Marketing No Brainers

Making Money With Blogs Part 3

June 29th, 2006Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, How To Courses

Making Money With Blogs Part 3

In parts 1 and 2, you learned how to research a profitable blog topic at Yahoo/Overture, open a blogger account, set up the blogger account, get a domain name and web hosting, and ftp your blog to your hosting account.

Now we’ll flesh out your blog content, link to your affiliate product, install an affiliate banner, and generally clean your blog up and make it look good.

1. Get the affiliate links from whatever Clickbank program you have chosen as your blog topic. If a banner is offered, get one also. If there is no banner then you can make one. Save the links in notepad.

2. Open your blog in your blogger control panel. Go to the template settings and scroll down the window with the template html in it until you find the sidebar content. It is way down at the bottom in most templates. You’ll often find a comment line there saying something like “you can put sidebar content here.” Look above this comment for the “links” title and the html list below it. Generally it is premade, all you have to do is change the html link and text in the list. Basic html skill will be required. If you need help with this Blogger help has sections and links.

3. Replace the links with your Clickbank Affiliate links. There are usually three links by default in this list. Link 1 goes to the affiliate sales page. If your affiliate program has a link to a newsletter page then use that as link Alternately, use a related affiliate program at Clickbank. And if neither of these options work, then word two links differently but point them both to the affiliate sales page. Just delete the third link html in the sidebar.

4. Select a small banner from your affiliate program, and paste the code for it up in the top of the “main” section. If you make mistakes, Blogger lets you back up to a previous state, so don’t worry. Just keep at it until you get it right. If there is no banner for your chosen affiliate product you might want to wonder why. But you can make one yourself from the info product cover and some basic html knowledge.

4. Write a general article about the product topic. Post it.

5. Now wait a day. Write a review of the affiliate product. Post it.

6. Now go to Pingomatic and fill in the fields to ping your blog. The rss line in the form is your blog website name with /atom.xml after it. Ping your blog.

7. If you have My Yahoo, My MSN, and Google accounts you can go in them and add your blog’s feed address - the same /atom.xml address you used in Pingomatic - into your account.

6. Continue on with an article / review every day until you have six or 7 articles done. Ping when your blog is republished, but never ping more than once a day. Never ping unless you have added new content. I usually ping every other day when I add content daily.

7. Make sure you finish the blog on the sixth or seventh post with a review. I do this by writing very short reviews, alternated by articles, as I go along. Then in the last post I summarize all the key points from the reviews into a complete review. You can really do this a lot of ways, some topics are better if all posts are articles until the last post.

Important, if you skip a day, don’t put all your posts into one day, just continue on where you left off until you have your six or seven posts. Do this naturally so Google doesn’t mix you up with the blog spammers.

Also, remember that you can delete entries, add new ones, edit old ones. Your imagination should be able to run with this. It is how you can rotate content to keep your blogsite fresh.

Blogger lets you preview and edit changes to your heart’s content. The only possible problem from this is if you have the “notify Weblogs” turned on, cause then you are pinging them every time you post, but also every time you republish a change. That is why we have it set to off. Since Weblogs is notified by Pingomatic, you also avoid double pinging them by having the setting turned off in your Blogger control panel.

You can get an Adsense account through Blogger. The link is in the templates section and they will automatically place the adsense block for you. I have Adsense on some blogs set up like this, and not on others. Depends on the topic and what the clicks pay. Also you may find that some Adsense formats don’t fit the blogger template you have chosen. Just pick another one that does.

In my blogs that have Adsense I generally put a small horizontal billboard on top, sometimes just the text links showing. And I generally ad an Adsense block - you have to do this manually - to the sidebar, underneath everything else.

Affiliate income should dwarf Adsense income if your article and review copy presells. So don’t get carried away with Adsense unless you want your blog to solely be monetized by Adsense. I see ten to twenty times the revenue from carefully chosen affiliate programs that I do from Adsense. But if after six months or so you’re getting no where with the affiliate product you can convert the whole project to Adsense.

The most important thing I’ll save for last. Put a newsletter signup box on the top of the sidebar. Your autoresponder host has a built-in subscribe form maker. Don’t tell me you don’t want to do this, because it is the biggest sales enhancement you can make to your site.

Capture your visitor’s name and email address. Bribe them for their name with something of value, which can be a teaser summary of the affiliate product you sell. Then follow up at least ten times with the subscriber. You’ve already got most of the content for the autoresponder messages. Just rework your blog posts.

To really get your mind going on the possibilities, Aweber will send your blog posts out automatically as your newsletter. What a concept!

That’s it. Now go and make some money. Comments or questions please, as we’ve gone through this on the fly.

Making money with blogs part 3.