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.

What are you doing?

What are you trying to do with your blog? What is your goal? Why are you blogging? If you are reading this post, the answer is most likely, "I'm trying to make some money." Fine. Me, too.

If you already had lots of money, would you still blog? I mean, do you LIKE to blog? Do you feel you have something to say? A huge percentage of bloggers today don't really have anything to say, you know. They have become like the newspaper columnist hack who has to crank out a column on deadline every week. What used to be fun has turned into work.

If you are blogging as a business, there are a lot of things you have to do that are really not that much fun. If you intend to earn money blogging, then the name of the game is high traffic. And people don't visit your site in large numbers simply because it is interesting and relevant and you write well. Sad, but true. If you are playing the PPC numbers game, many of your visitors won't bother to read your posts anyway. And if they bother to comment, it will be simply to grab a few "follows" to their own sites.

But that's cool. I don't write this in order to criticize what is going on, only to lament the demise of interesting blog posts, as a percentage of the whole. I understand and fully accept that if you are blogging for dollars today, that means you are blogging for advertising. You are a newspaper. A magazine. It is how money is made with a blog.

If you still love to write, for the sake of having something to say, how do you cope? You might do what I do. I have blogs for money and blogs for pure pleasure. You will find no ads on the latter, and no Technorati pings. It helps me keep my sanity. If you need to make some money, but you also still love to write, consider coming up with a fantasy pen name and open a separate blog just for the pure pleasure of it.

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.

Advertise

As with any business, you must advertise. They say word of mouth is the best advertising. This may be true, but it is only useful if you have the patience to wait a hundred years or so for it to pay off. In the meantime, you’ll need another job. These are tongue-in-cheek statements, of course, but the intention is to remind you again that no matter how pretty your site is, no matter how scientifically it is monetized, it takes too long to make any money if you just sit back and wait for people to notice you and tell their friends about you.

Advertise. Be very proactive in this regard. Many things you do to get traffic to your site technically fall under the umbrella of advertising. When you strive to get people to link to you, is that not advertising? But what this post is about is direct advertising that you pay for. Generally this is in the category of pay-per-click advertising.

Whether you choose the most obvious, Google’s Adsense, or whether you choose another of the several very good other sources that have been springing up around the internet, you just need to do it. This generally involves setting up an advertising budget you can live with and bidding on keywords--words that describe the subject of your business. Then the advertising company can run your ad where it will be most effective.

How many other ways can you think of that come under the heading of advertising?

Affiliate marketing

Many online entrepreneurs have decided that affiliate marketing is the best way to go. There are several things about affiliate marketing that are indeed attractive. The most obvious thing is that you don’t have to keep stocks of merchandise on hand or have a billing or shipping department. You don’t have to deal with complaints.

Affiliate marketing refers to the selling of other people’s products on your website. But it is more than simply setting up a website and placing a bunch of ad banners on it. I’m not sure if that ever really worked, but it sure doesn’t work now.

One thing you will still have in common with regular “store” sites that ship merchandise, is that you still are faced with the problem of getting visitors to your website. All of the things we've already discussed concerning traffic and how to get it still apply with an affiliate marketing site.

Blogs work very well, both in positioning themselves for search engine traffic as well as generating a really good repeat visitor base. Most of the monetized blogs you see are affiliate marking sites. Some make money on pay per click, such as Google Adsense, but primarily they get paid a commission for selling the products of others directly, rather than simply sending others traffic. There is money to be made with both, so don’t neglect pay per click opportunities.