Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

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!

This is a guest post from a good contact that I’ve made in my internet marketing journey. He’s a great guy with a lot of knowledge on the subject. This post just seems very appropriate, seeing as I have just found myself a mentor. Enjoy and Happy 4th of July!

My name is Bill Romer, and you probably don’t know me. Matt and I bumped into each other when our blogs crossed paths somewhere in cyberspace, and he was kind enough to invite me to write a guest post on his blog, which I am more than happy to do. Why?

Because Matt has something real going here – there’s not a bunch of hype – it’s not $0 to $500,000 his first month and all that crap.

He’s working.

Hard.

And he’s having some success already – he’s made some money with AdSense and is very close to cracking the “PPC Code,” which is a tough nut to crack, I can assure you. I’ve been able to do it recently with my own product, and only a couple of times in the past, for short periods.

Anyway, when we discussed topics for this post, we settled on the idea of finding and working with a mentor.

A very small amount of coaching was responsible for a significant turning point in my online career – no, not “millions,” but definitely thousands of dollars since the spring of 2008, when I purchased 60 minutes of telephone coaching for about $300.

The very first suggestion my coach gave me was to turn a then-successful PPC campaign into a product to be offered as a Warrior Special Offer (WSO). The other simple, but significant help he gave me was to write my sales letter for that WSO from a position of complete confidence – so we cut out just a few sentences that I’m certain made a huge difference in the way my message was perceived. In fact, I still heed that advice today, when I’m writing sales letters or web copy.

When I acted on those suggestions, I made a little less than $2000 within 3-4 weeks.

How did I find out about this coaching?

I believe it was at the end of either a free or low-cost video program my coach was offering through the Warrior Forum, and I TOOK ACTION.

How can you find a mentor quickly?

If you keep your eyes open on the forums – without wasting too much time there, of course – you will see 30-day group coaching programs, individual coaching offers, and other types of programs designed to take you to the next level in your online career.

Find one – in the area where you want to grow – and take advantage of it!

What if you can’t find any offers right now?

Start sending private messages in the forums (especially the Warrior Forum) to people who appear to know what they’re talking about, seem to have more knowledge than you in the area where you want to grow, and who have a number of forum posts to their name.

Write sincerely. Tell them what you’ve done so far and exactly what you want to learn – don’t ramble on, be very specific. For example, “I want to learn how to profitably use Google AdWords to sell my own ebook on [topic].”

Use my favorite business letter formula:

- Compliment the reader – “Judging from your numerous helpful posts and Special Offers, several of which I’ve purchased [if you have], you appear to be a respected part of this forum, and you also appear to be somewhat of an expert with Google AdWords.”
- State what you’re looking for – “I have just finished writing an ebook on [topic] and would like to learn how to use AdWords profitably to generate sales of this book. Would you be able to help me with this – perhaps giving me a few suggestions and/or reviewing my campaigns occasionally? I would be happy to pay you for your time, either with cash or with services – I am a pretty good researcher and writer, and I also can produce screen capture PowerPoint presentations or promotional videos [or whatever].”
- Thank them for their time – “I would be most appreciative if you could point me in the right direction, either with your own suggestions, or if you could recommend another person I might be able to contact for help. Thanks so much for your time.”

ALWAYS get recommendations for other people to contact at the end of your communications – you never know where that trail will lead.

There are literally hundreds of people on the Warrior Forum you could contact this way, and I would be dumbfounded if you private messaged 50 of them and got no replies.

Now, if you really want to make the most of this relationship, once you find a mentor, then simply DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO!

Take action! Get results! Tell them how what they suggested helped you and your business!

They will LOVE to hear that, and they will also see that you are a person of action and will be more likely to answer your emails or take your phone calls – and maybe even hire you – in the future.

Well, if there are any “secrets” to the whole mentorship thing, I’ve just spilled the beans.

Just remember that anyone can be a mentor to you – someone you meet in a group coaching program, another blogger, someone who has a product similar to yours, an affiliate manager or Clickbank product owner – anyone.

Reach out.

Ask.

Take action.

Get better.

Pretty soon, people will be asking you for help!

Bill Romer is a part-time online marketer, with products in the piano instruction and internet marketing niches. He writes a blog at http://askbillromer.com, and you can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/billromer

Full Disclosure
Before I begin this post on how to create a blog with WordPress, I want to fully disclose something. I do have affiliate links in this article. Some of the sites that I suggest you visit and some of the services that I suggest you use, I am an affiliate of. However, I do not promote any products that I do not use myself. If I suggest a server host or a domain name company, it is because it is the one I use and I have had good experiences with them. If you want to use one of the services that I am suggesting but you don’t want me to get the credit for it, go ahead and search the company on Google and sign up that way. I just want to be upfront and honest from the start.

Why Use A WordPress Blog?
The majority of the money that I have made online to date has been because I have set up several WordPress blogs. It is very quick and cheap to set up a WordPress blog and once you manage to get traffic to the blog, there are many ways to monetize the blog. The first WordPress blog that I ever set up was over at HowIWillBeRich.com. I probably made my initial investment back on that site within the first month of the site going online. Now I rarely update the site and it still brings in probably $30 every single month.

WordPress is very simple once it’s set up. Once you’ve got it installed and running on your server, it’s incredibilly easy to keep your blog updated. No advanced html or programming language knowledge necessary. Just log in, type up your blog post, hit publish, and you are updated. It’s so simple.

First you need a domain name and a host.
I am a big fan of a hosting company called PowWeb. With these guys you only pay $3.88 per month and you’ll get both your hosting and your domain name all in one place. By doing this, you will eliminate several steps of getting your domain and your host linked together. I recommend paying for a whole year in advance. You will pay $46.56 and you won’t have to think about it again for a year. You will get a domain name, unlimited webspace, and unlimited bandwidth (the amount of files that can be transferred from you to your viewers). On top of that, they give you $50 free in adwords. That’s $50 in free advertising. Sorry if it sounds like I’m really pitching their product. I really am just a big fan of their service. They’ve been great to me so far. So that’s your first step to creating a WordPress blog. Get your domain and server lined up over at PowWeb. (I had to cut this here because there are images and I want to keep a good load time. Just click below to keep reading)
Read the rest of this entry »