I don’t normally add external links from my blog but I thought this was a great post and one that you could benefit from. I manage to make a full time living by selling digital products on eBay and it’s now my ambition to do this next with article marketing and affiliate marketing.

Take a look at Charles’ blog post 7 reasons you aren’t succeeding online…

To your online success!

DesDrec

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Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

I suppose this is the important question really. I mean, I’m not naive enough to think that everybody bloggong at the moment wants to make money out of their blog. Some people may even have really strong feelings about making money from their blogs and this is fine.  If you think commercializing your blog is  immoral and unethical, then simply don’t commercialize it. I must admit, if you’ve got this point of view, there’s really no point in reading the post since I’m gonna talk about the exact opposite

Now, there are a few ways you can go with this. You can either use direct sales or even adsense to make money, or you can choose one of my favourite three listed below……

1) lead generation; 2) affiliate marketing; and 3) newsletter subscriptions.

Let’s tackle the first one of lead generation; Let me just stress that there are hundreds of ways to make money on your blog, but I personally believe that this is the most promising of all the other methods. This is definitely true if the market your blog is in is related to anything financial. Mortgage and refinance leads are especially good, as they bring in tiered commissions. In essence, your first commission cheque will come when you generate the initial lead – which will simple entail getting someone to fill out a completely free form; this lead will earn you anywhere from $3 to $12. Now, this is where it gets interesting. If your lead goes to refinance her home with the company in question, you could earn a serious windfall of several hundreds or several thousands of dollars. Nice eh!

The next method we’ll look at is affiliate marketing. This is probably one of the more popular methods.

Affiliate marketing generally consists of either directly signing up as an affiliate through someones website – or signing up as an affiliate through a third party. You’ll then need to use your blog to market this person’s products for a share of the total price. Sounds easy eh! Well, before you engage in this form of monetization you need to first connect with your readers and build trust and form relationships.

If you sell information products from ClickBank or PayDotCom, you can earn as much as 75% per sale which is fantastic; however, if you sell physical products, such as tables and chairs from Link Share retailers, such as Wal Mart, you’ll earn a 7-15% commission at best. Which way you go is completely your choice. I always favour information products since they’re easy to market and the customer service issues (if there are any) are normally dealt with by the product creator and is completely hands off for you.

Newsletter subscriptions are the last on my short list. You can create  a really decent opt-in page or a “squeeze page” on your blog, then offer a trial subscription to your newsletter as I’ve done on the right hand side. Now hopefully. If you provide quality content and promote your blog in the right way, you could end up with hundreds of subscribers over time and genuine followers who appreciate your work and take your advice.

As I’ve mentioned, there hundreds of other ways which I don’t have the time to write about in this blog that include selling advertising space directly and selling site memberships that allow visitors to access certain server-side tools.

I really hope this has helped, and as always I appreciate any comments you care to make.

To your online success,

DesDrec.

P.s. Just in case you missed it. I recently did a review on Vegas Traffic Jam that points you in the right direction in making money from your blog.

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