If you currently run a blog and aren’t making money through affiliate marketing, then I’d say there is a good chance you’re not earning at your full potential! What exactly is an affiliate program? Affiliate programs are pretty straight forward. You (the affiliate) will promote a companies product (using several different methods) and then earn a commission when a visitor clicks your link and makes a purchase. Affiliate marketing is just one of the numerous ways you can start properly monetizing your blog and earning the maximum amount of revenue possible from it. In the following paragraphs I’m going to lay out several different things you can do to earn more money from your online blog. Best of all, each avenue is completely different from the other, so you can add each and every one of these things to you blog and increase earnings by one, two, maybe even five times what it is right now! Continue reading and then start implementing these into your blog tonight. Revenue will already begin to go up as you start making new money from the traffic you’re already receiving!
CPM Ads – CPM is short for cost per million. With this payout structure you get paid based on impressions of your ads. That means visitors don’t actually need to click the advertisement for you to get paid. Instead, you’ll get paid for every 1000 impressions that are displayed. The most popular CPM network out there is Media.net which is owned by Yahoo. Signup for the website, generate a piece of ad code (I’d recommend 300×250) and then place one or two of them in the sidebar of your website. It’s also a good idea to put one above and below the content inside each of your blog posts. After all is said and done, you should have 3-4 CPM ads on your blog between the sidebar and post page. That means 1 visitor will generate at least 3-4 impressions for each page they load/visit.
Push Notifications – Push notifications are still fairly new in the online marketing world. However, you’re probably seeing more and more of them as you visit websites. You’ll know it’s a push notification when you load a page and receive a little popup asking if you want to subscribe or “allow” notifications from the website. Signup with PropellerAds and they will pay you one of two ways for adding the push notification code to your website. You can either earn a fixed amount for each visitor who subscribes to push notifications, or you can choose to be paid on a CPM basis for every 1000 ads sent out to those who have subscribed to push notifications.
Pop Up/Under – This is one of the oldest methods to making more money from your blog. Many webmasters and bloggers prefer not to bother their visitors with pop ups and pop unders. But, if you’re looking for another avenue to increase your sites revenue, this is one way to do it. PropellerAds (which I linked to under the Push Notification section) offers pop unders and pays on a CPM basis for them. Personally, I would only recommend bothering with popups and unders if you really wanted to scrape every bit of revenue you can from your website, and if you’re not worried about returning traffic.
Text Links – Another excellent way to make some extra money from your blog is by selling relevant text links. Create a post in webmaster forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, or anywhere else other webmasters hangout and let them know you’re selling links on your website. Someone will pay you for a certain period of time (usually on a 1 year basis) and all you need to do is add a link to their website in your Blogroll. Text links are a great way to make a little extra cash and people buy them because the one way link to their website will help them rank higher in the search engines.
Affiliate Ads – I spoke about affiliate ads earlier and now I’ll tell you how to profit with them. Signup with websites like CommissionJunction or ClickBank and you’ll notice there are hundreds of advertisers who have also joined those website. Look for an advertiser offering a product that would relate to your visitors. Add a banner (usually provided by the advertiser) into your sidebar above or below one of your CPM banners. When someone clicks the banner and buys the product, you’ll receive a fixed commission for it. Commission is usually listed inside CJ or Clickbank and you should know what it is before you start promoting the product.
