15 Days of Marketing Day Nine: My Blog, My Brand, Now Show Me the Money!

WORK HARD FOR THE MONEY

If you’ve got the bandwidth, meaning at least three hours a week to dedicate to freelancing, you might want to add to your resume with some freelance-type job sites. We’re launching MomForce.com very soon (still testing and tweaking) and this will be a great resource for jobs specifically related to moms marketing to moms. But there are quite a few others that have blogging, writing, marketing, and admin-type jobs (both by project and long-term opportunities). Get started by trying one of these:

• Go Freelance
• The On Demand Global Workforce - oDesk
• UserTesting.com (if you’re good at giving feedback about user experience, this is definitely worth checking out, I’ve made some good money from this)

AFFILIATE ADVERTISING

This is one method that I’ve played around with a lot. And I’ve figured out a few things along the way that I’ll share with you. The first is: You’re more likely to make money if you choose ads based on your blog’s niche. The second is: you’ve got to go beyond the banners. When I’ve just used the banner ads provided, I haven’t made that much money. When I include the text links in my posts that are relevant, it’s definitely more effective. Also, my rule of thumb is that if I wouldn’t click on the ad to find out more, my readers probably won’t either. Word to the wise, though - don’t write posts just to be able to insert the affiliate links…write your posts as you normally would and if there’s a link that fits, use it. I’ve signed up with quite a few affiliate networks to have as many options as possible. They include:

• Pepperjam Network (Now Offering a $10 Affiliate Sign On Bonus.)
• Logical Media
• LinkShare.com
• ShareASale
• Commission Junction
• Amazon Associates

You can also use these affiliate networks to create stores right on your website or blog. One tool that makes it super easy is Pop Shops. Now having a store is not going to be for everyone. Also, if you’ve been wondering about how to create a holiday gift guide and monetize it, Katja Presnal of Skimbaco Lifestyle and Christine Young of From Dates to Diapers are offering a how-to webinar about holiday gift guides on November 13, check out their blogs for more information.

SELLING YOUR TEXT LINKS

As your readership increases, so will your Google Page Rank. Companies and advertisers want to improve their SEO by having their links on “juicy” sites like yours. Don’t think though that if you’ve got a PR 1 or 2 or even 0 that you can’t make sales, you can! Two text link ad management companies I like to use are:

• LinkXL
• Triggit

Personally, I prefer LinkXL because it sells your text links on a monthly basis versus on a per-click basis that Triggit does. But if you’ve got a high-traffic post, you might want to use Triggit for that and LinkXL for the rest.

ADVERTISING SALES, TIPJARS, and PRODUCT PLACEMENT

There are a lot of ad networks to choose from and you want to make sure you really look into the limitations some set on what you can and cannot do on your site. Some limit the monetary value of the products you may review on your site while others are extremely flexible. Right now I am finding that I prefer to control the ad space on my site and have the flexibility to change things up based on performance. Plus, while my traffic is pretty high, I’m finding that I make more from direct ad placement, tipping, and paid blog product placement. So I’m not going to cover ad networks in this post, however, if you’re curious about them, Google “Ad Networks” and I’m sure you’ll have no shortage of information.

I’ve just started exploring direct ad sales and one tool that I’ve just signed up for and will start using is OIO Publisher. This service manages all your direct advertising sales and provides a marketplace to offer your ad space as well. What I like most about OIO Publisher is that you pay for the program, you keep 100% of your ad sales. So basically, I’ll earn back the cost of the publisher after one sale. As my traffic grows so will the cost of my ad space and it’s nice to know I won’t have to give a cut everytime I do. Plus they offer a lot of other goodies and services as well.

I’ve also had a lot of success with ScratchBack and their TopSpots widget. You can set the price of your TopSpot to whatever you want and readers, including businesses and bloggers, can “tip” you and get a spot on your TopSpots. You can set the spots to “auto-bump” as people purchase them (meaning after all the spots fill up, the oldest spots will retire) or you can set them to expire on a weekly or monthly basis. The flexibility of this widget is awesome.

As my readership has grown, so has the requests for paid reviews and product placements on my blog. I don’t do many of them as a lot of times, getting a free product sample is enough to have me do the review, especially if I love it! However, every once in a while, this opportunity presents itself and I charge based on the time commitment and current traffic stats for my site.

FINAL THOUGHTS

As you can see, there are a lot of options for monetizing. For me, I never want the monetization of my site to take precedence over the quality of my content. In other words, I want to keep writing about what I love and what I’m passionate about and figure out where the monetization fits in, not the other way around. For good measure, I highly recommend adding a disclosure policy to your blog as I have in my blog’s footer to be as transparent as possible.

YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

Explore the different options for monetization above and see what fits best with your specific blog or business. Some might not be a perfect fit, while others might end up being quite lucrative. I plan to blog updates on my success and lessons learned, some lessons I’ve already shared with you, as I experience them here on Jessica Knows. Start with what you’re comfortable with and consider those opportunities that you didn’t know about. Then hopefully, we’ll all start getting a little return on our investment of time and energy.