i7o Media

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Another option to make money from your blog is to do paid reviews. Basically you get paid to review a company, service or product on your blog.

Here’s how it works

1. Sign Up With reviewme.com
Reviewme.com is a company similar to text-link-ads which we spoke about in Part 1. Once you have joined reviewme, you will be listed on their website. Companies, individuals, webmaster and product owners who are looking for some advertising for their service or product will pay anywhere between $40 and $500 for a review on your website. The cost depends mainly on the exposure your blog will give them. Reviewme will decide the cost.

2. Write and Publish Your Review
Once an order is placed by an advertiser, you will receive notification and given 48 hours to publish a review. Once you publish the review, it will be checked by reviewme and you will be paid at the end of the month.

The best thing about paid reviews is that you can be 100% honest. This is a review…..NOT a plug! There is a huge difference. The advertiser has come to you, so you can be as honest as you like. Remember to always think of your readers first and foremost! If the product or service is crappy, then tell your readers that. If the product is actually pretty good, then go ahead and recommend it to your readers. If the product is good, but has a few issues – tell them that. You get the idea.

Always remember – your reputation and integrity is of upmost importance, you need to build trust in your readers. You can choose which paid reviews you want to accept. If you really don’t want to put your readers through the agony of a crappy product review, then reject the offer.

Here is the annoying part – reviewme.com takes 50% of the payment. Whilst they have generated the advertisers for you, it is a hefty chunk of the profits. Here is what I would do….

3. Also add a Paid Review offer on your “Advertise With Us” Page.
We spoke about the importance of having an advertise with us page in Part 1. If you can generate paid reviews directly, you can make more money and you can charge the advertisers less. make it 75% of what you are worth on reviewme.com

Add this to your “Advertise With Us” page:

Package 3 – Sponsored Review
Cost:
What you receive:
Conditions:
Benefits:

If you are getting decent traffic to your blog, you will no doubt attract paid reviews.

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Paid advertising can be a great way to make easy monthly income on your blog. Many of the top bloggers make good money through paid advertising.

Here are the options:

1. Text Link Ads
You can join a company such as text-link-ads.com who will manage your paid advertising. Firstly you will need to create a “publisher” account. TLA will then decide the price of the ads on your site based on factors such as traffic, theme and link popularity. You will then go into the marketplace and advertisers can find you. You will be provided with a small piece of script which you will need to place on your site. Very easy to add this to a sidebar “text-widget”

Once an advertiser chooses to place a text-link ad on your site, they will pay the money to TLA management and the link will go automatically into the pre-defined link section on your site(usually in the sidebar). You split the revenue 50/50 with TLA and get paid on the 1st of every month.

2. Private Text Link Ads
This is the same method as above, however you cut out the middle man and keep all the revenue yourself. You will need to set up an “advertise with us” page on your site. On that page you will need to provide advertisers with details of your advertising packages.
- Cost per month
- What you actually get
- Availability
- Benefits

By cutting out the middle man(TLA), you will increase your profits on each advertising space, however you will need to track-down payments, manage the links and keep it all up-to-date. It can certainly be a pain in the butt, especially chasing up advertisers for monthly payments.

I would recommend you do both of the above. Most definitely join a network such as TLA as this will increase your exposure to advertisers. Also add the “advertise with us” page so you can get 100% payment and capture some advertisers who are actually visiting your site.

Another option is to check out related blogs in your niche. See who is advertising on those blogs, contact them and see if they are interested. Look at who is advertising on the best blogs in your niche – these will be the interested folks who have money for advertising.

Here’s what I would do - I would advertise at TLA and use this service for a few months. I would then contact the advertisers privately and see if they would like to pay 75% of what they are paying now through TLA. I’m sure they will agree. That way you make 75% instead of 50% and the advertisers pay 75% instead of 100%. Are you following? Advertisers save money and you make more money. 50% commission from TLA is ridiculous.

3. Banner Ads
You could offer a premium package on your “Advertise with us” page which has a banner advertisement in the sidebar, footer or the end of each post. You can charge more for these banners.

Some blog themes come with custom advertising space in the sidebar. If you have no advertisers, make a small banner “Advertise your company here” and add it to that space.

Most of all, I highly recommend you add an “advertise with us” page. If your blog has plenty of traffic, you should be making some easy bucks with paid advertising.

If you have low traffic to your blog, you will need to build it up before you will be able to attract adertisers. Nonetheless, you should still add your “advertise with us” so its ready to go.

Remember - great content = more visitors = more $$ from advertising. It all comes back to great content. Content is King!!

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

1. Featured Content Gallery
This plugins allows you to create a fully automated content gallery. The gallery can be placed anywhere in your blog and is fully customizable. Looks awesome on the front page of your blog, giving your blog a modern interactive feel!

2. ShareThis
A social bookmarking plugin which allows your visitors to easily bookmark or email a post/page. Fully customizable with the ability to choose which sites appear in options, exclude from certain pages or put it in the side bar.

3. Smart YouTube
Easily insert youtube videos into your posts or sidebar widget. Smart youtube is awesome because it supports high quality video, works on the iphone and allows videos to be viewed in fullscreen. Highly customizable, low on external resources and very easy to use.

4. Twitter Tools
If your not twittering, you should be! Twitter tools connects your wordpress blog to twitter. This plugin will automatically update your twitter with your new blog post title bringing twitter traffic and often retweets which can go viral!! Makes twitter life easy!

5. Disqus
Disqus is a blog comment management system. You have the ability to show unique avatars for each commenter, comments can be sorted easily, you can also reply directly to certain comments. It looks great, easy to install and it makes it a breeze to regulate your comments. It connects directly to facebook out of the box and you can use it in the sidebar widgets to reward top commentators.

6. Popularity Contest
Displays your most popular posts based on certain criteria such as views, comments, pingbacks. You can adjust the weighting of each factor to customize your own popularity.

7. FlickrRSS
A popular plugin, lets you display your flickr photos easily on your blog. You can add this to the sidebar via the widget.

8. DropCap First Character Wordpress Plugin
This plugin makes the first character of each post big(magazine style). Depending on what type of blog you have, this can look very pimp!

9. Subscribe Remind
This plugin will remind your visitors at the bottom of each post to subscribe to your RSS feed. It’s not that cool, but reconnecting with your audience over and over again via RSS – now that is the goal!

10. Digg Digg
Plugin that adds digg, twitter, yahoo buzz and reddit butttons with counters so that your readers can vote directly on your page. Pretty cool way to get some viral content going.

11. WP Greet Box
Create custom welcome messages for your visitors depending on which URL they arrived from. For example, if your visitors arrived from digg, you can remind them to vote for your post. Fully customizable.

12. WP Since Last Visit
This plugin will show previous visitors a small “New” flag when they return to your blog and there is new material that they have not read yet. Test this one out first as it’s not compatible with all themes.

13. WP-PostRatings
Give your visitors the opportunity to rate your posts. You can then display the most popular posts in a sidebar widget. Be careful using in-tandem popularity contest as they do a similar job.

14. AnyFont
Allows you to use any type of font you would like anywhere on your blog. For example, if you would like a particular style for post titles, then this would be ideal. You can use this anywhere in your blog.

15. Thickbox
A good way to add style to your pictures. If you have galleries of pictures, this plugin will pimp them up.

Listen: Upload and activate 1 plugin at a time!! Get the plugin completely working and customized before you move onto the next one. Too often I see people get excited with plugins – they download 20 of them, do a massive upload, activate, activate, activate, activate…..before they know it, their blogs are outta control with plugins.

Do one at a time, once you are satisfied it works, move to the next. Sometimes plugins cause problems with certain themes and if you upload them all at once, you will not know which plugin is the problem.