Focusing Your Blog

When you decide to make money on the internet, you have a wealth of choices awaiting you, although they all come down to at most a half a dozen actual choices. You can go for pay-per-click advertising, banner ads paid for on a monthly flat fee, donations, sales of e-books or courses, paid-for-posts and affiliate sales.

Of course take any one of the above money making ideas and you have probably hundreds of different companies in each particular niche, all promising to make you rich or at least quite wealthy.

So which ones actually deliver? Hell, if I knew the answer to that I would have it made wouldn't I? However, it does come down to some doing better than others, mostly depending on your blog or website, and the traffic it has, or better yet, the type of traffic.

What the smart blogger does is try to decide in the beginning what blog moneitzation techniques to use for a particular blog. Some blogs work particularly well with pay-per-click, while others make the most money from affiliate sales.

When I design a website or blog, I try to have that in mind, and in fact some of my blogs were designed to be used to promote affilate sales at the expense of all other types of techniques. I focus the theme of my affilate blogs on the types of products or services my affiliate company is selling and try to convince my visitors of their need to purchase the products.

If I am designing a blog for pay-per-click advertising, I pay attention to my keyword usage and try to write posts that fill a need for advertisers, giving them a reason to run an ad on my blog. The same holds true to some extent for sites running monthly advertisements, usually in the form of banner ads. Let's face it, you probably won't get many advertisers interested in paying for a banner ad on a blog about belly button lint, (although I's sure there are one or two)

It's easy to get carried away with advertising and blog monetization, especially given the number of affilates and programs as well as the sexy looking banners and widgets that you can put on your blog. The trouble is, too many are too many. Your site becomes more ads than content, and often loses it's attractiveness to advertisers and readers alike.

I know that with my first blog, The View From Silverhorn Mountain I got carried away with advertisements. I filled my pages with Amazon product links, pay-per-click ads from two different companies and a host of various other affilate programs, everything from personal shavers to personalized t-shirts to camping gear and so on. My blog became more of a big catalogue of products than anything else. Content was hard to find, and most of all I wasn't making a penny. Well maybe a penny but not much more. My pages had become so commercialized I was into an overkill mode.

In hindsight I was so afraid of missing out on a buck by not showing a particular product, or by not filling every blank space with advertisments that I was actually doing my money making program more harm than good. It wasn't until I backed it off a bit that I started to see some returns. Just look at the blogs or websites loaded down with advertisements, how many do you really click on? Not many I'll bet. How many advertisements for individual products do you remember? Not many of those either I am willing to guess.

At some point I got a little wiser and started doing away with some of the programs, until I was down to two or three instead of six or seven. I tried to keep only the ones that pertained in some fashion to my blog's theme. You know what? I instantly started to do better. Readers started not only reading the posts, but actually visiting some of my sponsors, and I started to make a little money.

I still struggle with ads and monetization products, often having to resist the urge to get caught up in a sexy widget. Yes it might mean I lose some money not showing a particular ad or affiliate program, but not much. A lot of affiliate programs are making money only because 1 million bloggers are selling one of the affilate's products, but only one. The affiliate company makes money, but you the blogger don't because you never sell enough to reach the minimum payout.

My advice to you is to consider carefully any and all blog monetization ideas before you start putting their code into your website. Look for reasons why their product might sell on your blog, or why your readers might click on an advertisment shown on your blog. Will readers of a gardening blog really be interested in purchasing a pubic hair shaver? If you are selling products such as Amazon products, try to link them up to the context of your blog or website, don't show too many. Amazon have their Amazon Stores now that are pretty good for displaying their products and getting sales commissions. You can show one or two products or links that link back to your store, where products picked out by you, of interest to your readers are shown. So instead of filling your website with twenty widgets of individual products, you show one link, which takes customers to at least 40 or so products or more depending on how you design your store.

Don't try to be all things to all people. If you are trying to sell fishing gear, sell fishing gear, don't advertise fishing rods beside ads for women's shoes or on a blog about circus clowns. Focus your blog content and your ads or products.

So we are full circle again, back to the keys of successful blogging for money, good content, related to the products, good blog design, and good products related to the topic of your blog. Just not too many of them all at once.....

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