Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Next week I’m releasing the first of my content videos as part of the opening of Blog Mastermind. If you are new to blogging or interested in a better way to blog for money, then stay tuned for that video and the follow-ups after it coming, hopefully, from Tuesday onwards.

You will be able to join Blog Mastermind at the end of July.

Prizes For My Affiliate Partners

You can get full details about my affiliate program, including the prizes and register for an affiliate account, by heading to my affiliate blog and watching the 7 minute video there -

Do You Have Good Timing?

Since the content videos are coming out next week, if you were considering promoting Blog Mastermind as an affiliate, now is the perfect time to get involved.

If you have an audience who are interested in making money online, blogging for profit or business opportunities, you really need to pay attention to this. There’s only a few times when something is brand new and that’s the best time to promote.

Don’t miss out because you were slow to take action when the timing was right.

The Competition Could Be Fierce

To add some spice to the release of Blog Mastermind and because I like giving stuff away, I’m offering prizes to my top 10 partners, including a MacBook Air, Asus EeePC and Sony PSP.

Maybe you want to promote Blog Mastermind for the 50% ongoing commissions, but really, I think a brand new Snowball Mic is a much better incentive and everyone loves a top 10 competition – it’s going to be fun to see if, as I expect, Darren Rowse walks away with top prize.

Once again, if you want to get involved, you can sign up right now and view the full list of prizes on offer at my new -

Affiliate News Blog

Good luck, and I look forward to working with you!

Yaro Starak
Affiliate Recruiting

Back in August 2005 I wrote a three part series of blog posts about how I have made money online. This was one of my first pillar article series and forms one of the foundation content pillars that this blog was built on (my business timeline and typical day in my life articles were other foundation pieces I wrote in 2005, during this blog’s early days). These article types are concepts that are crucial to a blog’s growth during the first few months and are part of the methodology I teach in Blog Traffic School (and yes, the course is still coming, the mentoring program will be released first though).

I thought it was about time I updated my how I make money online series since I now make a significant proportion of my income from blogging. I was asked in my last post were I revealed that I made $6549.52 from blogging in March to break down specifically how I did it, so in this post I will explain the particulars for you.

How I Make Money Blogging – Video Explanation

I’ve explained how I monetize this blog in a 23 minute screencast video. It’s a 60MB video or 10MB audio only download, so I recommend this only for my broadband readers. If you have problems with the video I suggest you wait for it to download completely rather than watch it streaming.

Click the graphic below to open the video in a new window.

[ Click here for a smaller version of the video ]

If you like the video and want to see more screencast presentations like this, stay tuned for my blog mentoring program as I will be using screencasts throughout the program.

March 2007 Income Breakdown

I maintain a monthly income spreadsheet, which lists revenues generated from my blogs and websites. Here is a snapshot from March, minus some private data that is not appropriate for release to the public.

Read the rest of this entry >>

I just received the email from ReviewMe that they have launched their affiliate program and are paying out $25 per referral. Here’s what their blog states -

We are excited to announce our very cool affiliate program is ready for your blog! Not only will the affiliate program drive traffic to your individual listing at ReviewMe which will encourage review sales for you but it will also pay you $25 for any referred sale even if the visitor does not purchase a review from your blog.

I must admit that’s a good combination – you get paid for the review and the referral if they buy from your site, or if they buy a review from another site you still get the $25 referral fee. Needless to say, I have begun implementing my referral ID into posts here on my blog.

ReviewMe have also set up a badge you can apply to your blog that includes your affiliate ID and entices people to purchase reviews. The badge for Entrepreneurs-Journey looks like this:

Get In Now!

As a blogger who makes good money from affiliate programs I suggest you start promoting this one as soon as you can. The earlier you start the more you will make because the market is not saturated yet. Once everyone knows about ReviewMe it will be tough, especially for those of you with smaller blogs, to make any money from programs like this, but if you act early you have a much better chance of signing up new people.

Custom Pricing

ReviewMe have also changed their system so bloggers can determine the price to charge. I know for some bloggers this will be great because they can increase their fee and not impact their sales (perceived value anyone?). In my case I’m going to leave the pricing as is for now because I’m happy with the amount of review requests I receive at this time.

Praise For ReviewMe

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the service ReviewMe offers. The pricing structure is very rewarding and more often than not the review requests I receive are for very relevant and interesting subjects. Of course I get some that I either cannot do because they require too much research, or the topic is not relevant enough to my audience, or I’m traveling or too busy, but there are enough that I can do that it brings in a few hundred a month.

I’ve also offered some of the paid reviews to the Small Business Marketing & Branding writers whenever they come up, splitting the income with them if anyone volunteers to write the review.

That being said, writing reviews is a fine art and it can be hard not to feel like you are selling out just for the money. You have to think like you are writing the article because you are genuinely interested in the topic and not doing it for the cash, which, when the topic is relevant, is easy enough, but if it’s a little off-topic or a subject you no little about, it can be hard to make a review interesting.

Praise For Patrick Gavin

I don’t know if his companies are profitable yet given the focus at the moment appears to be on customer acquisition at both Text-Link-Ads and ReviewMe, but I have to give big props to Patrick and his partners behind the two sites.

Patrick’s come up with two very simple ideas for how to monetize blogs and offer advertisers great value. The services are perfectly positioned as middlemen in the transaction between advertisers and bloggers/site owners, both use a many-to-many business model so it’s possible to scale quickly without needing to increase resources significantly and the execution of the businesses has been great. The sites are clean and simple and the service is delivered with ease. I suspect both companies may well become multi-million dollar enterprises if they are not already.

I just wish I was as fast acting and thinking as Patrick and his team – they are definitely doing something right!

If all this is new to you, check out Text-Link-Ads where you can buy and sell text links and ReviewMe, where you can buy and offer reviews on blogs.

I also wrote an article when ReviewMe launched here – Should Bloggers Accept Money For Reviews?.

Yaro Starak
Reviewer

By Adam McFarland from iPrioritize

Internet entrepreneurs face an interesting challenge:

If content is king then how do you turn that content into money?

Many of the most visited sites on the web are social networking sites, blogs, forums, wikis, and news sites. Most first time Internet entrepreneurs tend to start a content site because the alternative (selling a good or service) requires inventory, shipping, customer service, and/or an advanced knowledge of that industry. The logical choice is to start a content site about something you know and are passionate about. But assuming you are able to build a loyal user base and consistent traffic, how do you then turn that traffic into revenue?

Ad Networks

Probably the simplest and quickest way to start earning some money is with advertising networks like Google AdSense and Commission Junction. Neither requires you to have any minimum amount of traffic so you can sign up as soon as you launch your site. AdSense is a favorite for site owners because you get paid per click as opposed to per action (making a purchase on the advertisers site after clicking), however many site owners take this too far and make the sole purpose of their site to get people to click on AdSense ads (as Yaro mentioned previously).

Commission Junction is popular because you get to choose what ads appear on your site. You can choose from thousands of publishers from the Wall Street Journal to MLB.com and everything in between. The downside being that they pay per action so it usually takes quite a bit of traffic to lead to conversions. Commission Junction campaigns also tend to require a bit more work in terms of choosing ads and rotating out those that aren’t successful. There are several other Ad Networks like ValueClick with other offerings that require a minimum amount of traffic.

Affiliate Marketing

One of the best ways to supplement your content is to offer products that relate to it. Affiliate Marketing programs allow you to list other businesses products and take a cut when they sell. You generally make 5% – 10% of any item that sells through your site. Not bad for not having to make the product, store it, process payment, or ship it! The most popular programs are eBay’s and Amazon’s, both of which you can set up in a matter of minutes. So if you have a site about video games, why not put the latest games for sale next to it? Or if you write a book review it’s only natural to give the reader the opportunity to buy the book on Amazon after reading about it. Proper placement of Affiliate Marketing advertisements can be very successful because they catch the visitor at a time when they are likely to take action.

Do-it-yourself Advertising

Building your own advertising network can result in more revenue than the other two methods if you do it right – and that’s a big if. Do-it-yourself Advertising involves selling advertising yourself by dealing directly with advertisers. You need to have substantial (and consistent) traffic to ensure the advertiser that their ads will be shown. Usually you sell advertising per thousand impressions (CPM), but you can also sell it for a specified amount of time or by other technique you can think of. Finding suitable advertisers can be difficult and many times you will have to contact several advertisers before anyone is interested. Once you find interest, you need to negotiate a deal that is mutually beneficial. You also need to keep an ongoing relationship with the advertiser and be willing to update and change their ads as their promotions change. Selling your own advertising and successfully managing the accounts is more work than Ad Networks or Affiliate Marketing, but it eliminates the middleman and if done properly can bring in much more revenue than the other two.

******

Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize – lists that can be edited at any time from any place in the world. Email, print, check from your mobile phone, subscribe via RSS, and share with others. Adam also has a blog about being a young entrepreneur that can be read on SportsLizard.com.