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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.

We saved the best for last! When it comes to making serious money from your blog – affiliate programs are your cash cow.

Affiliate Marketing In A Nutshell
Affiliate marketing is connecting customers to merchants and taking a commission. A website owner will promote a product on their website and each time a visitor clicks the link to the merchant’s site and buys, the website owner gets a commission.

How do we find products/services to promote?
The best way to find affiliate programs is through affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and Clickbank. You sign up for an account, search the database of products/services, once you find the product you want to promote, you simply add the links or banner to your website.

How is it tracked back to the website owner?
When you sign up for the affiliate program, you will be given a special link which contains your affiliate ID, so it can be tracked back to you.

Types of Affiliate Incomes
Recursive – You may be promoting a monthly service to your customers such as website hosting. Often you will receive a monthly commission for as long as that customer is paying for the service.

For example – You may refer a customer to a hosting company and the customer signs up for a $20/month hosting plan. Each month you receive a $5 commission. Sure $5 is not much money, but imagine if you sign up 100 people during the year. Now you have $500 recursive passive income. You literally do nothing to earn this money, it just keeps coming in!

CPA(cost per action) – With CPA offers, you will get payed only once for refering customers. You can be paid if your customers buy a product, take a free trial, in some cases they only need to enter their email address into a form and you get paid.

I promote a membership product on one of my blogs, each time a customer takes a 7 day trial membership for $1.95, I get paid $30. Not a bad deal at all! The membership site converts enough “trial members” to “full members” that they can afford to pay $30 CPA.

It is always a good idea to know the product well before you start recommending it to your visitors. It needs to be relevant to your blog niche and genuinely useful to your visitors. Don’t promote crap or you will lose visitors.

Right now, I am not promoting affiliate offers on Bizboink. I am focused on building up quality content and a loyal following. If I were to start promoting products, I would promote products such as:

• Hostgator – A website hosting company. They have an affiliate program, it is recursive. I use hostgator myself and they are a fantastic service, so I would have no problem promoting them.

• Wordpress Themes – There are some awesome wordpress templates packages which I could promote. I have bought many of them, so I know which to promote.

• SEO software – I could promote keyword research tools such as Micro Niche Finder. I use this software everyday and it has helped make me alot of money. I would provide video tutorials on how it works and how to get the most from it.

That should give you some ideas on how to promote affiliate programs.

Always Remember
As a blogger you are not here to solely promote products – you’re primary focus is your readers. Focus on providing value and entertainment, if you can do that, you build readers trust and loyalty and when you occasionally promote a product – you will have your readers respect and attention.

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!!