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.

to be continued...

How To Make Money From Your Blog - Part 1

More and more people are trying to earn online – there are millions of  new blogs, start ups and applications already and many more are being created each day! While there are so many people working online, only some of them are  profitable ( I mean really profitable – not just making their living)!

In this article I wanted to scratch the surface about several well known, and not so well known, monetization techniques that you could implement in your own business. Even if you don’t have your own business blog yet – no problem, because even a simple understanding  how other people earn online will be a great help to boost your confidence to start! Yes, online business can be very profitable if you follow certain rules to monetize your site!

consider that there are three categories of people venturing online:

1.Dreamers

Most people just complain about their life and keep reading success stories but don’t do anything on their own! Remember that dreaming will not make your goals a reality! These people may earn some money to survive, but nothing impressive, they’re just afraid or too lazy to actually start something. If you are there – don’t worry, you are stepping out from that reality to discover a new reality! This is how I started, because I didn’t want to accept the reality everybody else had! What’s the Secret?  - Take action!

2. Average business (making a living)

Here I would rank fairly successful people, including freelancers who own blog businesses and share their thoughts and expertise to their established readership (50,000-100,000 unique visits per month). Most online businesses fall in this category, because the actual project idea is good, but there is something missing. Mostly it’s because such business owners are just hard working and have experienced in their own niche – be it design, web development, writing, but not so much in marketing, social media promotion or money management. They are just lacking motivation or expertise in some areas that are crucial for their business to grow. They probably don’t have enough money to hire people who could take on the tasks required to market a blog and take it to the next level. Most freelancers don’t have enough time to learn these new skills because they are doing everything themselves.

My answer to fix this – implement better monetizing techniques to earn more (the old saying goes ‘work smarter, not harder’) so you can afford to hire someone that has the knowledge and skills you may not! Another solution could be to change the vision – maybe you’re doing what everybody else is. Are you doing anything different, or unique,to grab more people’s attention?

3.Good, profitable business (enjoy living)

And then there is  the third category where the business seems to have everything it needs – established team, great content, social media promotion, marketing and some classic monetization techniques implemented. Most people do not make it to this level of success and those that do often stop here because they don’t know how else to improve! I myself face this challenge and I’m slowly moving forward and making improvements. I was at this stage for close to a year and I considered myself highly successful. I was comfortable, and because I felt successful I didn’t actively seek ways to improve.  I paid for this mistake – I lost a lot of loyal readers, who just saw the content wasn’t at the same level anymore.