How You Make Money From Your Blog

This weekend I shall be attending Ryan Lee’s Continuity Summit in Stamford, Connecticut and next week I shall be in Washington DC for Yanik Silver’s Underground Online Seminar

But before I go I thought I’d produce both a quick video and a blog post to answer one of the most frequently asked questions I receive – which is: ‘How Do I Monetize My Blog?’ or ‘How Can I Monetize My Blog?’

Believe it or not, some people, even now, don’t fully understand how I monetize this blog.

I still get people wondering why I don’t accept advertising!

This video explains one strategy I use when it comes to putting Interviews on this website, but there are other methods such as list building, ecourse and endorsing offers from other Bloggers. In addition I have also expanded on some of what I say in the video in the post that follows (It was just going to be a transcript of the video – but I got carried away and added a good bit more)

As always I look forward to your comments.

To Our Success

Michael

PS: Attending seminars and masterminding with fellow Internet Entrepreneurs has given me the biggest return on investment of anything I have done in my online business. There are always more ways to improve our businesses – and I am looking forward to returning home in a couple of weeks, with even more ideas, which of course I will share here. I also hope to get the chance to do a blog post or two as I travel – and of course you can always keep up with the latest goings on at Twitter.com/IncomeDiary

PPS: By the way I am looking forward to meeting a good number my readers in Stamford and DC. It will be a Blast!

How I Monetize My Blog – The Video

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How I Monetize My Blog – Expanded

Today I wanted to share with you a method I use to monetize my sites.

Ingredient No1: INSPIRATION

For example an INTERVIEW with a successful Internet Marketer

For an interview I have three main ways to monetize:

1) You start with the interviewee’s product. For example if it was Ryan Lee that I was interviewing I’d recommend one of his products. Additionally if I found there was a good number of conversions for the offer I may later do a special feature / promotion on the blog / to the list (but that is for later)

2) In addition in just about every blog post I will include links to other worthwhile products that I recommend. As a lot of my readers are bloggers it naturally makes sense to include some Blogging Related products here. That is why you see me promoting: Web Domination by Nick Tart and Blog Mastermind by Yaro Starak.

I have also discovered that some people only every seem to buy cheap products while others will always opt for the most expensive option – partly I believe because some people believe the more you pay, the more value you get. For this reason the two products I suggest are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to price.

3) Create a comparison page or comparison chart. I cannot do this for every product but were I can, I have found it makes a big difference to conversions. My page on Blogging Resources is a good example of a comparison page.

You can have a comparison page for just about every product type – e.g. foods, tools, fitness equipment, website hosting etc

In most comparisons you will also want to make a recommendation or promote one option over and above another. If you can offer your readers a ‘coupon code’ for your recommendation then you will have a lot more conversions of the type you want

A great example of using a ‘coupon code’ is when people use my Coupon Code “Retireat21” to get their first month of hosting with Hostgator for just 1 cent!

To give you another example – I found a great Twitter tool so I created a post on how to drive traffic with Twitter and featured that product and others on it.

This is an example of discovering something that works from a Blog Post – and then making a bigger feature of it elsewhere on the site.

Every-time anyone asks me about Twitter – I direct them to that page.

How Else Do I Make Money?

Well of course I have an email list, people who have signed up for the eCourse or one of the other optins within the site. I have covered Email List Building and Auto-responders in detail in this post, so will not go into great detail here – just suffice to say there is something magical about sending out an email to your list and seeing a $1000 or more turn up in your commissions account within a few hours.

If you look at in detail you will see that it is designed to help people to take positive action in their online business TODAY.

It is the “No Leakage Rule” applied — this website does not have a Blog Roll or anything like that. At I have concentrated on delivering outstanding value – value that encourages people to join my lists / follow me.

This is perhaps my strongest recommendation to you – that you deliver value first and the money really will follow. A lot of people struggle with writing posts that can take several days to put together (such as researching a list) but if you are committed to doing that on a regular basis you will get the visitors and many of those visitors will join your email list.

Once you get on the email list, you will receive a series of emails (eCourse) via an Autoresponder. You’ll get like day one, day two, week four, week five and various other Free reports which produce income via affiliate commissions. Make sure to read Email List Building and Auto-responders in detail to be fully conversant with this and in particular how to email and NOT email your lists. No one likes a Spammer.

Also, and this is most important get yourself a reputation for delivering value and benefit – that means people are more likely to read your emails when you get them and take action.

One thing that has been very successful for me has been to promote other peoples products as the go through the Product Launch Sequence. You will often find that there are reports and videos with great value in them given away in the launch. Even if people don’t but the product people will get value from these free reports / videos and if you do it right, people will thank you.

VERY IMPORTANT: Only ever promote a product you would buy yourself and only a product from an individual you know and trust yourself.

It makes me cringe when I see some people promoting several different offerings from different Marketers every week – some even promote more than one offering in a day! I hate to say it — but there really is not that many great products around – so frankly finding more than a few offers per month to promote is difficult. (Anyone who is promoting more than that I think must be going for QUANTITY over QUALITY)

Talking of Promotions and Product Launches – it is nice to find products that pay you a recurring commission every month, for as long as a customer remains a member of the program. This applies not just to membership websites but also to some software products, indeed one of my nicest recurring incomes comes from promoting some software.

The great thing about most of these offers is that there will be a special introduction price – e.g $1 Trial for the first month which allows people to try out a product before making a serious financial commitment. AWeber Offer a $1 Trial which has proved very successful for me.

NB: Please note I do not promote “forced continuity” — This is where people are not fully aware of what they are committing to.

Forced continuity is a big NO, NO. Fortunately that is becoming less of an issue and most sellers make everything clear in the sign-up process, but in the past it has been an issue.

For this reason I make sure to only promote offers from ethical, reliable, honest marketers. And you should of course do the same.

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