Making Money With Free Blogs - The Truth - Part 2

Carrying on from yesterday's post there are three main ways to make money with blogs.

Okay, there are probably more, but these are the three that will concern the majority of readers of this blog.

(1) Making money with affiliate programs and running adverts.
(2) Making money with Sponsored Posts
(3) Making money using a combination of (1) and (2)

Lets look at using affiliate programs and adverts first. To me this is the easiest method because there isn't a lot of work involved. I believe in taking the easy route in life if possible.

There is one snag, however, with this method. You need traffic, as much traffic as you can get. In most aspects, as I emphasised yesterday, it's a numbers game.

I've proved this fact to myself over and over. The day I had over 11,000 hits on my Celebrity Insider blog my AdSense commission went sky high. But when I started out in blogging, and had few visits, I only made a few cents per day - even though they were the same style ads.

Yes, you have to place your adverts in prominent positions on your blog but, even if you do this, without sufficient traffic you won't make a lot of money. But don't let this put you off. Lots of small amounts can add up to a worthwhile sum, especially when you are starting out.

Staying on the AdSense theme I've found that the best places with my particular blogs, for their ads, is top right and horizontal above the posts. Usually the 160x600 set of ads, top right, gets the most clicks.

Also with AdSense experiment with the colours of the ads, some pull more than others. Google has advice on this here.

Talking generally about running ads and affiliate programs my experience is that most banners are a waste of space. There are always the exceptions but I don't feel that they produce sufficient in ratio to the space they take up.

For me, small text ads at the end of a post get better results. Best of all though is if you can incorporate the affiliate program within your actual posts. This always works best (for me). I don't mean necessarily by blatant advertising but sometimes by introducing whatever it is into the theme of your post.

With this post that I am writing now, for instance, I'll most likely get more clicks for AdSense information than if I had one of their 'Generate revenue from your website' banners - simply because I have used a couple of links for the word AdSense.

I'm not going into depth here about individual affiliate programs, I'll cover some of these later, but there is one big aspect of affiliate schemes that many bloggers seem to overlook. This is that most of them will pay you commission for introducing new members to the program.

I have mentioned this before but this is where you can make money by doing virtually nothing - once someone has joined under your affiliate number. Take FriendFinderGroup as an example.

This is one of my biggest earners but a lot of the money comes from business that other people produce - for which I get 10% commission. Ten introductions will therefore double your possible income.

There are therefore two important aspects of affiliate programs and the likes of AdSense.

(a) Promoting the products themselves yourself and
(b) Introducing others to the programs concerned.

I don't want to make this post too long so I'll continue another day.

Good luck,
Mike.

Making Money With Free Blogs - The Truth -1

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