$800 per month method with Google Adsense

I'm going to show you, step by step, how you can make about $800 per month with adsense. It's so easy that even a teenager can generate cash from this.

First, let's set up what you need: 1 website or a landing page with a domain and hosting, an adsense account and a Craigslist account. You will need 20 minutes of your time everyday as well. 20 minutes per day to make $800 per month! Not so bad!!

Since this is involved Real Estate foreclosure, the first thing you need is a domain with the word "foreclosure" in it. So, go to Godaddy.com (or any other domain site or use one of yours) and in the search field, use something like "word foreclosure" or "foreclosure word". An example would be "searchforeclosure" or "foreclosureguide". Sky's the limit with the word available out there. Plus, take a dot com instead of a dot net or dot info. It will cost you less than 10 bucks so no biggie here.


Once you have your domain, you need a hosting to host your website files. Go to hostgator.com (or any other hosting). Plans start at less than $4 per month. So it's cheap.


Now, for the files, let me show you how to make your landing page. Search for a foreclosure website on Google. I found "my foreclosure tips dot com". You can see it looks complete and professional. And there are 3 areas of adsense on it.

Once you found a website, go to your browser's tools tab and click on "source" or web developer and view source if you use firefox. Copy/paste the code, insert it to Notepad and save it as a dot htm (or html) document. You're done. You have you landing page. Make the links not clickable in your code and change the adsense code with your adsense code so you can get paid. Email me if you need some help here.

So, so far, you have a site with a landing page, a domain and your hosting.

Now, go to craigslist dot org and register for an account. It's easy, fast and free. No big deal here.

What you need to do now is find the appropriate type of home picture depending the city you want to post in craigslist. Let's suppose you post a home in foreclosure in Buffalo, NY, you don't want to use a mexican style home from Phoenix, AZ. People will see right away there is something wrong. So, if you want to post a home in foreclosure in Buffalo, go to google images and search for "Buffalo house" and you'll see a bunch of pictures of local homes there. Same thing for each other cities.

Once you have your pictures from 30 or 40 different major cities, where you get more traffic than smaller cities, you can post it in its own city. Type something that will catch people attention: "Foreclosure - this pool home must go - price at $89,900 - will go fast, act now". Then, insert your landing page URL code so people can go to your website to see the home. Except there is no home in your landing page. That's when they click all over to have more details of the home. And they will click on your adsense as well. And you're done!

I post 5 ads everyday. But you can post more than 5 ads yourself. But for me, 5 ads is about 20 minutes of time because I change the picture of the home each time to have fresh pictures. And since this is targeted traffic (people really looking to make a good deal buying a foreclosure), I have about $2 for each 100 visitors. I have days that make $40 and days with less. But 5 ads - 20 minutes/day is averaging $800/month, which is not bad.

Take action and make money now!

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Google update

Please, we are sorry for not updating The blog today. Google had an Update which had a negative effect on our blog.
We are working on it and Hope to be Back within The shortest period we can.

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COMMENTING ON POSTS

We are sorry for not being able to make comments on our blog.
We have fixed the issue and want to inform you that you can now leave your comments on posts.

Thanks for being there.

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Earn BIG by Selling Small- 7 Lessons I learnt as a Fiverr Level 2 Seller

Not boasting but just a truth…. I am one of the busiest landing page seller on Fiverr (LOL!)

In last 27 days I’ve sold about 50 landing pages. And as of now, I’ve been getting 2-5 landing page orders daily.

I know… for majority of the newbie sellers, getting started on Fiverr is a pain. Because newbie seller has to compete with other big guys who already had big reputation there. So if you are one among those newbies, this article is for you.

1.Be prepared before listing

Selling more gigs is not a rocket science. However, there are 3 factors that encourage buyers to order your gig. Here they are

Factor #1. Position of your gig on the search result

Position varies time to time. Even if you are top seller, your gig will not be shown at the highest position every time. Your gig listing will get maximum exposure if yours is a new listing. And if you fail to get more orders, day by day your listing will get less exposure or it will be partially removed from the results.

Factor  #2: The image/video you displayed

Understand what buyers are looking for and how to stand out from the crowd with your video or image you display.

The image you displayed itself should convey the purpose of your gig and encourage buyers to order your gig. So spend some time to make it attractive.

Factor #3: The title and gig description

Title play a big role than description.

The title of my landing page gig is I will design landing page or squeeze page for MAXIMUM CONVERSION for $5.

Here, the term maximum conversion helped me a lot. Marketers started hiring me as they are looking for increasing their conversion rate.

2. Remove gig listing if you fail to get any order for first 7-14 days

Search results visibility on fiverr works based on a simple principle. It is to give opportunity to as many as sellers and help them sell their gigs instead of promoting only few big sellers.

So here is exactly how Fiverr search visibility works.

Imagine that you created a specific gig now. As a new gig, your gig will get good exposure on the search pages category pages and on other pages. Fiverr will check how great the gig is performing.

If the gig performing great, you will get consistant periodical exposure in a day. But if your gig performance is worse your gig will get lower visibility and will be partially or fully removed from the first page.

So if you could not  win any order in 2 weeks better to remove the gig listing. Create a new gig and try changing the category or other elements and test which works well.

3. Start selling related gigs

just interrelated!!

Because I started getting request from my potential clients now I am also providing related gigs/services on Fiverr.

Apart from landing page design, now I also provide ebook cover page design and header design. As many people are giving away free ebooks on their landing page these gigs also have higher demand among my clients.

So start selling related gigs on Fiverr.

4. Learn the upselling principle

A couple of months ago, I read an article from my blogging buddy Greg Narayan. The article discusses about importance of upselling.

Though, I am not new to the upselling principle this post deeply explain it. I highly recommend you to read it once  if you’ve not yet read it. So here is the article: The Shot Glass Technique: How to Upsell for More Conversions

Simply, upselling is an art of asking an already interested costumer if they want a little more.

In real life, we experience upselling in many ways. Here are some excerpts from Greg’s post.

Who else upsells to us (in real life)? Let’s see:

1. Restaurants: When a waiter asks us if we’d like some wine with our meal, or a bit of dessert after, that’s an upsell. Usually we say yes and end up spending more, though we might not realize it.

2. Hotels: Receptionists are trained to ask if we’d like access to the pool, a premium movie service, or a nice bit of room service. If you’re already staying in a hotel, why not indulge?

This simple principle helped me to earn $20-$50 per day consistently.

5. Money Lies on Higher Levels

Since I got level up, almost 50% of Fiverr income is from extra gigs

Fiverr is not just a $5 crap. Its real business and a good game. So if you played it correctly you can make really big money from it.

Before leveling up, I used to sell landing page gigs for only $5. But now, I have been selling the same gig of landing page for $30 with some small extra gigs. That is 600% increase!!

6. Maintaining 100% gig rating is harder

As people could buy gig for $5, most of the buyers are not serious buyers. Some of the buyers hype about their product or services but while asking about requirements, they will not be so clear.

So these guys are real head ache for any seller.

But one thing you should always remember is that treat your customer like a king. Behave like your customer is always true.

If you could not understand your buyer, ask for more clarification or cancel the order by mutual agreement.

Nothing is worse like late delivering a work. Once you get a negative feedback, know that it is for life. You can never get 100% rating again.

7. Instant reply is always better

Before purchasing a gig, some buyers used to contact more than one seller who provide same services.

So once you’ve seen a message, reply instantly.

In most of the cases, the order will goes to the seller who replied quickly to the buyer.

Bonus tip: Avoid terms like money, email, skype, payment etc, while listing your gig

According to Fiverr ToS, you should not contact your buyer or make payment outside Fiverr.

So avoid using words like money, email, skype, payment etc. if you don’t really needed it.

If you are a seller who sell private coaching on fiverr, you may need skype id of your buyer. No problem at all.

In fact, there is no restriction for using such words on your gig page.

If you use any of those words your gig will be submitted for review before it get published. That’s only the problem

Source :wpblogtips

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BULDOZER AND REFUSE DUMP TRUCK CONSTRUCTED BY AN SS3 STUDENT

Awesome! I'll say. You will have to beieve that The works in The pictures above were made by an SS3 student whose dream is to become a Mechanical Engineer. Master Echezona built a locally made electric engine bulldozer and dump truck. This is breathetaking. He is exhibiting his works to attract sponsors so as to take it to some better level.

Abeg, sponsors make una dey show.

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Making Money Because of Your Blog – Indirect Methods

We now turn our attention to ways of making money from blogging that are more more ‘indirect’ in nature – or how to earn money because of your blog rather than from it.

Many of the following methods are the result of the profile and perceived expertise of the blogger themselves (whereas many of the direct methods mentioned previously are less reliant upon this).

Building a profile as a blogger doesn’t happen quickly and starting a blog with some of these hopes should be seen as a long term thing. My own experience in this area is that now after 18 months of blogging here at ProBlogger that it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve had opportunities open in most of these areas.

• Consulting – when you are perceived as an expert on a topic you will find that people naturally come to you for advice – some of them willing to pay for it. Some niches are probably better positioned than others for their bloggers to get into paid consultancy work of course. I spoke with one blogger recently (blogging in a business/technology field) who was able to charge himself out at $600 per hour to give advice to a large company. Interestingly I’ve heard of a number of companies in the last 6 months who are developing VOIP services that bloggers will be able to add to their sidebars to enable them to be called by readers for consulting. The systems would have per minute rate on them to automate this consulting process.

• Employment Opportunities – Just this last week PR blogger Steve Rubel announced that he’d been hired by a bigger PR firm. While he didn’t say it explicitly in his post I suspect that one of the reasons for him landing the job was the profile he’d built over the last year and a half from blogging. Steve’s case is not the only one – bloggers are increasingly being targeted by companies because of their demonstrated abilities in their field of expertise.
• Business Blogging – Similarly there are some businesses who employ people to blog for them either as their main role or part of their role. One example of a company who employed a couple of bloggers was Vespa who now have two blogs. BloggerJobs is one site worth following if you’re looking for these types of jobs. Most of the jobs there are from blog networks but occasionally they include businesses looking for bloggers also.
• Book Deals – Some days as I read through the RSS feeds that I follow it seems that every blogger I read has a book either in progress or coming out. Once again it’s about being seen as an expert in your field – if you can achieve this you will find publishers are more receptive to having an idea pitched to them and at times will even seek you out. This is becoming more and more common with publishers as they are seeing not only some great writers but that many of them already have large amounts of content on their blogs ready to be pulled together into a book!
• Offline Writing Gigs – Manolo from Shooeblogs recently landed a writing gig in the Washington Post Express after he was discovered via his blog. These types of opportunities can be in the form of newspapers, magazines, trade publications etc.
• Online Writing Gigs – Similarly some bloggers also land jobs writing for other forms of websites as a result of being discovered from their blogs.
• Selling e-resources – I wasn’t sure whether to classify this as direct or indirect (and depending upon how you do it you could probably go either way) but some bloggers are leveraging the expertise they have in an area by putting together their own ‘e-products’ such as e-books, tele-seminars, courses etc and selling them to their readers.
• Business Partnerships – One of the benefits of blogging about a niche topic that interests you is that you will begin to connect with others who have similar interests and expertise. As you interact with them it’s amazing to see the opportunities for working together that arise.
• Speaking Opportunities – Once again this is dependent upon the topic you’re writing about but some lucky bloggers end up with all kinds of opportunities to speak at conferences, workshops and seminars on their topic of choice. Sometimes they are freebies, other times the conference will cover costs and on other occasions there are speakers fees.

If you’re planning to use some of these indirect ways of making money because of your blog it’s important that you think seriously about building your own profile and credibility as a blogger. Think about the types of people that you respect and look to as experts an consider what they offer in their fields.

These people are generally original thinkers that not only report what others are doing, but who provide answers and vision for their industry. They are also often well networked and have the ability to draw others along with them.

What does this mean for your blog? Here’s where I’d start:

• provide useful content that shows an understanding of your niche.
• network within your niche. Work on being connected with other key players (big and small).
• use your blog not only to report and rehash news but to also show initiative in proposing solutions. Be proactive in your blogging and lead the conversation rather than just react to it.

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Positioning your Adsense Ads

 The amazing thing about the Adsense advertising system is how one simple change in positioning of your ads can have a profound impact upon the earnings you receive from it. I still remember a fateful night about 8 months ago when I learnt this lesson and doubled my income overnight (no this isn’t one of those posts where I’m selling something – relax).

It was 10.30pm and I was about to head to bed when on a whim I decided to shift my Adsense ads from the position that I’d always had them at the top (banner position) of the blog I was working on at the time. I shifted the ad to a new position and then got distracted with something else and forgot about it.

A few hours later (I got very distracted) I again was thinking of bed but decided to check my Adsense stats for one last time before shutting down my powerbook – imagine my surprise when I found that my click through rate was 40% higher than normal (and so was the earnings for that time of night)!? At first I thought I was dreaming, then I considered that maybe Google had made a mistake, then I panicked that someone had been randomly clicking all my ads – and then I remembered the repositioning of ads that I’d done a few hours before.

Needless to say I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake excited by the potential that I’d just unlocked in my blogs, inspired by the fact that I could make the same changes to all my other blogs tomorrow, kicking myself that I hadn’t done it earlier (what a missed opportunity) and wondering if there might be an even better spot to try putting my ads.

The following morning I lept out of bed and checked my Adsense stats again to find that my click through rate was even higher than the night before and that I’d stumbled upon a way of doubling my income – literally over night.

So what is the magical, secret position to put your Adsense ads? Someone even emailed me tonight offering to pay me to reveal the secret. Hmmmm – maybe i should hold an Ebay auction and offer the information to the highest bidder!

No – I’m a nice guy – you can send cash if you want to but I’m not into secrets and am always (well usually) happy to share what I know. The ‘secret’ was simply to move my ads down from the banner position into the actual post itself. At the time Adsense only allowed one ad placement per page, these days they allow three (like I have on my blog here) – so now you can actually keep your banner ad and also put one inside your content.

So why do ‘in content’ ads work better? The answer is pretty obvious – in fact its quite literally staring you in the face as you read this…..you’re reading this….your eyes are trained upon the content of this post. What better place to put ads than the place your reader is pretty likely to look? Now keep in mind that different websites and blogs tend to have different results when it comes to where their readers eyes are drawn to (see this fascinating blog for some studies on this) but it is generally accepted that the first paragraph of content is generally reasonably well read of most pages.

Of course there are some who argue that this isn’t an ethical thing to do – putting text link ads into the content of a blog – I’m not going to get into that argument here except to say that in my opinion blog readers are usually smart enough to tell what is content and what is an ad (the Ads by Goooogle lable is enough for me). All I’m saying here is that in my opinion and experience, the positions that generally get the highest click-throughs are within the main body and content of your blog.

I’m not really telling a massive secret here – if you look at most of the top earning blogs out there you’ll find that most of us are using the same strategy with our ad placements. There are slight variation on the theme between us but check out some of these blogs use of ads within content and you should see what I mean:

• Engadget – ads placed after a post and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
• Digital Photography Blog – ads here are within content at the top of posts. Another ad can be found at the bottom of posts before comments.
• Mobile Tracker – ads at the end of posts and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
• Gizmodo – ad at the base of each quote on individual pages and between posts on the main page.

Of course they are all variations on a theme but there is a pretty common theme there i think.

I will say this however – not all blogs are the same and each one of my blogs vary in degree to which they prove this point. Sometimes the click through rates between blogs vary incredibly despite the fact that the ads are in exactly the same position. Obviously its not as simple as just sticking an ad into the content of your blog – its worth experimenting and tracking your results. What works on one blog will not always work on another.

In my next post on this topic I’ll answer the question – ‘can you have too many adsense ads on a post?’ and ‘when does more actually = less?’

There are probably two main ways of answering these questions. The first one is from the point of view of aesthetics and the second is about cold hard cash and whether it will earn you more money to have more ads or less.

1. Aesthetics – probably the most common complaint I hear against Adsense (and other types of ads) is that advertising is an eyesore and ruins the design of a page. I’ve read post after post of people complaining that they do not want to be exposed with ads and especially offensive to their sensitivities are pages that have ads all over them.

I have some sympathy for this view and its something that always weighs heavily on my mind as a blogger – how many ads are too many ads? The beauty (probably the wrong work in a paragraph about aesthetics) of Adsense is that it is customizable and ads can be made to blend into or contrast the design of a page. Even so, the more ads you put on your page the higher the chance you have of offending the those who are advertorially (I know its not a word – I’m being post-modern) sensitive.

Related to this is the theme of your blog. I have some blogs that I only serve one ad per page (or even no ads) simply because I don’t feel its appropriate to commercialize the blog at all.

2. Financial Considerations – believe it or not – but having more Adsense ads on your site can actually mean you earn less income from them! I know this sounds stupid and some of you think I’ve finally lost it – but its true, I found out for myself last week. Let me tell you the story.

Last week I decided to ‘tweak the ads on one of my blogs’. The blog in question had two ads per page, one in a banner ad at the top of the page and the other in a position within the content section of my blog. The ad within the content was my primary ad – the one that performed best (as previously discussed). Adsense allows three ads per page so the logic in my mind said ‘three ads will perform better than two’. So I cleverly decided to ad a small ad to my side bar (similarly to the one I have on this blog at present over on the left). I added it (with a label saying it was an ad) and smuggly went to bed imagining that I’d just earned myself a few extra dollars a day.

The next day I noticed that the Click Through Rate of my Adsense ads was lower than normal overall – so were earnings. I was not too concerned because it does tend to go up and down from day to day. The following day I noticed the same thing – lower CTR and lower earnings. Day three and I was starting to worry a little that something had gone wrong as the trend continued and I had little idea why. At first it didn’t even cross my mind that the new ad might be having any impact.

I checked the channels feature of Adsese at this point and realised that only one of the many channels that I track was lower than normal. It had halved its normal rate! Of course the channel that had decreased was the primary in content ad from my blog (my cash cow of the blog).

It only took me a few moments to work out why this had happened. You see the ad that I had added to my side bar was stealing ads from my primary ad in the content and leaving it with few, if any ads to serve. Let me explain.

The way Adsense works if you have more than one ad running on a page is that it will serve ads to the ad that it finds first on your blog. It fills up the first one first, the second one in the code second and the third one in the code third. If at any point it runs out of relevant ads it stops serving them and you either end up with a public service ad, an empty space or an alternate ad (depending upon how you configure your set up).

On that particular blog the code was in this order.

- 1 Banner ad

- 2 Side bar ad

- 3 In content ad

You can see what was happening – the banner ad got first priority and was always served ads. The side bar ad almost always got ads and the in content ad got them some (50%) of the time. Of course this left my primary position empty half of the time (not a wise move).

You can probably guess what I did faster than a speeding bullet – side bar ad was gone very quickly and the banner ad didn’t last long either. Now the in content ad is always full and I have moved a secondary ad further down the page. CTR and revenue are back up to normal (in fact they are up a bit).

So – take home message time. When designing the ads on your page rank your ad positions in terms of priority. Which spot do you want to get the first ads and always be full? Which are secondary spots that don’t matter so much if they are empty from time to time? Then check to see which order they appear in the code on your site. This is easily done. Simply select the ‘view source’ option in your browser. This should open a window that shows you the back end of the page you’re viewing – find the google adsense code and work out which is which (you should be able to tell by the size of the ad). If your primary ad isn’t the first one you might need to make some changes either to where you place your ads or to how your blog is configured and serves the code.

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What Advertisers Want: 6 steps to Attract Advertisers to Your Blog

How do advertisers determine whether a blog is worth their marketing dollars? Promising blogs start out with must-have elements — interesting content, loyal readership, eye-catching design and regular updates.

But what’s missing? Here are six ways bloggers can become more attractive to advertisers.

Cross-Media Integration

Advertisers looks at many metrics when considering advertising on a blog — page views, daily visitors, average time on site, CPM, among others.

One of the growing metrics on an advertiser’s radar is a blog’s social media page. Advertisers not only look at how many followers a blog has but, more importantly, also look at the conversations being held on the blog’s page and social media channels. Can advertisers see themselves being a topic of conversation? Are open-ended questions being asked around a certain product?

When advertisers see a blog’s large following on Twitter, they see their ROI increasing. Incorporating sponsored social media posts (i.e. sponsored tweets) into your offerings will make a blog’s brand more lucrative. Outside of social media, consider other media. During the past five years, I’ve made more than 50 TV appearances that focused on blog content. As a lifestyle blogger this was a natural fit, and this is an attractive option to heighten exposure for your advertisers.

Get Advertisers Involved

Offer a variety of sponsorship opportunities other than banner ads. Polls, product spotlights and giveaways are great ways to help a blog’s aesthetic and give advertisers options to showcase their brand.

Some advertisers want to only participate in giveaways while others may only want to guest post. Guest posts are among the most common ways advertisers get involved with blogs. Guest posts are typically used by brands to build web traffic and to put readers in a purchasing frame of mind. Along with their content, guest posts typically have a byline and a link to the respective blog or website increasing their web stats.

Note that it is imperative to remain up front with readers and disclose that a special section is paid for.

Get Readers Interacting with Advertisers

This is arguably one of the most important components of a campaign. If, for example, a blogger reviews a storage product like Backup Genie review and then asks readers to weigh in with their opinions, ask them if they are already using it, plan on buying it or how it would make their lives better. Getting readers to interact with a brand is what advertisers are truly searching.

Know Your Blog Rank and How to Improve It

There are two leading ways advertisers use to measure a site’s performance: Google Page Rank and Alexa ranking. These ranking systems allow website owners to benchmark their websites and give advertisers metrics for evaluation.

Google Page Rank is an algorithm that ranks a site from 0 to 10 with a major emphasis on quality backlinks. It’s no surprise that if the Google bots don’t like something, like a broken backlink, a blog’s Page Rank score could be in jeopardy. As Page Rank (PR) is slow to update (PR is only updated every 3-4 months), it’s difficult to better your PR in a short amount of time.

If a blog is stagnating at a PR3 for a while, it could mean there are on-page issues that should be checked using Xenu. Alexa ranking is a free online directory that measures how many daily visitors a site receives, along with other traffic metrics and search analytics. Both are important to advertisers, but Page Rank is measured on your website reputation and Alexa is measured on website traffic.

Let Numbers Speak for Themselves

A media kit gives advertisers a quick glance of what they need to know. It should be updated regularly (and honestly) with the blog’s positioning, like this:

• Google Page Rank: 4
• MozRank: 5.25
• July 2013 Visitors: 13,485
• Pageview: 72,856
• Average Time on Site: 2:02
• Bounce Rate: 72.42

Bloggers should be forthcoming if certain stats don’t scream success. Share additional facts such as:

• Strong niche following for Topic XYZ
• Active in social circles (only share follower number if blog’s social media has more than 5,000 followers)
• Blogs for two group blogs
• Contributing blogger for major Topic XYZ website

Know Your Advertising Options

What better way to help build your brand than to hit the pavement and meet advertisers, share your inspiration for the blog and why you think they would benefit from advertising? But if being in the field isn’t your thing, let those who specialize in blog advertising help win new advertisers. Adsense and Amazon Affiliates are among the leaders but research to find a good fit for your blog.

It’s getting easier than ever to garner interest from new advertisers, but harder to weed out scammers.

The longevity of a blog is on based consistent, quality content (and ranking!) but bloggers monetize best when they deliver results to advertisers.

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How to Make the Switch Between Monetizing with Ad Network to Selling Ads Directly on Your Blog

Over on Reddit today someone asked for some advice on switching from monetizing a blog using just ad networks (like AdSense) to selling advertising directly to advertisers. I found myself writing a rather long response and thought it might also be of some use to readers here.

Here’s the question:

I was reading a post about blogging and money and was wondering when in a bloggers career do the emails start coming in where companies are trying to advertise on your website? I am curious because when first starting out you don’t have a lot of traffic so no proof of presence so companies don’t really care to be shown for long periods of time on those blogs. So people get adsense or amazon ads up. Then at a certain point there are a ton of people coming in and people now want to throw ads up. This is a great point to just take down the automatic ads and go with the ad management setup.

When did you realize your traffic was high enough to switch over?

And my response (which wasn’t really written as a blog post – so I hope it is helpful):

This is a question I hear fairly regularly and I wish there was a magical number that applied for all blogs. The reality is that I’ve seen bloggers sell ads directly to advertisers before they launched and to bloggers who couldn’t sell ads directly, even with tens of thousands of visitors a day.

As with most things in blogging – there is no formula.

My own experience is that I have monetized my blogs in a variety of ways from day #1 and  that as my blogs grow this has not changed. What has changed is the type of monetization.

As your traffic and brand develops, new opportunities will open up for different types of monetization.

So for me, in the early days, I started with AdSense and a little affiliate marketing (Amazon’s program). This generated a few cents a day – but they were a few cents more than I had when I started! More importantly, I learned a lot about ad placement and design, and what type of ads worked best on my sites.

As my traffic grew, I began to realize that I might one day be able to sell ads directly to advertisers. However, these advertisers didn’t magically appear. I had to go and chase them.

While I had an ‘advertise with us’ page on the site, the only ads I was able to sell were small ads with small advertisers. I had a camera review blog and my first advertisers were small local camera stores who paid $20-$30 for a month of advertising (discounted for 12 months). It wasn’t much – but it was $20-$30 a month more than I had… and again I learned a lot from selling those ads!

As traffic and brand grows, you can command more for ads but you shouldn’t just rely upon advertisers coming to you.

Ask yourself a few questions to identify potential advertisers:

• What is my readers intent? Why are they coming to my blog? If you can nail what this is you might just find an advertiser who matches that intent. For my camera review blog, I realized my readers were researching before they purchased a camera, so pitching to camera stores was a smart move.
• Who are my readers? What are their demographics? Knowing who is reading your blog is golden information when finding advertisers. Surveys and polls of your readership can help work this out. Once you know that, ask ‘who is trying to reach this type of person?’
• Who is actively advertising on my niche? Look on other blogs/sites/forums to see who is advertising. Look to see what advertisers ads are appearing on your site through the Ad Networks you use. Look to see who is advertising on Google when you type in key words related to your niche. These advertisers are in the market for readers in your niche and should be places you go to pitch your site as a place to buy ads.

As you approach advertisers you’ll see that they want certain information that you can begin to pull together into a media kit.

Information about your readers is important to include (readership numbers, demographics, reader intent etc) as well as the opportunities and costs associated with advertising.

Include what type of ads you can run (ad size and placement).

Also think about how you can offer bundles of ads. For example, you might offer ads in your newsletter, on social media or to do a giveaway to your readers. These extras could be offered either as incentives to advertisers (buy some ads and we’ll throw in XXXX) or you could use them as up-sells.

In time, you’ll see what kind of information that advertisers want. Smaller advertisers often won’t need as much but as you approach bigger advertisers (usually you need to do this through their agencies) they’ll ask for more and more information and make more demands in terms of paperwork and your pitch.

Even when your site is big, you’ll still find that you need to pitch TO advertisers more often than not. Some will come knocking but I find that these are more likely to be PR people wanting you to write about their products for little or no money or in return for product (it’s hard to live off free products).

Having said that – this depends a little on your niche and traffic. If you’re writing about something very specialized and in demand, advertisers are going to be more keen and will seek you out, even if your traffic is small.

Lastly – I’ve done many direct ad deals over the years but even though they are regular I still run some ad network ads on my blogs to fill the gaps.

I’ve also found that as your traffic, brand and reader engagement grows there are other ways to monetize by developing your own products (eBooks, courses or even physical products) as well as doing some affiliate marketing. But that’s probably another story :-)

Hope something in that helps!

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5 Ways to Prepare Your Blog for Affiliate Selling

Using your blog to earn a passive income through affiliate sales is something many bloggers aspire to. Isn’t it? But you won’t make money if you don’t get visitors to your site and you won’t get that consistent traffic until you have a blog worth visiting.

There are lots of ways to generate affiliate sales through your blog but having affiliate products to sell is just a small part of the picture. This article will focus on five elements you should consider, before and after you sign up to any affiliate programs.

1. Become A Niche Expert

If you simply focus on making affiliate sales, you’re likely to scare people away. When you do a search on Google for anything related to a particular niche, what are you looking for? Usually, you’re looking for expert. So, it follows on that if you’re an expert in a particular niche, you’re going to attract traffic. So how do you establish yourself as an expert?

There’s more than one piece to this puzzle. You obviously need lots of knowledge about your niche. You need your own blog where you can share your knowledge and engage in discussion. Write plenty of content to educate people. Once people are comfortable with you as an expert and you’ve developed a community, you can start slipping in affiliate products in your blog posts.

Nobody wants to be sold to all the time. They want to believe they’re making the buying decisions on their own so when you include affiliate links and products in your blog posts, you should aim to provide genuine solutions to common problems.

2. Create a Recommended Products and Tools Page 

Word-of-mouth advertising is by far the best, strongest and most effective form available…and it’s free! Everybody’s favorite price. This is what you are trying to harness in affiliate sales and you can consolidate all your best product recommendations on one page. As you’re building your reputation as an expert, your followers will trust your opinions and a single page of recommendations allow you to recommend products outside of a blog post.

Every time you recommend a product or tool, you’re putting your own reputation on the line and that’s one of the most valuable assets you have in business. Never recommend a product or service that isn’t good quality and never lie, say a product is good if it’s not. You only have to do it once to lose all the trust you have built up with many of your followers.

You can also create your own tools and products and add them to this category if you have the necessary skills or are willing to outsource this aspect of your business in order to make even more money.

3. Write Product Reviews

Product reviews are a great way to include affiliate links in a useful and educational blog post. Where possible, never write a review about a product you haven’t used yourself. If you’re going to make money this way, it’s best to truly know how well a product performs so you have be honest with your community.

However, it’s not always possible to use every single product and so some reviews will be based on research and opinion. You must always write an honest, but positive, review of the product and have an affiliate link within the review that goes to the product.

It’s critically important here that you don’t hide the fact you’re an affiliate. A lack of transparency may cost you the trust of some of your readers. There’s nothing wrong with making commissions based on reviews you have written if you’re honest about everything.

4. Build Your Own Mailing Lists

A growing mailing list is key to long-term success in affiliate selling and your blog for that matter. However, just because somebody subscribes to your blog, it doesn’t give you permission to hit them with countless sales emails every single day. You’re smarter than that!

Using an autoresponder (such as Aweber or GetResponse) will help keep in regular contact with your subscribers but you should vary the type of information contained within the emails. Regular newsletters give you the opportunity to share free articles, reports, ebooks and even free products sometimes.

Your affiliate sales emails should be interspersed with these other emails so the people on your lists don’t feel like they’re always being sold to. This comes back to building relationships and rapport. Also allow your subscribers to provide feedback to make sure you know if you’re taking the wrong approach.

Banner Ads 

Banner ads can be effective but you need to consider the size and placement within your blog. Most affiliate products tools have a selection of banners you can use so test different ones to see which banners can give you the best results for your money. Avoid large banners and ones that have clashing colours  Remember that they’re merely one aspect of your blog design. They shouldn’t overtake everything else you worked so hard to design.

Making money with affiliate sales can be very lucrative but it’s not as easy as waving a magic wand. It involves a lot of short, medium and long-term planning to ensure your business grows consistently and your income also grows. Never be afraid to change things to see if they can improve aspects of your business. You can always change them back if they don’t work.

You’re the master of your own destiny (and your blog). Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

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