Image: faith goble

Guest post by: Tom Walker

Finding quality and reliable advertising revenue can be a make or break proposition for many bloggers. Most bloggers understand the importance of advertising and that it is just par for the course when it comes to making their blog profitable. Discovering how to go about finding and maintaining worthwhile advertising relationships however, is often much more difficult. Making your blog profitable when it comes to advertising, first means you must find advertisers willing to promote their products or services on your site, and the following tips might be able to help you do just that.

1. Adsense: Using Google AdSense can be a great way to get your feet wet when it comes to advertising on your blog. With AdSense, you can let someone else handle the advertising for you as you begin your foray into blogging. By using AdSense, you can get a general idea of the types of advertising that might work well on your site as well as how the revenue system works.

2. Spread The Word: When you decide to branch out to do your own advertising, you will likely have to put in some effort when it comes to finding prospective advertisers. In most cases, they won’t come looking for you. Use your available resources and networks to let people know that you’re on the lookout for advertisers. Utilize email, friends and family, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and your blog itself as great mediums for finding possible advertisers for your blog.

3. Market Yourself: Most advertisers will look for a reason or reasons to choose your blog for their advertisements. Consider possible enticements to get them to look twice at your site. Are you a top ranked site in your market? Have you found a niche few others know about? Maybe you’ve won awards for your blog or blogs. Finding ways to sell yourself and differentiate your blog from the masses can appeal to advertisers.

4. Location, Location, Location!: It’s important to remember that once you begin reeling in the advertisers, to keep them happy you must often consider the location and placement of their ads. Being stuffed into a distant bottom corner, or wedged between two other massive ads probably won’t make your advertisers too happy. Of course, how much they are paying will likely determine placement on your page, but you should also consider that sometimes smaller return business is more lucrative than one-time big business.

5. Don’t Get Lost In The Fluff: When considering location and placement of advertisements upon your blog, it is important in keeping your advertisers happy to avoid too much clutter on your blog. Video clips, pictures, graphics, and text can at times overpower your advertisements. While the quality of your blog is important, it must be weighed against quantity and available space for advertisements. Most advertisers won’t be happy to find the effects of their ads diminished by surrounding graphics or lost in the fluff of your text.

6. Don’t Waffle: Moving back and forth between subjects on your blog can be a turnoff to some advertisers. When a company or advertiser thinks he is placing an ad on a blog about personal finance, and suddenly finds that you are blogging about your pet goldfish, it can be a turnoff and they could decide to pull their advertising faster than it takes those last flakes of fish food to hit the bottom of the bowl.

7. Stay Relevant: Keeping your blog relevant and on topic is one of the best ways to bring advertisers to your blog. Inconsistency in posts, letting your blog lapse into long periods of inactivity, and not staying current on the most recent subject matter relating to your blog can drive advertisers away.

8. Be Reasonable: Keeping your CPM low, at least initially can help you draw in advertisers until you get your feet under you and your blog builds in popularity. Starting your CPM too high may tend to drive away many advertisers who would have been willing to work with you. Be reasonable in your expectations and don’t become greedy. Even once your blog hits it big, it is important to remember where the money that is rolling in comes from. Angering advertisers with high CPM rates is a quick way to ensure your advertisers won’t want to work with you.

9. Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day: It will likely take you time to learn the advertising system and how best to attract new advertisers. Don’t get frustrated or pushy when it comes to finding advertisers. Enticement is good, but putting on the pressure might drive advertisers away. Just keep at it, and more importantly look for ways to keep your blog active with plenty of traffic. A popular blog will often breed advertising revenue and bring more advertisers to your site.

10. Keep At It: Turnover can be high in blog advertising. Consistency is the key to building and maintaining healthy advertiser relationships. Don’t expect to be able to grab a bunch of advertisers all at once and then sit back and put it on cruise control. You will likely find yourself constantly on the search for new advertisers. While your search methods will probably become more refined, and your time spent finding advertisers for your blog may diminish, the process will likely continue for as long as you wish to keep making money from your blog.
About the Author
Tom Walker lives in the UK where he writes and designs for a office supplies company offering Epson printer inks, toners, paper and other printer accessories. You can read his posts about advertising and design on their blog.

Apart from very few people who seem to be leaning towards social entrepreneurship, everyone else is still here to make money and we are hence capitalistic in nature and actions. We all blog for money and there is no mistaking that fact.

However, there are emotions involved when the subject of money comes up. Blog monetization, hence, is a subject much discussed in the blogosphere; it doesn’t seem to end.Yet, not everyone makes good amount of money from their blogs and I think here are the reasons why:

Placeholders, PLR ( private label rights) content and free blogs will never make it

Too many blogs out there have been made by affiliates trying to sell one product or the other and they think that they could start making money just  by putting up a free blog, a couple of web pages or free content from Private Label Rights packs ( PLR packs) — this isn’t going to cut the ice.

The Internet works with a two-pronged strategy which consists of providing quality information and convince your readers that you know your stuff. Once this happens, selling is only a matter of putting a web-front on your website.

Unless you provide great content for a long time and write persuasively enough to inspire your readers, make them think about what you wrote or push them enough to buy directly, you aren’t going to be in business.

Look at that single dark spot on the wall

Most blogs have no focus at all and they usually seem to be all over the place, talking about almost everything. Good blogs have a primary focus.  Look at some of the examples of some blogs below:

• Location Independent, JetSetCitizen, World Hum, EverythingEverywhere – all of which focus on living a location Indepent lifestyle by traveling and workin at the same time.
• The Host Reviewer: A comprehensive site that focuses on nothing but in-depth reviews on web hosting providers and their services.
• Blogging Elements : Blogging, tips, best-practices and information on blogging for beginners — a shameless plug, I know. Still, you get the point, don’t you?

Focus, my friend is everything; it’s that wretched 5 letter word that stands between you and your success online.

How do you want to monetize your blog?

For the first few months or years of your blog’s existence, don’t even bother monetizing your blog. Blogging is a great way to make some money but the time will come. Start writing great posts and make sure that you swear by producing content that is effective, reflective, thoughtful, provoking or at least informative.

After your blog picks up on readership, look  to monetize your blogs using just one or various types of monetizing. However, avoid Google Adsense because that isn’t for you, if you want to make a lot of money for  a long time to come.

Ideally, you will do well with CPA networks that pay you per lead. Ultimately, you will have to decide and I’ll leave it to  you. Just remember that you have to stay focused. Pick merchants who sell products or services relevant to then niche you are operating on.

Once it is monetized optimally, all you need to do is to drive traffic to your blog.  That makes for a whole new post  altogether.

How focused is your blog? Do you think blogs with content on everything and anything make money?

The holy grail of affiiate marketing is to find the right niche market to promote to; this is where most affiliates get stuck and freeze out. It isn’t that difficult to find your  niche though and I intend to reveal at least 3 important sources for you to help yourself with the all-too-important niche research process before you set-off on your affiliate marketing/blogging endeavors:

• MSN and Yahoo: I was, I am and I will always be a die-hard fan of classic stuff. I know that we all moved out of the neighbourhood that talks, raves and rants about MSN and Yahoo a long time ago. I guess we got to give these pioneers a break they deserve. The long forgotten fact about these two portals is that they still are a rich source to hunt for niches. For example, click on shopping and you will find even more categories opening up for you. The more you plumb, the more you find.
• Dmoz.org: I still remember the first time I did a search on ” how to promote” your site on the Internet, It was highly recommended that I enlist my site on dmoz.org–human edited, largest and one of the oldest  directory on the Internet. Well, the utility doesn’t end there; you can use it just like MSN and Yahoo for niche research too. Similar to the endeavor on MSN or Yahoo, just driill down to specific sub-niches within major niches.
• Television and magazines: Don’t watch the TV – it’s a major time waster. magazines are things you read when you wait for that bus to arrive or for that flight to depart. You could do more with them — have you ever given a thought to the fact that almost every channel on the TV and every topic a magazine focuses on is another source of a niche (which has many sub-niches, so to speak) ?

As you think, so shall you reap. They weren’t kidding when they said that. If you just look around, you will see profitable niches everywhere. Keep at it and let me know if there are sources I over looked?

If you’re considering making money online with ebooks, there’s really just a few basic steps to go about it:1. Think of a topic that you’re really familiar with or passionate about.
2. Find out how many other books, websites, ebooks, and blogs about that topic.
3. After your research, start writing.
4. Edit, edit, edit.
5. Proofread.
6. If possible, get someone else to proofread. It’s always helpful to have more than one pair of eyes to look through your manuscript.
7. Format your manuscript in to an ebook format. It really is up to you what type of format you want. Most popular format is PDF, as most people can easily download and read it.
8. Get a good digital cover.
9. Create a sales package for your ebook.
10. Create a marketing package. Websites, blogs, sales letters… And perhaps, even affiliate programmes.
11. Promote, promote, promote!
12. Follow-up – and promote some more.

Of course, I realise that these steps are the absolute basic. You can even write a whole ebook to flesh these topics out!

resources:

Making Money Online with Lulu -  a resource for folks interested in DIY publishing.

1. The SEO Book Keyword Tool - I use this on a daily basis, primarily for the keyword research of all my websites and article marketing efforts, but it’s useful for selecting niche phrases for any type of website. It’s like any other keyword tool, the results aren’t exact, but it’s worked quite well for me. I would recommend it to everyone.

2. Instant Article Wizard Pro – This is the first article “creator” I’ve ever recommended. My initial feelings on this type of software was that it was impossible for software to create an article that was actually readable and useful to others. I can honestly say that I was wrong. I started using IAWP about a month ago and although some articles need a little editing, it’s cut huge amounts of time off of article writing. I’ve been having my sister write my articles lately and she’s been using this and sending twice as many articles than before.

3. Rank Checker - This is Aaron Wall’s newest tool from SEO Book, which provides a very simple way to check your sites rankings on Google. It is also a Firefox addon. You just open it up, insert the domain name and the keywords you want to analyze and it shows you the rankings.

4. SEO for Firefox -This is possibly one of the most useful and time-saving tools I use. It inserts loads of useful data directly into the search results of Google and Yahoo. You just do a search as usual and directly below each result you’ll see data such as PR, Age, Cache date, Yahoo Links, DMOZ, Alexa etc. It makes analysis of the competition much quicker and easier and is just neat all around.

Affiliate marketing wouldn’t work as a business model without proper affiliate networks in place to act as a medium between merchants and affiliates. Of course, with any middleman involved, things fall between the cracks and what results is a mediocre usability experience. Not so with Pepperjam Network though, which launched in full fury.

Pepperjam promises to the ‘next generation in affiliate marketing’ and certainly brings its own unique flavor in terms of features and advertisers. Pepperjam, a two-time Inc. Magazine fastest growing company and industry leading full-service internet marketing agency, today announced the launch of Pepperjam Network, a proprietary next generation affiliate marketing network.

Features

Pepperjam does a great job at integrating web 2.0 features into what has always been a low-engagement experience for affiliates. By connecting
affiliates and advertisers with an easy-to-use, cutting-edge interface designed to facilitate and optimize the affiliate marketing process, Pepperjam has really excelled in achieving a competitive advantage over networks such as Commission Junction. Pepperjam is also well equipped for Pay Per Click affiliate marketers and offers SID tracking for campaigns down to the keyword level.

One of the major innovations of the network allows affiliates and advertisers to chat with each other regarding mutually beneficial promotional tactics in the Pepperjam chat room.

Aside from regular affiliate marketing modules such as text links, images, and dynamic content, Pepperjam also offers a nifty contextually relevant widget that displays appropriate ads from Pepperjam advertisers.

Is it Worth My Time?

Trust plays a huge part in building a relationship with a new business. Pepperjam is not only a trusted name in the internet marketing industry but a huge innovator in optimizing marketing practices. According to their company bio :

Pepperjam is an industry leading full-service internet marketing agency offering marketing services and advanced technology in the areas of pay-per-click, search-engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and online media planning and buying. The company was founded in 1999 by internet marketing expert, conference speaker, and published author Kristopher B. Jones. Pepperjam has received numerous awards and achievements, including recognition by Inc. Magazine for two consecutive years as one of the fastest growing privately-held businesses in the United States.

Top 3 Reasons For Using PepperJam are:

1. Save Time – With other networks I had to waste time trying to find the right partners, and then wait for various approvals and sign agreements. With Pepperjam its easy!
2. More Transparency - I didn’t feel a connection with advertisers on Commission Junction and other such networks. I feel motivated as an affiliate when an advertiser or merchant is willing to work with me to create a win-win situation.
3. Pepperjam Knowledge Vault – Pepperjam Network contains a knowledge vault, which is exclusive to Pepperjam affiliates. The vault contains exclusive access to a list of tools and educational resources used by Super Affiliates.

Pepperjam.com

Tags and social bookmarking services are similar but different. Social bookmarking actually is the term that refers to users recommending which topics are most popular with them. This is done through votes and by tags.

A site or software tool that collects and stores your recommended or “bookmarked” sites is called a Social Bookmarking Manager. Some Social Bookmarking Managers are private, but the ones that will usually serve you better are the public ones, which show the world what you think is important information, and asks others to “vote” for your recommendations as you vote on theirs, and the winners rise to the top.

Tags are mini-categories for blog content, tagged by the blog owner or visitor. Used in combination with social bookmarking, you can search through tag services for the most popular posts within a specific tag category based upon traffic, voting, or other recommendations.

Tags and social bookmarking help Internet users talk to each other, sharing favorite posts and articles. They also help let you, the blogger, get a feel for what topics are popular at the moment. If it is popular enough, you may want to blog about it. By monitoring these “most popular” lists, whether by overall category or tags specific to your interests, you can keep a finger on the pulse of public opinion.

Technorati

Del.icio.us

Reddit

StumbleUpon

Feedmelinks

Digg

You may have banner ads all over the Internet, but have you considered purchasing some ad space in email newsletters? This can not only be a good source of traffic, but also a great branding strategy, as instead of relying visitors to find your ads, your ads will be going straight to your inboxes.

Now I know what you are thinking and I am not talking about spamming people.  I’m talking about purchasing ad spots in targeted email newsletter that people have subscribed to.  And when I say “targeted”, I mean just that. Find publications that would appeal to the demographic that you are trying to reach. For example, if you are a web designer, you may try advertising in an ecommerce newsletter.  You might not want to advertise in a design newsletter since the subscribers to that are most likely designers themselves.

You also want to find a publisher that appears respectable.  Make sure they comply with legal guidelines and are not spammers themselves.

Advertising in email newsletters is a good way to create brand awareness and become recognized by a lot of people. Eventually, you are likely to get more customers.

There are many ways that you can make money online by using your website or blog. There are ways that aren’t commonly used and then there are ways that are commonly used. We’re going to go over some of the ways that are commonly used and have been proven to be effective for others who have used these options.

Affiliate Marketing
There are many bloggers and webmasters that have turned themselves into affiliate marketers. Why is that? Well, it seems that money speaks many languages and when someone finds a good way of earning money, they seem to want to use it more than what really doesn’t make them much money at all. Affiliate marketing can be a profitable venture for you. Do your research so that you know without a doubt you have what it takes to become a great player in the area of affiliate marketing.

Google AdSense
AdSense has been known to have a very successful outcome for those that have monetized their website or blog with it. You are paid for each qualified click that you receive from the advertisements that are being shown on your website or blog. There is always an effective way to implement this as well as an ineffective way to implement this. Make sure that you know the effective way and put it to work for you.

Put your skills to work for you.
You can provide additional services on your website or blog to help you make money online. These services can be anything that your visitors might be looking for. This could include writing, web design, etc. The possibilities are endless. If you do something directly related to your niche, why not offer others the ability to have you get it done for them as well? You will both benefit from this, just think about what you can offer and give it a try.

Provide paid website reviews on your blog.
A lot of bloggers will offer other blogs and websites paid reviews. These are usually posted in a blog post that is dedicated to the review of the website or blog. This is a great way to earn some extra money from your blog. A lot of bloggers have actually made more than some of their advertising programs that they use to make money online. You will need to have a good reader base and traffic to be able to charge the most for a paid website review.

Sponsorships can help you out quite a bit. Maybe more than you think.
Some blogs or websites offer sponsorships, which is also known as private advertisements. Simply put, the advertiser will pay you a fee to place their advertisement on your website. You choose what ads you want to offer privately and put in the leg work. Depending on how you provide sponsorships, you can help cover costs while putting a little bit of extra money into your pocket.

These were just a few of the more simple and proven techniques to make money online using your website or blog. There are many other ways to make money online, you will just have to put in a little research for that. Try it out and if it don’t work, try something else out.

Attention: First you must get your customer’s attention. You should do this with an effective ad headline. Direct and to the point, get their attention in the first 7 seconds.

Interest: Next get your reader interested in your product. Good text copy in the advertisement. Picture main points of the product to draw them in.

Desire: Next build desire for your product. Tell your customer how your product will benefit them or affect their lives. Key features why they need this product.

Action: Finally, ask your customers to take action. Ask them to click a hotlink to your website, or to call your toll-free order line, or get more info by calling a pre-recorded message or sending a request in the mail. Even just click BUY. Sometimes people just want to be lead.