How To Make Money From Your Blog - Part 2

Image Banner Advertising

Advertising, no doubt, is the most popular and classic way to earn money with a design blog. You can see a couple of banners on almost every design blog. Selling banner space is one of the main ways many blogs earn an income (they’re still the top income source for 1WD). BuySellAds is the top choice for blogs who want to sell their unutilized space. It simplifies the process of buying and selling advertisements so you don’t have to attract advertisers yourself. Instead you can just focus on the blog’s content and let BuySellAds do the work for you. However the biggest drawback is that BSA take 25% of your profit. Of course you can try to sell advertising space on your own, though it can be really frustrating and time consuming, so the majority of blogs use BSA.

Well, there are a couple of good alternatives though:

DeckNetwork

The premier network for reaching creative, web and design professionals, The Deck serves up over one hundred million ad impressions each month and is uniquely configured to connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience.

What makes this ad service stand out from the crowd is they accept only top design sites, ensuring that traffic is very targeted for advertisers. They also only accept high quality advertisers who are selling good products, not just any old thing. The downside in my opinion, is that if you want to use their service, you cannot use other monetizing options, for example: Google Adsense.

CarbonAds

Carbon Ads is an ad tech company behind a new kind of advertising network. Carbon connects advertisers to highly-relevant users through targeted verticals we call Circles. These circles are made up of influential publishers who lead, or are actively engaged with, their industries. To their audiences, Carbon brings well-designed, value-focused ads, displayed one per page above the fold, for quality brands, products and services that readers actually need and want.

Another promising new ad network is FuelBrandInc – very relevant for designers.

Affiliate Programs

If your blog generates a lot of traffic you should really consider affiliates as a serious source of income. If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing – it’s the type of advertising where you, for example, with your blog send potential buyers to a direct merchant. If done right it can be a win-win situation for both you and your audience.

ClickBank

Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks which we use here at 1stwebdesigner because they offer the biggest payouts if you sell something. It’s not easy to convert visitors to actual buyers, but this is the best place to start. There are also good alternatives: CJ, which is very similar to Clickbank. Basically these two networks are the biggest ones and you’ll find the greatest variety of products, some of which could be really appropriate for your site.

Why to choose Clickbank:

Commissions of up to 75% — much higher than other affiliate networks
Digital products mean instant delivery and faster commissions
More reward for your efforts
Tens of thousands of products

Envato Marketplaces

Well, at least for our site, the Envato marketplace referral programs have worked really great. Why? Because their marketplaces are extremely relevant to our site – for themes we use Themeforest, for design elements we use GraphicRiver, for code snippets we use CodeCanyon sites!

I definitely suggest you check out the Envato markeplace referral program to get started easily. In my experience the image banners from the marketplace don’t work very well. Don’t over optimize articles, but it doesn’t hurt to add few premium selections for example to big slideshow gallery article. The reason people actually go to these marketplaces is because the products offered there are extremely high quality, something worth paying for! In my opinion, free isn’t always the best option and if I find something that can greatly save me hours of work for only $10-30, I will buy it without hesitating! Learn more here: Envato Wiki site.

Another alternative is Mojo-Themes, which is kind of similar to Themeforest selling premium themes and templates.

Amazon Associates Program

Well, I haven’t earned millions there, because at least 1stwebdesigner isn’t focused so much on hardware and physical products. I would suggest if you’re in the design niche to seriously consider promoting popular design books, bestsellers on Amazon from time to time. While such promotions won’t make you a lot of money, it definitely doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on Amazon’s products.

Amazon is different because they offer very little, only 4% as a referral fee at the beginning, if you sell enough products in a month you could maker 6% or higher. What’s cool with Amazon is that though your referrals may not end up buying what they saw on you site, they may end up buying something completely different, and you’ll still make some money. The main task here is actually just to get people to go to Amazon, and they’ll do the rest! There are several ways to make money with Amazon, learn more here.