Making money basics, part 2

1. Making money selling your own products or services means you ship the product yourself or perform the service yourself. “Yourself” includes dropshipping and 3rd party fulfillment, but the point is that you are the person who is responsible for seeing to it that the customer gets the product they paid for.

2. Making money selling the products and services of others means “Affiliate Marketing.”

3. Selling eyes means Pay Per Click (PPC) banners or widgets on your website, or selling advertising spots on your site outright.

There are variations and combinations, but those are the basic ways to make money on the internet. All of them require visitors to your website (or blog) in large numbers. That’s why I said in the last post that the question of how to make money on the internet is really a question of, “How can I induce a lot of people to visit my website.”

The way you lay your blog or other website out, in ways that are attractive and interesting, which at the same time give the visitor a clear and easy way to buy something, is called “monetization” or “monetizing your site.” Your monetization should not be offensive or even intrusive and should, as much as possible, blend right in smoothly with your editorial content. Blogs which do not have ads of any kind are not monetized. Blogs which do have ads ARE monetized. Needless to say, a blog can be monetized poorly or it can be monetized effectively.

Next: getting people to come to your blog to see all your great stuff.

Put product reviews on your website

With your site up and running for a while, it is time to get serious about your initial monetization, even though you don’t have much traffic yet. Of course, if you will be selling your own merchandise, you will have already set up your catalog and payment center during the website setup process.

If your website is a blog, and you have decided to monetize it by offering advertising space and by promoting affiliate advertisers’ merchandise, then you will be wanting to start placing your ads and product reviews tastefully throughout your website.

Remember there are two types of ads, and that you will be most probably be using both. Pay per click ads create revenue for your website if you have high-traffic, and affiliate ads (in the form of product reviews, not banners) will earn you a commission on products sold through your website by that advertiser.

Be aware that many advertisers require a certain level of traffic on your website before they will become affiliated with you. That makes it a little harder for you at first, but there are very many other advertisers who don’t have this requirement--so don’t worry. Pay per click advertisers are especially picky about not advertising with low-volume new sites, so you might just concentrate on affiliate sales at first, until your site traffic increases.

Once you have established relationships with advertisers and have written and posted your product reviews, it is time to concentrate fully on building traffic to your website.

Making money with your blog

By now you have discovered that building traffic to your blog is the main thing you need to concentrate on. Odds are, if you are successful in your efforts to drive traffic to your website, you will make money. You can have the most beatiful website in the world, and you can have it perfectly monetized and strategically set up, but no merchandise will move out the door if you don’t have customers. Fact of life.

We have had several posts about how to bring traffic to your internet store, and of course there are more things you can do that we haven’t talked about yet. But let’s go back for a moment and summarize some of the main points you need to be taking action on in order to build your traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO.)
Advertising on pay per click services.
Getting important successful sites to link to you.
Using other blogs and forums to get your site exposure.
Working to build repeat business.

Let’s briefly go over each of these points, so you are clear about what each step means.

Site setup and monetization

1. Choose the type of internet business you want to set up.

Do you want to sell physical things and then ship that merchandise to your customers?

Or do you want to sell other people’s products for a commission, while also selling advertising space on your website?

2. Set up your “store”--your website. Choose a webhost who is reliable and who offers everything you will need, at a reasonable price. How you answered number one, above, will determine how your website will look.

If you are selling actual physical merchandise from your website, then your website will look like a mail order catalog, and it will have a way for customers to pay.

If, instead, you want to be a commissioned salesperson for other businesses, then your website will consist of product reviews and a method to direct the partially sold customer to the real merchant’s website. You will also most likely display at least a few pay-per-click advertisements on your website.

3. Putting things on your website that people can read, look at, click on, and so forth, is called monetizing your website. When visitors to your website can read about things, look at things, click on things, and take other actions which will bring you an income, then your site is monetized.

All of these things take effort, research, and merchandising skills on your part, but these things are the easy part. The hard part comes next: getting potential customers to look at your stuff.

The key is already inside you

Did you do the web surfing experiment? If so, did you come up with a list of general subjects that you seem to be quite interested in? You can use this information as clues to what you should be writing about as well as how your site might be monetized.

For example, you might have found yourself searching sites about sewing or about woodworking. Or you might have looked at a lot of sports sites, baseball in particular. To me, this means that you might be happy joining those particular crowds. You might be happy writing about those subjects. Do try and make the niche as narrow as possible so as to somewhat limit the competition for the same readers.

And monetization? That should be pretty obvious: send people to sports sites, baseball sites, sewing sites, crafts sites, woodworking sites. Sell, on commission, products that you are interested in yourself: sports products and equipment, baseball fanware and memorabilia; sewing patterns and fabrics, woodworking books. You get it. If you are interested in the subject yourself, it should be pretty easy to write reviews for the products you are trying to sell, as well as blogging about the latest information regarding the subject.

Your blog should be fun for you, not work. Start out on the right foot by not trying to write about something you don’t personally care about. That’s too hard to do.

Take it slower

I read a lot of blogs about making money on the internet. I’m sure you do too. I am always looking for new ideas, and always trying to imitate success. Anyway, one of the most common things I see is the advice to take this blogging business more slowly. Take time to get your feet wet and learn. Writing is the most important thing in the beginning. You need to attach yourself to a subject you like and begin writing about it. That's the advice I see coming from the big boys and girls in the blogging world.

Only later should you begin to monetize your site, they say. Work on being a good writer and getting people to come to your site for the writing you do and the information you provide. Later, monetization will become a natural transition. At least that’s the way many of the very successful bloggers say they did it. They began blogging because they loved it and because they felt they had something to say. Only later, after the audience was fairly large did the money-making part begin.

I think that is most likely true. It is like taking the time to get an education before your go out into the working world to earn a living. It is frustrating to make yourself wait when you want to start making money right now, but, really, how can you do it without the audience? Also, there is something about starting a blog for the primary purpose of making money that people seem to pick up on, and the feeling turns them off.

Consider starting a “pure” blog when you first start out. That is, just write about something you are really interested in. Build up a readership following over a few months. Then, if you still want to, that is the time to slowly make the moves toward monetization. If you don’t love to investigate things and write reports about them, this may not be the right job for you anyway.

Secret lives of successful bloggers

Is there a big secret?

There must be. There has to be. There is. You have suspected this for a long time now, but let’s finally get it out in the open:

“There is more to blogging than just writing a lot of stuff and setting up your blog to suit the search engines.”

There. I said it. I feel better already.

As always, you can find the clues to the “secret” things that successful bloggers do by simply reading their blogs on a regular basis. Perhaps you have had a sneaking suspicion all along that these people were doing something you weren’t doing. You were right. If you don’t have tons of traffic, you were right: they ARE doing something you aren’t doing. Or at least you are not doing it as well as they are.

Some things are hard to explain, hard to define. On the one hand, you have what I call the “mechanics” of running a blog: things like good and interesting and helpful writing; good monetization techniques; advertising; commenting on other people’s blogs, and so forth. On the surface it seems like you are doing every single thing that the “big boys and girls” are doing on their blogs. That must not be true.

Like I said, it’s hard to put this intangible thing into words. But at the heart of the matter is the fact that the really successfull bloggers have found a way, somehow, to CONNECT with their readers. They are on the same wavelength, the same side of the street. They have discovered what their readers are looking for, and they give it to them.

For the next few posts, let’s explore that “secret” in more detail.

Putting product reviews on your website

With your site up and running for a while, it is time to get serious about your initial monetization, even though you don’t have much traffic yet. Of course, if you will be selling your own merchandise, you will have already set up your catalog and payment center during the website setup process.

If your website is a blog, and you have decided to monetize it by offering advertising space and by promoting affiliate advertisers’ merchandise, then you will be wanting to start placing your ads and product reviews tastefully throughout your website.

Remember there are two types of ads, and that you will be most probably be using both. Pay per click ads create revenue for your website if you have high-traffic, and affiliate ads (in the form of product reviews, not banners) will earn you a commission on products sold through your website by that advertiser.

Be aware that many advertisers require a certain level of traffic on your website before they will become affiliated with you. That makes it a little harder for you at first, but there are very many other advertisers who don’t have this requirement--so don’t worry. Pay per click advertisers are especially picky about not advertising with low-volume new sites, so you might just concentrate on affiliate sales at first, until your site traffic increases.

Once you have established relationships with advertisers and have written and posted your product reviews, it is time to concentrate fully on building traffic to your website.

Window Dressing

More about the monetization of your website. That is, more about the actual setup or layout of your store’s floorplan.

One assumes you are using your main websites as more permanent “stores” of some kind, and are using your blogs as “funnel sites” to these stores. Your stores--your regular websites--probably have much more permanent content than your blogs, in that you are not making drastic changes to them frequently. Insead, you are either adding or deleting specific products, or you are freshening the wording in your sales brochures.

These website stores usually consist of either an online mailorder catalog of your products that you want to sell and ship, or they consist of colorful, interesting, and informative “brochure pages” which describe and promote the features of the products of others, one product per page. In the case of the former type, there will also be included a checkout counter.

In any case, you will want to use your blogs as a much more informal meeting place where you can sit down and have coffee with your customers and passersby. Here you can discuss the issues of the day, anything that is dear to your heart, anything at all you want to share with your friends. Obviously, the conversaton often turns to what you do for a living. It is only natural, in the process of this friendly social discourse, that you invite them to visit your store.

But the blog, in my humble opinion, is not the place for the hard sell. People are there to relax and get to know one another. Indeed, you should leave some business cards on the table of your blog, but don’t use your blog to beat people over the head.