How about affiliates? In your experience does anyone ever make money from them?

– Charbarred, The Plugg

Affiliate marketing is seen by many as the one true goldmine on the Internet. Others see it as a waste of time, energy and space. I have had some success with affiliate deals but the key is to pick the right one.

If you think you can just sign-up with Amazon or eBay or even art.com and throw a site up and have the money roll in you are going to fail. Why? Because everyone else is doing the same thing!

Do you have any idea how many affiliates are in the Amazon program? What about eBay? I do not have exact figures but one offshoot of the eBay system has about 24K members. See what I mean about putting up a lame site? It will not work.

I have tried the Amazon affiliate network but I made nothing there. Technically I made $0.88 but I will never see that money because of the minimum payout requirement. I ended up taking the Amazon links off of my sites because even though they were generating hundreds of thousands of impressions and thousands of clicks there were no sales.

I then moved on to the new eBay network AuctionAds and saw some success. It was a variable success though and it most often hit on Mondays. I used their tracking system to figure out which articles on which sites were generating the clicks that converted into revenue and fine tuned it to the point where it now pays a reliable monthly payment.

I also dabbled in game reviews for a while and found some small success using the Fun Again Games affiliate system. I never made enough to make it worth my while though I was able to turn those funds into games by using them as store credit.

The simple fact of the matter is that affiliate deals can work but only if your site is a niche site that focuses on one thing and is popular. You can’t just throw up an affiliate link store and expect people to buy things from you. You need to write about the products you are trying to make money off of without it appearing to your readers that that is what you are doing.

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Money used under Creative Commons License from flickr user jenn jenn

What is the quickest and easiest way to monetize a blog?

– Teri K, Meriden CT

A lot of people look into blogging and then reach a point where they start thiking of it as a potential full time job with a full time income. Let me set a few things down right now.

Making money on the Internet takes work and dedication. It can take even more work than your current job does. You may work your ass off and never make any money on line! With that said, the following tips may send you in the right direction.

1. Write good content that people (other than your family who is too nice to tell you your writing stinks) will want to read.

2. Pick a niche and stick with it. Some people can pull off a site that cover more than one niche but most fail. Look at the successful tech blogs out there, do they cover multiple niches or do they have extra sites for other topics?

3. Ignore your traffic numbers. Nothing will make you depressed faster than seeing that the only person visiting your site is you. Web sites take time to be index by search engines and for people to find and like you. It can take a year (or longer) for a blog to get traction and gain a following.

4. Comment, comment, comment. Don’t just comment on your own blog but also take the time to comment on the blogs that you read. What, you don’t read other blogs? Get yourself out into the blogging community!

Now that you have some traffic and a steady supply of readers you can begin to look into turning your writing into a revenue stream. I have many more blogs than this one and I use different monetization streams for different sorts of blogs. Some of these will work for you while others will not.

Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads is a service that will sell text links on your blog. They will also offer you a program that allows for selling ads at the end of your most popular posts.

Text Link Ads takes a 50% cut of any revenue earned by running ads on your blog. Though this may seem like a large cut it is worth it. Their marketplace is second to none and very easy to search.

What, why am I not selling Text Link Ads on here? Because this site has not been around long enough to get a low Alexa number or a high Google Page Rank. Both of those metrics are used to set the price for text links on your site.

Google AdSense

The old standby of blogging is Google AdSense. I run AdSense on this blog (and many others) and it works on the basis of CPC or Cost-Per-Click. You get paid based on the clicking patterns of your readers. When a reader clicks an ad you get paid. The payment may be as low as one penny to as high as $50 (or more). The rate of pay depends on the keywords involved.

The one danger with AdSense is that Google is very aggresive about fraudulent clicks. So much so that many people have lost their AdSense accounts (and pending payments) because of actions performed by their readers.

Pay Per Post

Pay Per Post is a company that brings advertisers and bloggers together so that an advertiser can pay a blogger to blog about something. Pay Per Post accepts just about everyone into their program and your results will vary. Generaly the better ranked your website is the better money you will make. Or should I say the better offers you will get. Making money from PPP is also dependant on your own writing abilities. No one wants to pay for your services if you can’t string a few words together!

Pay Per Post also has a great community of “Posties” who are always willing to help out new members. They are clearly the best of all the paid blogging networks.

Conclusion

Those are the three easiest systems to use to monetize your blog. There are plenty more out there but these three are by far the easiest ones to get into and start making money with.

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Mo Money Mo Problems used under Creative Commons License from flickr user greggoconnell

“What is three way linking?”

– Bob P, Ocean City MD

Three way linking as in Internet SEO (Search Engine Optimization) trick used to creatively link multiple sites and pass Google “juice” without having those links discounted as reciprocal.

Some people think three way linking occurs when Site A links to Site B who links to Site C who then links back to Site A. This is not three way linking but is instead a link circle.

Proper three way linking occurs when webmaster A links to Site B and webmaster B links back to Site A by using Site C. Using this method Site A passes some Google juice to Site B and webmaster B reciprocates by linking to Site A from another site he owns that is not Site B. None of these links will show up as reciprocal because they are all one way.

Three way linking also requires all three sites to be on different servers (or at least have different IP addresses). Search engines are getting smarter and they can tell if a site is linking to other sites on the same server.

One thing you should never forget is the value of the anchor text of the link. If everyone were to link to this article with an anchor text of “three way linking” this page would quickly become the top search result for that term.

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PP1-48 used under Creative Commons License from flickr user corrieb