There are several ways to monetize your blog.
The main three are affiliate marketing, pay-per-click advertisements, and e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is actually an extension of affiliate marketing but it is so powerful that it warrants a little bit of separate attention.

To begin with, we are going to focus on affiliate marketing. I was going to really go in depth about PPC advertising with adsense but decided that affiliate marketing is probably a better way to start. I don’t think that posting Google Adsense ads on sites about internet marketing is the best strategy. The main reason being that people who visit internet marketing sites tend be a little more web savvy. They tend to be more blind to adsense type ads. Promotion in the internet marketing niche is much better and much more profitable when you affiliate your self with products and companies that you like to promote.

What is affiliate marketing?
Basically, when you are doing affiliate marketing, you are promoting someone else’s product. When the product sells, you get a cut of the profits. I believe CDNow was really the first company to start affiliate marketing on a grand scale on the internet. Nowadays, Amazon.com and eBay use affiliate marketing heavily. Each company that you sign up for has their own process of bringing on affiliates. I can’t really go in to the process of how to sign up for each of them on this blog.

How can I make money with affiliate marketing?
First let me give you an example of affiliate marketing in action. My blog has a recommended reading section. You’ll notice that in this section, I am talking about all of my favorite books. If you click on one of the books and decide to purchase it, Amazon will give me something like 4% of the sale. As you can see, it’s not huge money. 4% of a $15.00 book is $0.60. I need to sell a lot of books to make real good money. Another example of an affiliate is PowWeb. My blog is hosted over there and I am a huge fan of their services. Every time someone clicks on their link and signs up for an account, they pay me $77! It only costs someone $45 per year to sign up! They are counting on the fact that people are going to sign up and hang around and continue to renew. As you can see, I do not need to get a whole heck of a lot of people to sign up over there to make a good income. This is the power of affiliate marketing! There’s some good and some bad but if people trust you enough and value your opinion, it can all really add up quickly.

Another great place to find affliates is called Commission Junction. They have a whole bunch of different companies that you can promote with all different types of offers. This is where you can find any product from any niche to promote. If promoting eBooks is more up your alley, I recommend Clickbank. Here you can find all sorts of eBooks that offer up to 75% commission.

Here’s what you should do.
Signup for the affiliate programs at Amazon.com, Commission Junction, and Clickbank. Find some products between those three companies that you think you can promote and that your readers would enjoy. The companies will give you a special link with a unique tracking code. Use that link every time you talk about the product. People will click through the links and, hopefully, buy the products that you recommend.

Tomorrow I am going to teach you how to cloak the links. This will make the URL that people see in the status bar look different from the actual link you are sending them to. Psychologically, people may respond better when they don’t think they are being sent to an affiliate link. I don’t do much cloaking on this site (It’s called Full Disclosure Internet Marketing for a reason) but I do want you guys to understand how to do it. It will definitely come in handy.

Until next time, you should now have the tools to get a blog set up and start making some dough.

If you have any questions, comments, or better suggestions about affiliate marketing, please leave them in the comments! I will thank you for it and so will the other readers that would greatly appreciate more advice!

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