Money Making Blogs

One way of learning how to monetize your blog is to check out what other bloggers are doing. For the sake of an example, let’s take a look at JohnCow.com, which is a parody of the infamous JohnChow.com. Here are the ways that they are making money off the blog.

1. Banner ads

You’ll see these banner ads on a lot of blogs. The top banner is usually a 468×60. Some blogs, depending on the design, also use the 120×600 on the sidebar. You can run different banners depending on the target audience of your blog.

Private ad space

The nice thing about selling private ad space is that the income can be quite predictable. Besides the 300×250 banner next to the post, there are six other 140×140 ad spots on the right side of the blog. Once your blog gathers steam and has a good number of readers, it is generally not difficult to sell out your ad inventory. If not, you can populate some of the spots with your own ads for affiliate products.

As a blogger, you can also capitalize on some of the ad spots to increase your traffic. But just be sure to target blogs that your readers are likely to come from. I noticed that one of the 140×140 ads was for propertyireland.net which given the type of readers frequenting JohnCow.com, I think this is purely a waste of money. Better to advertise on a real estate blog.

Google AdSense

These familiar Google AdSense blocks are situated between posts. Notice the color matching the green background of the blog. Good strategy to try to blend in the ads. Normally, AdSense doesn’t work that well for making money type of blogs. After all, the target audience is already familiar with AdSense and the clickthrough rates are likely to be dismal. Test it out yourself and see.

Affiliate links

Include affiliate links in the text as part of your post. These usually convert the best as compared to banner ads. You can use the text to presell the product. Making money type of blogs like to post reviews of products and then include the affiliate link as the link to the product.

Note: You’d want to protect your affiliate links… for instance, all the redirects on JohnCow.com has the same structure of johncow.com/milking/affiliate-link but if you just type johncow.com/milking you will see a listing of all the affiliate programs being promoted. Usually that’s okay if you’re not blogging in the money making niche. But if your audience are savvy money makers as well, you’d be better off protecting your links.

Donations

They call it “buying them a pint of milk” instead of a donation. Very clever way of going along with the whole cow theme. Don’t expect too much from donations, but if you want to monetize to the max, every little bit helps.

Competitions

While competitions don’t make you money directly, they do build buzz and bring more traffic to your blog if done right. Therefore, you should definitely consider it for your own blog as well. Try to offer something that will get people talking about your contest. A large sum of money often does the trick. Also, you can include rules that make people have to link to you in order to participate. This will increase the number of backlinks to your blog from closely related blogs. But be careful. Too many links generated in a short period all with the same anchor text can raise red flags as they appear unnatural.

So there you have it. There’s nothing really fancy or groundbreaking here. Just all the tried and true ways of monetizing a blog. Now, go and think about how you can apply some of these things to your blog. Take action.

Here’s something that I read taken from the book “Action!” by Robert Ringer (I highly recommend it):

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you had better start running.

Some folks just love it and others hate it. Well, it really boils down to how your promote it. Can the Amazon affiliate program fit into your blogging strategy? Absolutely.

Don’t be fooled by those who claim that it has a poor commission payout. The often quoted 4% commission applies only to the first tier of payouts. With Amazon, your commission increases based on the number of orders shipped in each month. So when you get to the next commission tier, your commissions increase for ALL your sales for that month. Everything except electronics, which is capped at 4% commission, is following the sliding scale.

As you can see, you can have a maximum commission rate of 8.5% if you can push the large volumes.

Here’s proof that it works:

Here are some good reasons why I love Amazon:

1. Trusted brand. It’s a lot easier to sell something when everyone knows that the vendor is a trusted name that isn’t going to keep their money and not ship the product.

2. HUGE selection. Yes, if you haven’t shopped at Amazon lately, take a look at the different categories of STUFF that they have there. They’re not just about books anymore. They sell a lot of third-party stuff too - even groceries!

3. People know what to expect. Since they’ve been around for so long, people know just what to expect when they buy something from Amazon. The checkout process is familiar. People are comfortable making purchases online when they are familiar with the process. Again, this ties in to reason #1.

4. Great prices. Amazon often has the best prices anywhere online. Another great selling point.

5. Constantly improving. They are continuously trying to improve their offerings with new widgets and new creatives for promoting their stuff.

6. Electronic payment. Payment goes straight into your bank account!

Ways that I think the Amazon affiliate program can improve:

1. They don’t seem to really care that much about communicating with affiliates. Even though I make 4 figures a month with them, I’ve yet to receive any special gifts like the Christmas gifts I’ve gotten from Google and Yahoo.

2. Payment timescale. You won’t get paid for the current month’s earnings until 2 months later. So expect to receive September earnings at the end of November. This can create some cash flow problems if you’re using PPC.

The bottom line is that you should really consider adding Amazon as a part of your blog’s income stream. Find out more about it here.

[tags]Amazon affiliate program[/tags]

DealDotCom is a new program that is set to launch on Tuesday, September 18, 2007. It will feature daily deals on internet marketing and online business related products. The way it works is that when you refer someone who joins the site, that person will automatically be placed under you for the rest of their life. While other sites offer 30, 60 or 90 day cookies, DealDotCom gives you lifetime commissions. So someone who is referred by you who doesn’t buy anything now but decides to buy something in 2012, guess what? You’ll still get the commission.

The program is still in pre-launch and you can only join by getting an invitation.

Because the affiliate program is two-tiered, more people will scramble to join just to get in on the action early. Like many multi-tiered programs, the earlier you join in, the better off you are. By the way, the first tier pays out 35% and the second tier is 15%. This can become a lucrative source of passive income for your blog.

Get an invitation to join here.

Starting a blog that’s a parody of another popular blog can be quite profitable, as in the case of JohnCow.com which rides on the popularity of the (in)famous JohnChow.com. In their first month alone, they made over $1000.

It’s not exactly clear who are the perpetrators behind the blog, but I suspect that they are European from the way they use commas instead of decimal points for reporting dollar amounts, i.e. $10,00 vs. $10.00. In any case, this is a blog that is well thought out - unique icon in the address bar, the whole cow theme, cow pictures, cow related terms like “if you liked this post, buy us some milk” rather than just “donate to us” and my favorite of all is the tag line: “The miscellaneous ramblings of Dot Com Moooguls”.

One factor that contributed to the rise of this blog is the fact that while many people like the posts of John Chow on his blog that is usually filled with ads and affiliate links, there are others that are intensely put off by it. It’s the latter camp that has given JohnCow.com a boost by posting in the forums about this new blog that is a parody of JohnChow.com. As is usually the case, controversy can bring buzz to a new site and this is what we see with JohnCow.com.

Sidenote: In recent days, John Chow has apparently lost favor with Google. Doing a search for “John Chow” on Google shows that the site is nowhere to be found on the first page of results. However, JohnCow.com is listed in the #5 spot.

[tags]John Cow, John Chow, parody blogs[/tags]

Check out BlogRush which is a widget that you can place on your blog. How it works is that the widget will display titles of posts and snippets from other blogs in the category that you choose. You build up credits for the number of times the widgets shows on your blog and the more credits you have, the more often posts from your blog will get syndicated around the internet. It’s a viral way of building more traffic to your blog.

Registration is simple and free. I did it within a minute. All you have to do to get your widget is to enter the name of your blog, blog URL, feed URL and the category that best fits your blog. Then copy the code that is provided and place it on your blog.

If you use a WP blog template that is widget enabled, you can easily add the BlogRush widget to your sidebar. Under the presentation/theme editor window, drag a text widget to your sidebar and past the BlogRush code in there. Save it, and that’s it.

I’ve installed it on the sidebar of this blog so that you can see what it looks like. BlogRush is still in beta right now so I expect that there’ll be more features added on in the future, such as customization to fit your blog’s color scheme.

[tags]BlogRush, blog syndication, blog traffic[/tags]