Making Money With Free Blogs - The Truth - Part 3

Following on from yesterday today we look at Making Money With Sponsored Posts.

As an example of sponsored posts you can see the last two I have written here and here. They are simply short articles, or reviews, on nominated subjects. In doing this you are paid anything from $5 to $100 or even more.

I do my sponsored posts through PayPerPost but there are several other websites that offer similar systems.

Now before you get too excited about the likes of getting $100 for writing short reviews the reality is that you probably won't get this much unless you have a blog with a high PageRank.

This blog has a PageRank 5 and I normally get around $15 to $35 for writing a sponsored post with PPP. I noticed today, for instance, that there was an offer that would pay $10.50 for a review by a PR3 blog but $20.50 for a PR5 or above.

This is an illustration of why PageRank sometimes matters.

With the websites running these sponsored post programs there are certain criteria that you have to meet before you are accepted. Normally blogs must have been running for three months and have at least 20 posts. Needless to say they won't accept adult blogs or anything controversial. My celebrity blog was turned down for example - probably because there is sometimes naughty(ish) stuff about celebs.

As I see it, it's quite easy to make some decent money with sponsored blogs if you plan things properly. I would suggest running a few blogs and keep these updated regularly for three months plus and then join PayPerPost or something similar - or why not join several.

After this period you should be a able to easily write two, three or more sponsored posts daily -and this will add up to a nice income.

When you start off writing sponsored posts you may only be offered say $5 but don't let this put you off. I once said that I wouldn't write a post for this amount, but it will get anyone started earning money and gradually this will increase.

If you write say three sponsored posts a day at only $5 each this will still give you over $100 a week. Of course if they are $20 each it would give you $420 per week - and so on.

In some ways this is a method of making money with free blogs that can be very successful but just think ...

If you combined this with what I talked about yesterday i.e. Making money with affiliate programs and running adverts ...

... then the money you make would be considerably higher still.

Will continue on this theme another day.

Good luck,
Mike.

Further reading:
Making Money With Free Blogs - The Truth - Part 2
Making Money With Free Blogs - The Truth - Part 1

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How To Make Money With Sponsored Posts

You know, it's quite easy to make money if you choose the sponsored post route.

It takes about three months to set up and have running properly but then it's plain sailing. The format is simple.

Start a blog on any inoffensive subject, preferably something covering a wide spectrum. If it's too narrow a niche the sponsored blogs that you can write will be limited. If you did a blog, say on reviews of all sorts, then there would be a massive range of sponsored posts that could be used for the blog.

Of course, it's better still if you can create several blogs.

The blogs have to be updated with posts at least three times a week for the initial three months. The idea isn't to make money out of them during this build up period but you might as well run AdSense Ads or something similar.

You then follow the usual way of obtaining regular visitors and getting a few inward links, not forgetting Blog Directories which have a high PageRank.

What you are aiming for, within the three months, is to:

(a) obtain as high a PageRank as possible
(b) to get a respectable Alexa score. This can often be inflated by such things as hit exchanges - though if you use these you mustn't run AdSense ads, this is against their rules.

After three months join PayPerPost and all of the other similar schemes. Providing you have no adult material or anything offensive you should be easily approved.

Then ... take up as many sponsored posts as you possibly can - subject to individual rules. Most sponsored posts have to be sandwiched between two normal posts ... and make money!

Always read the offer instructions carefully so that your posts are approved.

If you have four or five decent blogs accepted there would be a lot of money to be made.

Q.E.D.

With a website like PayPerPost, if you have your own domain name so much the better. There will be more offers available. For some reason some 'advertisers' don't favour the likes of blogspot addresses. But this is easy enough to do and only costs about £5 or $10 to set up.

For ages I ignored sponsored posts, just didn't like the idea, but as you will have seen yesterday I've made over $100 from them in the last seven days without any sweat.

What I've just written is about making money and not about enjoying blogging. It's purely using blogs as a way to make money and not as a way of life or influencing the world to your way of thinking. It depends on why you want to blog.

Yesterday I looked at another website offering sponsored posts - Bloggerwave. I filled in the application and am awaiting acceptance. I'll give further info when I've seen how it all works.

With PayPerPost they are offering new members $20 for their first post. Or alternatively, by using the button on the right, newbies can get $7.50 for reviewing this post! Blogs have to be over three months old.

Sponsored posts are a simple way to make money - if that's what you are looking for.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Money Making With Sponsored Posts

As regular readers may have noticed I have been doing some sponsored posts recently. I've actually done six this month.

In the past I have written about how I have held back from this sort of money making program. There are various reasons for having said this. Mainly because I didn't want my blog swamped with sponsored posts and also I thought that it might affect the number of visitors to the site. I also mentioned about how writing such posts involved extra work.

I've thought about all of this and but then remembered what this blog is supposed to be all about - which is making money. That's what my original mission was. Sometimes it's necessary to remind ourselves as to why we are blogging.

So I decided to try the sponsored post route to run alongside the other things I do. It seems silly to completely ignore a particular stream of possible income.

As I said I've written six sponsored posts and this should earn me about $140. Now what I want to try and determine is if this will have any detrimental effect to my blog. So far it hasn't made a scrap of difference to the number of visitors or anything else - not that I'm aware of anyway.

To adjust for the additional posts I have increased the number shown on the front page to ten. This way regular posts are still easily available and it is also fairer on the people who are paying me money.

At the moment I have only done posts through PayPerPost.

I'll do a proper report on how I get on with this after about six weeks. This will give a decent time span to judge the results.

Good luck,
Mike.



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Make Money With Advertorials

It appears that sponsored posts are now generally accepted as a way to earn money with blogging. As you no doubt know you can get anything from $5 upwards for writing a sponsored post. You can even get $7.50 for writing about this post - more info here.

Now sometimes the problem can be that sponsored posts on offer may not be relative to the subject matter of your blog. I was thinking about this earlier this morning and 'ding-dong' the blatantly obvious hit me. Instead of writing sponsored posts, for other people, why not do them for yourself?

What I mean by this is to have a specific post, on your blog, about a product or service for which you are an affiliate, agent or whatever. This way there is no restriction on what you write, no rules to comply with and any money made from the post is all your own.

I thought that I would try this out - an experiment if you like - to see how this would work in reality. If you look at my previous post you will see that I have written a post about a book on making money with blogging - which is what this blog is all about.

I feel that such posts, however, should still be marked in some way to indicate that they are different from a standard post. I'm going to mark these as 'Advertorials'.

So that is my idea for today. It's pretty obvious but something that may be worth thinking about. The fact is that to make money your 'products' have to be seen and sold. Perhaps advertorials could do this for you.

Good luck,
Mike.

Further reading:
Build Blog Traffic By Other Bloggers Reviewing Your Posts!


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