Affiliate Marketing or Advertising – A Blog’s Preferred Monetization Method
Make sure you get the main concept right – Do not fall into the trap of “making easy money” and “getting rich fast”. You or some people may earn a few thousand dollars as an one time revenue. But this would happen only very rare, far and between, or once in a very long while. We all want to get rich but that is simply not realistic and is not sustainable. What we are looking for is something that can last and we can continuously build on it. One such method is to start a website or more preciously start a blog.
Consider the following:
- A blog that monetizes with affiliate marketing
- A blog that earns money through advertising – Examples are Adsense, or other Adsense alternative ad networks including Propeller Ads, Buysellads, etc.
Affiliate marketing with blogging
First you will have to identify and determine the niche of your blog i.e. This is very much to make a final decision on the topics that you’re going to be blogging. A generic blog that has too many different niches won’t work very well for the users, and especially won’t do well on Google organic search ranking.
As you have decided your niche or main topic, it is time to register your blog’s domain name. Your want a custom name for your blog because you want to eventually build it into a brand. You can purchase your choice of domain name through one of the web hosting services including Godaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc.
In one of the web hosting accounts that you’ve purchased your domain name, you should also buy hosting spaces for your blog. Usually, a shared hosting plan would be more than enough. Your blog will have plenty “bandwidth” from this shared hosting plan, as for the first year you normally won’t expect your blog to grow 10,000 folds in web traffic.
Install WordPress in your hosting account. Use one of the default pre-built themes for your WordPress blog, or search for a paid WordPress theme. The bottomline is that you simply want a theme that works well with your WordPress blog, and it preferrably looks great. Install the required WordPress plugins to optimize your blog for faster loading speed, etc.
To start, write at least a few articles per day, for the next 60 days. After that you may end up having and publishing 50 new blog articles. That’s a very good start in terms of new content creation.
Sign up at least 1 or 2 affiliate networks and get the affiliate offers. Each affiliate offer would provide you with unique links for promotion. Insert the affiliate links into your blog articles.
At this stage, you should start promoting your blog through multiple channels including social media sites, search engines, forums, and more.
Earn advertising money on your blog
Before placing ads on your blog, you’ll have to do all the same thing that you would do for affiliate marketing. But this time when your blog and the content is ready, you will add the banner ads on your blog.
You will still have to promote your blog so people will start visiting your blog.
