that it’s better to make a little less and have fun doing so, than to make more money and hate it!

All the best,

Britt