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Placing Ads on Your Sidebar (Affiliate ads, Banner Exchanges)
The concept of earning from a blog has been discussed several ways and a multitude of times all over the net. This money goal revolves around the concept of selling things where there are people who are passing by, and right now, blogs as windows to people’s lives and thoughts are popular. However, there are some people who still do not want to place advertisements on their blogs. Here are some of the reasons that I learned by talking to other bloggers who keep their blogs ad-free.
“Only my friends and family visit anyway” – Of course, with a personal blog, you don’t expect much traffic from other sources, initially. However, as you post more and more, you will see that with or without search engine optimization, your blog will attract people who are looking for the topics you talk about. Unless you keep your blog private by placing a password on all your posts, the search engine robots will continue to visit your blog and send traffic from relevant sources.
“It clutters up my blog and divert attention from my stories” – This is the most common reason why other people won’t place ads. They are really building an online diary and they don’t expect to earn from it. They could also be feeling guilt about making money off their visitors. If you don’t want to place ads that could bring you cash, you can simply put your favorite charity’s banner on your blog to help you out. Perhaps a friend has an offline business that he wants to promote? You can create a small banner for him and paste it on your blog. The beauty of web 2.0 is that you meet so many people online and opportunities to help out aren’t scarce.
“I don’t know how” - You’d be surprised at the number of webmasters who are too proud to ask for help regarding their blog modification. WordPress could be tricky to navigate if you don’t use plugins and if you don’t want to explore the other features of your admin panel, particularly the widgets section. Basic knowledge of HTML is not difficult to acquire. Just remember to copy your php codes to a notepad before experimenting so that you can easily revert back to the original when you break something.
To those who want to monetize their blogs but don’t know how, here are a few tips:
1. Join an affiliate network and choose the products that you want to promote – You can be sure that your favorite brand will have a banner that will fit your sidebar perfectly. They will give you an HTML code to place on your sidebar. The effortless way to do this is to add a text widget on your admin panel’s widget section (for WordPress users) and paste the HTML code on the text box (right below the spot for the title).
Use a Google Adsense Plugin for WordPress – Plugins like AdsenseDeluxe and MightyAdsense will make your WordPress blog advertisement placement easy. These usually require you to simply input your adsense code and the plugin creates ads for you for putting on your sidebar of post body.
A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress
So many people will tell you that if you want to have a self-hosted blog that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing, you should use WordPress. There are a lot of WordPress fans all over the world and for good reason. This blogging platform enables you to do just about anything you want on your blog through plugins and easy-to-edit themes.
The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the blogging software that you use if you are going to avail of your own hosting plan to build your blog. Most of the popular hosts will have a one-touch WordPress install available in your cpanel, or your blog’s main control place. WordPress.com is a website that provides free blogs; and any blog hosted here will have a unique subdomain (i.e. yoursubdomain.wordpress.com). This is a counterpart of blogger.com, which also offers free blog hosting (i.e. yoursubdomain.blogspot.com).
Choosing WordPress Plugins
If you browse through every plugin available for download at WordPress.org, you could be overwhelmed with the sheer number of available ones that you want to use. The first step to choosing plugins is to limit the number of plugins that you will install in your WordPress blog. For A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress
So many people will tell you that if you want to have a self-hosted blog that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing, you should use WordPress. There are a lot of WordPress fans all over the world and for good reason. This blogging platform enables you to do just about anything you want on your blog through plugins and easy-to-edit themes.
The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the blogging software that you use if you are going to avail of your own hosting plan to build your blog. Most of the popular hosts will have a one-touch WordPress install available in your cpanel, or your blog’s main control place. WordPress.com is a website that provides free blogs; and any blog hosted here will have a unique subdomain (i.e. yoursubdomain.wordpress.com). This is a counterpart of blogger.com, which also offers free blog hosting (i.e. yoursubdomain.blogspot.com).
Choosing WordPress Plugins
If you browse through every plugin available for download at WordPress.org, you could be overwhelmed with the sheer number of available ones that you want to use. The first step to choosing plugins is to limit the number of plugins that you will install in your WordPress blog. For example, let’s say you may only have five plugins initially. Which plugins should you include and why? Write out how you want your blog to function and find the plugin for it.
Examples:
I want my visitors to contact me via email directly (Contact Form plugin)
I want to tag my posts in such a way that the search engines will easily find me (all-in-one SEO plugin)
I want my readers to share my posts on their facebook profiles or social pages (Share this plugin)
I want to show google adsense ads without touching too much html (Adsense Deluxe plugin)
Choosing the Best Theme for Your Blog
The best thing about WordPress is that it’s so easy to do test runs of themes or skins for your blog. Simply select Themes under the ‘Design’ feature of your wordpress admin panel and you can choose which uploaded theme to use during the day or month. The wealth of information about WordPress themes over the net is astounding! Seriously, there is a solution for every concept you might have in mind for your blog. You want something that looks like a magazine, there’s a theme for that. If you want something that reflects your grunge and punk rock lifestyle, there’s another theme for that. What are the criteria for choosing the best WordPress theme for your blog?
1. Compatibility with your WordPress version. – Not all themes that are offered for download over the net can be used by the current WordPress versions.
2. Tag and link visibility on the front page – Your main page is the first thing that people will see, so make sure your important links, categories and tags are clearly visible to people on your front page.
3. Browser compatibility – Don’t you just hate it when you view your site using IE6 and it looks broken? Choose themes that have been tested across browsers to ensure that each viewer may be able to see your banners, your affiliate links and your articles.
When you start your blog, you know that there are certain people who you think can appreciate your topic. Some of these can be your friends, co-workers and relatives who, of course, will read anything you are going to put out. However, one cannot earn from a blog by having just a handful of readers. You need a big crowd of fans, or at the very least, interested people who will hang out for a while and listen to what you have to say about a certain product or service. For you to earn decently through your blog, you need visitors who are already interested in your site’s topic, will likely be interested in your topic and those who will most likely benefit from your tips or endorsements.
Where do you find these interested and highly excitable people?
Forums – Online communities have been around for a long time, and some have evolved out of one particular interest that thousands of people share. Joining a forum that directly attracts posters who are more than a bit interested in what you have to say about a certain subject area is powerful. These forums may provide signature space where you can place a link to your blog, or may even allow you to include your blog link or banner in your forum profile. Discussion of your interest in the forum will lead to curiosity. The people who will develop a keen interest in your opinions will probably visit your blog to know more about you and to read more about your thoughts. Developing a good relationship with some of these forum posters will increase your credibility, and subsequently, the amount of traffic going to your blog.
Your Competition – Using the search box at Google (particularly google blog search) and Yahoo will reveal several sites that already talk about your exact blog topic. Visit the most relevant ones and observe the interaction of the webmaster with his readers, check out how he has developed his topic and learn about the trend of his posts. When you have deemed this blog as a “kindred spirit” (someone who has the same level of authority in your field), you may opt to contact him to ask to advertise on his blog. If you are the shy type and wouldn’t approach another easily, you may opt to simply observe what advertising systems the blogger uses on his blog and find ways to place your banner there. Having an advertisement on another blogger’s site will increase your chances of attracting a part of his traffic. Most webmasters will appreciate your business because you represent a related site, which their readers will enjoy. There are some others, however, who will not allow you to advertise on their site because they don’t want the competition.
Remember that finding readers for your blog is easy if you work with the concept of relevance. Also, there are several offline ways of increasing traffic to your blog. One of these is by creating business cards with your blog logo and a short description of what you talk about. You can distribute these in related events that you yourself attend.
Your Sales Pages
One of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog is by making yourself known to other sites. For example, in places like facebook, people will be able to see your link and follow your bait to your blog. The exact place they first go to is called your landing page, which could be your main index (your blog’s front page) or another page that directly tells them what you are selling and why they need it. Some people get disappointed when they expect to see a product review and they get taken to a page that does not exactly tackle what they went there for. Sales pages are also the ones that you use for your Google Adwords campaigns, which you can consider when you have learned enough to use this powerful marketing tool.
The easiest way to introduce your sales page to your blog readers and visitors is to place a link to the sales page on the most visible part of your blog. Page creation is a no-brainer when using WordPress, as one of the features of a wordpress blog is the ability to create web pages that are outside the normal blog post cycle.
There are several ways of categorizing sales pages, and the most common way is to determine whether a sales page is ‘soft sell’ or ‘hard sell’. For people who are just starting out in their quest for online earnings, we will differentiate the types of sales pages by describing what’s ugly and what’s pretty.
The Ugly Sales Page – You might have seen some pages that have ugly yellow bands all over them, or bold letters in various fonts and colors. There are no photographs, not even a pretty icon to beautify things. The paragraphs are not aligned and don’t really qualify as good reading. While we would pass off these pages as “fugly”, there is no denying that they catch attention. Further analysis of the reasons behind the “fugliness” will tell us that these pages are designed to make the reader’s eyes widen at certain points, usually the ones that tell the most powerful messages of the page. Font play, colors and the overall layout of the page makes it a fugly but effective tool for driving profits.
These pages are meant to shock the mind of the reader, shaking him up with the strong message and the visual gimmicks, and eventually sending him to an excited frenzy (or panic), which will make him buy the product being offered.
The Pretty Sales Page – The anatomy of a pretty sales page comprises a nice header, well-aligned text in fonts in neutral color, and over-all, a good presentation of your sale. The nice environment that the page creates relaxes the reader and keeps him reading. Engaging text complemented with icons that directly appeal to the aesthetic tastes of the reader will drive your sales. The buy or “action” button is unobtrusive but inviting.
The goal of the pretty sales page is to make the reader bookmark the page. Skimming through the page, the reader could qualify it as a good resource and promptly tag it for reading afterwards. While he might not buy immediately, he will return often and will possibly buy in the future. The best part is, the exquisite quality of your sales page could just make the reader invite others to view it.
From the moment you start posting on your blog, you should court people to subscribe. Why? Subscribers are a blog’s best friend, these are the people who are waiting for you to post, and waiting to comment on something you tell them through your blog.
How to Attract Subscribers
As soon as you start your blog, the first thing you need to do is to get rid of the “Hello World” that is the default post of a WordPress blog (if you’re using the WordPress platform). Your first post should be an introduction of who you are and why you are blogging about a certain topic. Take the opportunity to highlight your interests, your background (in relation to your blog topic) and why they should listen to what you have to say. Your first blog post will set the tone of your blog, so write it with your signature style.
1. The ‘About’ link or page – As soon as you write your succeeding posts and your first one goes to the “older posts” place, the next thing you have to do is to make sure that anyone who visits your main page will get a feel of the exact topic of your blog. Your header image could be the central thing that will tell them about your blog, or you can simply make your blog title and description compelling enough for visitors to continue browsing through your categories or tags. Alternatively, you can post a small “About Me” snippet on your side bar. Those who are content with just writing an about me page should place the link to that page.
2. A series of posts – Some blog writers have devised a way to keep their subscribers and regular visitors coming back on a daily basis. Posting everyday is not particularly difficult if your posts for each day of the week have themes. Browsing through the blogosphere could familiarize you with phrases such as “Meme Monday”, “Trendy Tuesday” and “Wordless Wednesday”. These correspond to the kind of posts that the author comes up with during a particular day of the week.
Make Your Series Unique
Your series shouldn’t exactly follow those of other blogs. Yours could be something different, such as a weekly debate which runs from Monday to Wednesday. The first blog post should contain an open ended question, which the commenters could answer. When comments on the post reach a certain number, you could write your reaction to the comments via another post. This cycle goes on until you post your conclusion and recap of the discussion.
3. Disclose a Planned Event
If you’re planning a trip around the state or around the country to look for ways to improve your knowledge in your area of expertise, tell your readers about it. Ask them to stick around and “subscribe” to immediately receive your updates on how the event is going, or if you encounter something interesting during your trip.
This concept may also be applied to blog contests you will be joining and contests that you are planning on your blog.
