Easy Earning

As you no doubt noticed, I’ve starting adding videos to this blog in a big way. The effect on traffic has been quite positive. Video is where blogging is heading and you should consider adding a video element to your blog if you haven’t already done so.

Videos Boosts Blog Traffic

I have noticed traffic to the blog has gone up by 15% since adding more videos to my posts. In addition, RSS subscription is on the verge of breaking 26,000 for the first time. Readers seem to really like videos. It allows me to express myself in ways words on a blog can never do.

Something I haven’t paid attention to at all was YouTube subscribers. I didn’t know I had any until I checked it. There are nearly 100 people subscribed to my YouTube videos. YouTube could be a nice traffic source if you built up a big enough subscriber base. I found iJustine via YouTube and I’m sure many others found her the same way.

Google Can Spider Video Content

Here’s another reason why you want to start adding videos to your blog. Google now has the technology to spider video content. YouTube videos are showing up more often on Google search results. For example, the YouTube video for the Macbook Air commercial shows up on page 1 when you do a search for MacBook Air. The video has been viewed nearly 2 million times. Imagine how much traffic you would get if you had been the one to post that video with your blog URL watermarked on it.

Videos Are Inexpensive To Add

You don’t need an expensive film studio to add videos to your blog. All my videos are shot with an inexpensive Flip Video digital camcorder. Most digital cameras can take video so you don’t have to buy a separate video recorder.

Editing the videos can be done with the software that came with your computer OS. I used Windows Movie Maker when I had the PC. Now I use iMovie on the Macbook Pro. While neither program is as powerful as Adobe Premier, they’ll get the job done and they’re easier to use. Thanks to services like YouTube, hosting your video is easy and free.

Videos Can Make You Money

I haven’t tried to make money with my videos yet but I can this as a viable income stream down the road. We already have sponsors giving us free stuff for the weekly Dot Com Pho videos and I can see product placement fees in the future.

Another way to make money with the video is by becoming a YouTube partner to get a percentage of the advertising money. YouTube is not the only service to offer partnerships. There are tons of video sharing sites, like Revver, that will give you a cut of the advertising dollars.

Maximizing Your Video Traffic

To get the most out of their videos, many bloggers will upload their videos to a bunch of video sharing sites. However, this can be a long and boring process. To make thing easier, I recommend using a service like Tube Mogul, which distributes your videos to all the major video sharing sites with a single upload.

The service also offers video analytics so you can see how your videos are performing across all the video sharing sites. It’s no harder to use than uploading a single YouTube video so I highly recommend it.

Another thing I recommend to maximize your video traffic is to always embed your blog URL into your videos. If the viewer likes the video, chances are he’ll want to know who made it and see any other videos you may have made. Putting your URL at the beginning or end is also good for branding purposes.

This is part one in a three part piece around making money online and avoiding the scams that are out there.

You and I have common interests. We’re after the same goal: making money online. It sounds simple and John makes it look easy, but if you’ve dedicated any time to trying to turn a profit on the web, you know it’s a lot harder than it looks. Unfortunately for you, as part of those looking to make a living online, you’re one of the most victimized groups on the web today. Don’t believe me? Google ‘make money online’ and just look at the sponsored ads. Nearly every single ad is spam.

What we do at ivetriedthat.com and what we intend to do with these guests posts is to educate as many people as we can about various work at home and make money online scams. Most scams operate under the guise of ‘Look! Everyone is making hundreds of thousands of dollars online and you’re losing money by not acting RIGHT NOW!’ They then show Clickbank or bank accounts with thousands of dollars earned, people holding bags of money, and flashy expensive cars. All the while, you feel like a sucker for not finding out about this website earlier.

In desperation you pull out your wallet and make a purchase before the text-box counter hits 0 and the ’special 30-minute’ sale that’s happening right now ends. Before you know it, you’re out $7 or $27 or $47 or maybe even $197 and you’re left with a crappy outdated book on how to do affiliate marketing. Hell, just reading JohnChow.com is more educational and it’s free!

You were scammed. Swindled out of money that should be rightfully yours, but you were defrauded by a website that made you believe that you’d be given the secret formula to success. Unfortunately, there is no secret. The Internet operates just like real life. If you plan on making a living online, it’s going to take hard work and dedication. Nothing comes quick and easy in life. It sucks. I’m sure many readers can relate to the feeling of getting suckered out of money.

With the growing pressure of falling economies and rising gas prices, more and more people are looking to making money through alternative measures. A lot of people are turning to the Internet to make money, but sadly, Internet crime is on the rise. All hope is not lost however. The next piece will show you the common themes around these make money online scams and what you can look for to avoid future situations like these.

“Is it possible to earn a full-time salary as a part-time blogger? (eg, if you’re student)”

This question has been voted up quite high in my Q&A sidebar widget so I thought I’d attempt an answer today.

It’s one of those questions with two answers:

Yes…. and…. No

Let’s unpack both (and I’d encourage you to read both as they bring balance to the question).

Yes it is POSSIBLE to earn a full-time salary as a part-time blogger

Part of me wants to simply answer this question with a ‘no’ answer and give a long list of answers why it’s not possible (because to answer ‘yes’ will mean some will accuse me of painting an unrealistic picture of blogging for money). However I have met a number of bloggers who make a good living from blogging as part time bloggers (in writing this I don’t have permission to share their stories so I’ll keep this fairly general).

However in every case there are a few observations I’d make about these bloggers. They usually had all of the following characteristics (or at least a few of them):

1. They worked hard - they might not have put full time hours (40 or so hours a week) into their blogging but they certainly did work quite a few hours and worked hard in those hours. Many of them did work full time on their blogs at certain times (summer holidays etc).

2. They were very good at what they did - they had an exceptional knack of being able to write engaging content, build networks and build community on their blogs.

3. They had an element of ‘luck’ to their story - I am thinking of a couple of bloggers particularly who really found themselves in the right place at the right time when they started their blogs.

4. They were able to draw others in to help - one way to overcome an inability to work full time hours is to draw others into your blog to help shoulder some of the load.

5. They made money indirectly ‘because’ of their blog and not just directly ‘from’ their blog - interestingly a number of the bloggers I’m thinking of have developed products (e-books and courses) of their own that they sell from their blog (and other people’s blogs). This means they are not just building a revenue from advertising but have a secondary source of income.

6. They USED to work full time as a blogger - one blogger that I’m thinking about now works about 20 hours a week blogging and make a very good living from his blog - but only because he used to work full time. ie he built up his blog to a point where it really was earning good income which then enabled him to scale back a little and coast a bit (he also hired someone to help him - see point #4).

No it’s not LIKELY that you’ll make a full-time salary from blogging part time

It is possible to make a full time living from blogging part time - but the sad reality is that the bloggers I’m thinking of are not in the majority.

Most bloggers who do get to a level of earning a full time living from their blogs are working full time hours (or above) on their blogs. And even then many that are working full time hours are not able to make a full time living from blogging (time is just one element of many factors that build a successful blog).

When I’m talking to new bloggers wanting to explore blogging as a way of making money I generally encourage them to see it as something to supplement their existing income.

Yes it is possible to make a full time living from the medium but the reality is that most never get to this point. Sure - have it as a goal, but set yourself smaller goals in terms of your earnings and see it as something that progresses over time as you invest more time into blogging.

If you’d like to see a progression of how this unfolded for me I’d encourage you to read my story of becoming a Blogger. It it you’ll see that I gradually stepped up my time put into blogging - but only as the earnings I was receiving allowed me to.

PS: Are You a Part Time Blogger Earning Full Time Income?

If you’re one of those bloggers that I mention in this post that are able to pull in a full time income from blogging part time I’m sure my readers would love to hear from you and learn from some of your wisdom. Feel free to share your own experiences (either with your URL as an example or anonymously if you’re not wanting to go public) - looking forward to your own lessons.

Affiliate programs are a brilliant idea. For the owner of the product, they’re a way of ecruiting a veritable army of salespeople to promote your product without having to pay them a dime unless and until they generate a sale. For the affiliate, they’re a great way of earning extra cash from an existing, high-traffic website with virtually zero additional effort.

Only problem is, most affiliates don’t HAVE an existing, high-traffic website and they’re suckered into thinking that it’s a simple matter of signing up for an affiliate program and “driving traffic” to the product owner’s site using a uniquely-coded URL. Well, it IS that simple. And it isn’t.

If you don’t already have your own high-traffic website, how do you think you’re going to drive traffic to the product owner’s site in the hope of generating a sale? Well, there are a few ways, actually. And all of them are going to cost you either time or money.

First off, you’re going to have to spend money on advertising. How much? Well, consider this. Estimates vary but, roughly, only 2-4% of people who see your ad will actually click on your link. Of that 2-4%, only 1% or so of THEM will go on to buy. In addition, it takes, on average, 7 or 8 exposures to your ad before people will click on it. AND to achieve even these piddly numbers your market must be targeted in the first place. This is, as you can see, nothing but a numbers game. Pure and simple.

So what does all this mean to you, the advertiser without a website? Well, to start with you’re going to want to advertise where a LOT of people are going to see your ad. But not just ANY people. People interested in the product you’re wanting to sell - your target market. So this cuts out the free classifieds and FFAs. And it means you’re going to have to spend advertising dollars.

Where do you go to advertise then? The most effective form of advertising is in ezines. Take mine, for example. At the time of writing, my subscriber database is around 14,000. Each week I run an ad for my own opportunity (in addition to running ads from other paying advertisers). I generally get about 500 click-throughs over the course of the 2 or 3 days following publication. That’s a click-through rate of about 3.6%, about in line with the average. If you were to pay to advertise in my ezine, it would cost you $70 for a single classified based on my $5 CPM ($5 per every 1,000 subscribers) pricing formula. This is not an uncommon formula for pricing ezine advertising. You’re therefore paying around 14 cents per click. That’s not bad. Other than that, what can you do? Well, you can choose to spend time rather than money. An obvious choice considering what I’ve just said is to start your OWN ezine. Build your own list and over time you will have a large subscriber database to put your ad in front of too …and it won’t cost you a dime. But this takes time and it takes work. It’s taken me two and a half years to build a list of 14,000 subscribers. And it takes a few hours of work to put together the ezine itself including writing the feature article. Every week, week in, week out. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

And once you’re publishing your own ezine, it’s a simple enough matter to distribute your articles for other ezine publishers to run in their ezines. That 4 or 5 liner at the end telling readers who you are with a link to your website (or, if you don’t have one, the website of the owner of the product you’re selling) is effectively free advertising for you. Not all publishers accept article submissions though, so be sure to find out whether they do before submitting your articles to them.

But think about this. If you’re doing all this work anyway, doesn’t it make sense to create your OWN website (in addition to your ezine)? Sure it takes time and it takes work and it takes money (but not a lot - hosting fees can be pretty cheap if you know where to go). But once it’s done and you’re just in maintenance mode - adding fresh content every few days, uploading your latest ezine and maintaining your archives - your website does so much of the work for you. Generate a few hundred unique visitors a day and you can be getting the same click-through rate to your affiliate site *for nothing* that you were paying someone else 14 cents a click for.

EVERY SINGLE DAY. 24/7/365.

So, this is the truth about affiliate programs. They’re great if you’re the product owner and they’re great if you can link to your affiliate site from your own high-traffic site.

But if you don’t have your own site, you’re going to have to buy traffic to your affiliate site - either with money, time or both. How many sales are you going to have to generate to earn enough commission to more than cover your time and costs and leave you with a profit?

Bottom line? Setting out to make money with affiliate programs before you have your own site in place is putting the cart before the horse. Yes, you want to make money and you want to do it quickly. But it just doesn’t work that way. Not with affiliate programs, anyway. So adjust your expectations and do first steps first. It will be slow going to start. It will take you weeks to create a worthwhile site and then MONTHS to generate the kind of traffic you need. But if you take a long-term approach to your business and take the time now to lay the proper foundation, you’ll reap the dividends for years to come.

Inbox Dollars pays you to read the emails that are sent to you once you sign up. It is absolutely free to sign up. Once your registration is confirmed, you’d start to receive mails that contain advertisements. You’d be credited money to read those advertisements.

To sign up at Inbox Dollars, click here

Resource A Day

Resource A Day is another paying website. It is free to sign up here too. You’d also receive a bonus of $10, just for signing up. You could earn more by referring people to this site. Once you have signed up, you’d be provided with a web page, to which you could direct your referrals. The site also provides a calculator that enables you to calculate how much you could earn with a certain number of referrals. You can also avail the several free resources provided by Resource A Day. The site also provides free tools ranging from free antivirus to free spell checkers. You’d also be introduced to special offers and trial versions.

To sign up at Resource A Day, Click here

Pay Per Post is another money making website that pays you to write about products of their advertisers. Pay Per Post, or PPP, provides a significantly higher earning chance compared to the paid email or paid survey programs.

What you are basically supposed to do with PPP is to find open oppurtunities and make use of them by writing reviews for the products mentioned in your blog or website. Apart from writing reviews, you could also earn by writing referrals.

To get started with PPP, you need to initially submit your blog, which would be evaluated. Only approved bloggers are allowed to write reviews.

My advice is to initially enhance your writing skills to their best before signing up for similar programs. If you are not a good writer or if you have adult content in your blogs, then there is every chance that you get bans, which is never a good thing to happen.

Then, there are the PPP tools. To implement the PPP tools, you must get a piece of code and implement it in your blog. This enables PPP tools in your blog. The referral program mentioned earlier is one such tool. There are a few others like the one which allows users to review posts in your blog. This increases the popularity of your blog and gets more visitors.

More visitors means more traffic and hence, more income. So, go ahead and sign up on PPP.

As an update to this post I’ve more recently written one on How I make Money Blogging which highlights the most profitable ways that I use blogs to generate income. I’ve also written extensively on how bloggers make money in ProBlogger the Book.

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

When starting a Wordpress blog, it’s always important to have an idea in mind of how you’re going to piece it all together. Generally speaking, when I set up a new blog, I pretty much use the same plugins every time, as they seem to be “essential” to the overall operation of the blog.

I have a folder on my desktop called “essential plugins”, and now it’s just part of the process, but I thought I would share the plugins I use with you, just in case you haven’t heard of one of them or used one yet. Most of them have been around for a while, and are pretty popular, not to mention they currently work with Wordpress 2.5 (which is very important).

Here Are My 10 Essential Wordpress Plugins:

1. All-In-One SEO Pack - This plugin should be installed on every blog out there. It’s the first one I think of and the first one I upload to a new blog. Reason being? It allows you to quickly perform “on page” SEO for not only your individual wordpress pages, but also for each post, which in the search engines eyes is also a page. Sometimes I may want to come up with a creative title for the readers, but the all in one seo pack allows you to use search engine friendly titles and descriptions for the search engines. It’s good stuff!

2. Secure Contact Form - Every website/blog needs a contact form, and while many bloggers have their own personal choices, this one is the one I use for pretty much all of my blogs. It’s easy to install (just a few clicks), and even more easy to use. I like the security features of it, which are in place to prevent spam (which can be horrendous on blogs).

3. Wordpress Database Backup - I know this one isn’t as exciting as some of the others, but please believe me when I say you need this! Many times this plugin alone has literally saved me countless hours, and large amounts of money. You can set it to auto backup your blog daily, weekly, or whatever you prefer. At least do a weekly backup, so if all is lost, you’ll only be out a weeks worth of posts. I also use this to extract the database in a friendly Wordpress compatible version if I transfer to another person or host. Set it and forget it.

4. Brian’s Threaded Comments - This cool plugin allows you to have one of those nifty comment sections that allow a person (or me) to reply directly to a comment, instead of posting below it. You can have the comment replies nest as deep as you want, but I think the default is 3 replies, and that’s what I leave it on. Installing this plugin isn’t hard…it’s the typical upload–>activate. But you have to replace your themes comments.php form with one supplied with the plugin. That’s it!

5. Google XML Sitemaps - This is another one of those semi-boring plugins, but a necessity. This plugin (which just takes uploading and activating), is what I use to generate a clean and search engine friendly sitemap xml file, which I submit to my Google Webmaster Tools account. Hey, anytime I can make it easier on the Google spiders to crawl my site, I’m game.

6. Spam Karma 2 - Every blog needs a spam killer, and while a lot of bloggers use the default Akismet, I trash that one and upload Spam Karma 2. I love SK2, because it seriously catches everything. There are many options you can tweak to set different karma levels, but I usually never mess with it. I keep it default and it’s worked wonderfully every time.

7. Sociable - While I do not currently use sociable on this blog, it’s only because the theme kind of has some of the sociable functions built in to it, so it wouldn’t make much sense to have the same thing twice. What Sociable does is allow you to put little pretty social bookmarking icons beneath every post and/or page to make it easy for your readers to submit your article or post to the big social bookmarking sites (Digg, SU, Sphinn, Reddit, del.icio.us, etc…). It’s another one that you just upload, activate, and configure which icons you want it to show.

8. CommentLuv - This sweet plugin is a new favorite of mine, due to the fact that it encourages more commenting on your posts. Commenting fell by the wayside for a while, until this plugin came out, which, in a nutshell, pulls up the last post (if possible), of the blogger who leaves a comment. So for instance, if you have a blog, and you comment on mine, it will attempt to pull the link to your latest blog post under your comment. So that way, people may see it and you just might gain a few new readers just from commenting on someone else’s blog. Pretty cool, huh?

9. Adsense Deluxe - While not all bloggers show Adsense ads on their blogs, a lot do. Obviously on this one, I am, but on some others I leave it out depending on what the goals of the particular blog are. Regardless, if you want to easily implement Google Adsense into your blog without much hassle, check out Adsense Deluxe. It’s easy to work with, and you also have the option of showing Yahoo Publisher Network ads too.

10. UsersOnline - This plugin may be more material than others, but I’ve really grown to like the UserOnline plugin. It simply shows you how many people and/or bots are on your blog at any given time. It seems like more of an ornament, but I find it useful when I submit a post to a social bookmarking site, I can immediately see if people are on my site. It’s really fun when you get a big Stumble and have several hundred on your site at one time - it’s quite motivating! Anyway, installation is easy, and if you need to feed your ego, this plugin will help do that

Here’s the story of how I went from earning no affiliate sales to generating thousands of dollars in sales every month.

When I started Free Money Finance, I decided that I would only recommend products and services that I was familiar with and/or use myself. I established this policy because I didn’t want people to think I was saying I liked something just so they would buy it and I could make a few extra bucks. As the blog grew in popularity, this philosophy served me well as readers learned they could trust me and that I would never intentionally lead them astray – especially just in an effort to make money for myself.

However, as you might imagine, this philosophy severely limited my blog’s earning potential. For the longest time, I ran Adsense and nothing else. Then I wised-up a bit and realized that there was a way that I and my readers could both benefit from affiliate sales on my site. So I took the following steps that ultimately helped my income to skyrocket.

Step 1 - Make a list

As the writer of a money blog, I brainstormed and listed the various money-related products that I use and like. The list included Vanguard for investments, Quicken for financial tracking, various books that had made a difference in my personal money management, and a couple Credit Cards I was using to maximize my cash back rewards.

Step 2 - Supplement the list

I supplemented this list with products that my readers said they liked and recommended. Examples of these included budgeting solutions from Mvelopes and You Need a Budget.

Step 3 - Find matching affiliate programs

With the list in hand, I went on the hunt to find affiliate programs offered by these businesses. Ultimately, I was able to track down an affiliate program for each of my options except for Vanguard (I did find one for E*Trade and I use them, but I really can’t recommend them fully like I can Vanguard.)

I took a duel approach in offering the programs to my readers – I put ads on my site and I also talked about the products, how I used them, what others said about them, etc. in posts. I even took comments from readers who had their own successes with the products and posted them as endorsements of the products. Here are a few examples:

• How You Can Earn Over 2.6% Cash Back by Using a Combination of the American Express Blue Cash and Chase Freedom Cash Visa Credit Card
• Mvelopes Seems to be a Winner (At Least for Most People)
• Personal Finance Books that Can Change Your Life

The results? No contest – the post-related mentions performed much better. In many cases, the ads didn’t have any conversions at all while the in-post links generated hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in sales per month.

What was the difference? I could honestly recommend the products, so my passion came through in the posts. Furthermore, I had tangible examples to share with readers – how to best use each item to get the most from them. In short, my enthusiasm, knowledge and personal recommendations helped to sell the products. Sales soared and hundreds, if not thousands, of readers got products that can help them to improve their personal finances. It was a win for us all!

So, what items/programs/services do you use and like? Make a list, search out affiliate programs for them, and get to writing. Your fortune could be waiting.

Commonly known in the Internet Marketing world as “article marketing”, or, “bum marketing” - it’s simply the act of submitting articles to popular article directories on any given subject, and then putting your URL in the “resource box” (the author credits) at the end of the article. The goal is to hopefully get a decent ranking in Google for your article, and when people read it, they are persuaded to click on the URL for the author that wrote the article, which leads them to your target URL (your website or whatever website you’re promoting).

Whew, that was hard to sum up in one little paragraph, and there’s still so much more to talk about, but I’m just going to cover the basics today, on the subject of using article marketing to drive traffic to your blog.

Article marketing is a wicked tool, which, if used right, can drive long term traffic to any blog. I’m serious when I say that all bloggers, even some of the “big dogs”, should actively participate in this method of traffic generation, because it works. And it works even better in numbers.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with this concept, bare with me, I’ll give you a quick tutorial below:

1. Write an article that deals with the subject of your blog. For instance, if you write about fitness, then get an article written that relates somewhat to fitness. Easy enough.

2. Pick a phenomenal title for your article. This is where you would want to do a little keyword research, but since this is meant for beginners, I won’t go into that at the moment. If you stick with titles like, “Top 10 Ways To Lose Weight Fast”, or, “21 Foods That Melt Belly Fat”, you should be just fine for now.

Note: If you are familiar with keyword research (using a tool such as the free Wordtracker keyword tool, then make sure you do a little check up to see what people are searching for in your niche, and make sure to include your chosen keyword in your title - make sense?)

3. Sign up and set up your free account over at a popular article directory such as EzineArticles.Com (the best, by far).

4. Proof read your article until you’re sure it’s perfect, and proper spelling and grammar is used.

5. Write a quick resource box (the resource box is what appears underneath your article when it goes live). I find that a quick and to the point one works best, with a call to action in it. Instead of saying something like, “Bob Jones is an expert at fitness, read his daily fitness tips here”, instead, I would say something along the lines of, “Learn 7 explosive ways to lose weight fast in our free newsletter”. I would make the word newsletter the actual link back to the site. By putting a “call to action” in the wording, your CTR (click through ratio) will be much higher. This is the whole goal of this, so a good resource box should be one of your number one priorities.

6. When all of the above is done, submit your article for approval.

7. Wait a few days until it gets approved.

8. Use an existing article in your blog, or some other website, to link to the live Ezine Article you just wrote, that way it gives it a little extra “link juice”.

9. Rinse and repeat as many times as you can stand it. Seriously, this is the way to make it happen. Writing 4 articles and expecting heaps of traffic isn’t going to happen. This is a numbers game, meaning, the more articles you get submitted, the more traffic you’re going to receive. Heck, I have articles from over a year ago still generating good traffic for an old blog of mine.

Numbers Are Your Friend

I can’t emphasize the fact enough that article marketing is purely a numbers game. The more articles you have submitted, the more traffic you’re going to receive in the long run.

You see, whenever you submit an article with a popular article directory such as EzineArticles, you stand a chance at getting a good ranking in the search engines because EA carries a lot of weight in the search engines (especially Google).

I want to present an truly awesome example of how article marketing can not only drive tons of traffic, but also put a lot of money in your pocket. There is a guy over at the WarriorForums that goes by the name, “TimG“, and he’s well known around there for his article marketing savvy. Long story short, he just posted some statistics yesterday - because he just hit the 1500 articles submitted milestone. That’s HUGE.

He obviously uses these articles to drive traffic to his websites, and here are his stats from having 1500 live articles (be ready to get jealous and cry):

Page Views: 2,231,423

URL Clicks: 141,030

Now, URL clicks were only recently started to be tracked by Ezinearticles, so one could assume that number is probably double, triple, or more. Folks, that’s a lot of traffic and clicks.

You may think that’s a lot of articles to write, but he freely admits that he outsourced a lot of it, due to the fact that even by outsourcing the articles, he still made plenty of profit from the traffic coming in to cover the costs. When you get to the point where you have 100+ articles submitted and they’re doing well, then outsourcing your article writing is probably the smartest thing you can do. Instead of using your time to write articles, you can be out there promoting and marketing your site.

Imagine, just imagine, how much money he’s pulled down from this. He’s a marketer at heart, so no doubt he used this traffic to direct it at affiliate offers, CPA offers, or whatever floats his boat. And this is just from the article submissions alone! With that many backlinks from the articles, and from people who have used his articles on their own websites (another huge factor in this), he probably has more traffic than he could ever dream of. Even if 1% of those converted to a sale, that’s a lot of dough.

One more thing, like I just mentioned a bit above - the whole point of an article directory is to provide a place for other webmasters to freely copy and paste the articles for use on their own websites, so long as they keep the author resource box in tact. Out of the 1500 articles that Tim submitted, it’s safe to say that there are quite a few webmasters out there using his articles, which of course leads to more incoming links, which in turn can help boost your search engine rankings. I’m quite sure he ranks well for a variety of keywords. Also, big E-Zines that have hundreds of thousands of readers often look at article directories for good articles to publish, so getting picked up by one of those types of sites is an article marketers dream, because if you get picked up by one of the big boys, you can expect a flood of traffic to your site, and fast.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, article marketing can be quite the worthwhile activity, especially if you get serious with it. I find it’s a great activity for when I have downtime, and I’ve recently started a quest called Bum 1000 - which is my attempt at submitting 1000 articles to EzineArticles to see how much traffic I can drive to various websites of mine.