How To: Become a four figure blogger, Part 2
This is Part 2 in the series How To: Become a four figure blogger. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1.
As I mentioned at the end of Part 1, there is a lot of money to be had in affiliate marketing. Depending on how much time you devote to it, you could easily surpass $1,000 in a year with a few well placed links on a high traffic blog. Even on blog with very little traffic, one or two conversions a month could bring in a couple hundred dollars.
There are other advantages to using affiliate programs. Most importantly, they diversify your income.
One of the lessons that I learned after a a year of blogging for an income was the danger of relying upon a single income source for your blog.
Darren Rowse, Problogger.net
Darren actually has quite a few tips up about affiliate marketing at http://www.problogger.net/category/affiliate-programs. If you’re interested in learning more, check out his site.
I’m going to focus on the basics, simple implementation, and why affiliate programs work.
Personal Experience
For the first 5 months that I had this blog up I was using the Six Figure Blogging (the inspiration for this series) and Podcast Bootcamp affiliate programs. They fit in perfectly with my blog because they were programs that other bloggers would be interested in and they were both run under the same website, so I could check all my stats and get all my checks at the same time.
The first thing I did was mention Six Figure blogging in a post and put up some custom made buttons that linked directly to the Six Figure Blogging course website and the Podcast Bootcamp website. I started getting click throughs immediately and within 24 hours I had actually referred someone who bought the Six Figure Blogging course. I dont remember exactly how much I was paid, but I believe it was around $100 for each person that bought the course. I ended up making about $300 in a week’s time.
Not bad. But it didn’t continue. As soon as the post fell off the page I stopped getting clicks on my link. I stopped making money, period. In the first week I made $300. In the next four and a half months I made $100, total.
What did this teach me? People don’t want to click on advertisements in your sidebar. Strategically placing affiliate links within posts gets a much better conversion rate. I’m not the only person who has discovered this - any professional blogger will tell you the same thing. People are much more likely to click on a link within a post than they are to click an obvious advertisement on your sidebar.
Get started with affiliate programs
Since you’re going to be writing 2-3 posts a week anyway, why not sign up for some affiliate programs and start including the links anytime you can?
My advice: head over to Comission Junction, create an account, and start looking at advertisers that will relate to your blog’s topic. It doesn’t make much sense to advertise computers on a blog about sports, but maybe there is an online sports mall that will pay you 10% of the money they make from people you refer to them.
Comission Junction’s website will explain everything you need to know. Another popular affiliate marketing company is ClickBank - check them out too, decide which one you like best or use both.
The great thing about integrating affiliate links into your posts is that you know exactly what you’re advertising, you know exactly how relevant the advertisement is to your content. It is also as “well blended” as it gets. You can optimize Google AdSense quite a bit, but it still looks like Google AdSense to a savvy blog reader. Affiliate links look like any other link in your post, and they get as many clicks as the other links too.
Affiliate marketing will not take any extra time once you sign up for a few programs. You’ll be able to integrate the links as often as you’d like and you have the potential for much greater rewards than a pay per click advertising system.
With a program like Six Figure Blogging, you only need to make about 10 sales a year to reach the four figure mark. People that are very good with affiliate marketing can make 10 sales in a day.
Other resources
Andy Hagans posted at Performancing.com about weaning himself off AdSense and turning to affiliate marketing. He provides some great insight into the difficulties and rewards associated with affiliate marketing.
So I started from square one. What type of site would work well with affiliate monetization? The answer (and I’m not saying it’s the only answer, but it’s the answer I found) is to build sites around the buying cycle.
Superaff.com is a blog dedicated to affiliate marketing tips, tricks, and techniques. If you’re thinking about getting serious about affiliate marketing, add this blog’s RSS feed to your favorite news reader.
Know of some other resources? Let me know, I’ll keep adding to the list.
Related Articles:
- How To: Become a four figure blogger, Part 3
- How To: Become a four figure blogger, Part 1
- Ecommerce vs. Content Monetization
- $100,000 from blogging
- I’m Posting At Performancing….
Dennis can you provide an example of what an inline (or in post) ad would look like. Are they just a hyperlink or an actual ad?