“Profitability” is the final consideration which you should factor into your decision-making process about which products to advertise. When you have finalized your product list, have evaluated them and found them to be satisfactory, you need to check the information provided by the supplier to determine what will be the percentage of your commission, earned on each sale. Practically speaking, given a choice between two excellent products, you might as well choose the product offering the highest commission. If you have allocated enough space for several advertisements on your site, of course, you can offer as many products as you have room for, even those with a lower commission, however, if you think of your website page as a sort of “virtual shelf” like a shelf in a store, you may want to consider the concept of

Product Rent

Supermarkets, department stores and other large businesses use “product rent” when calculating the cost and profitability of merchandising specific products on their shelves. The purpose, of course, is to utilize shelf space most efficiently and to maximize profits. Businesses will promote the best-selling, higher profit items, by giving these products the most prominent locations on the shelf in the most actively shopped sections of the aisle, as determined by marketing research. Vendors who stock the shelves will compete aggressively to have the best position on the shelf ( perhaps eye-level and near the front of the store.) This is not something which is critical for you, although, you may want to put your most profitable products where they will be seen first. In some cases, in larger stores, low-profit items or those which do not sell well will be phased out and eliminated. The exception to this practice would be low-profit items which are popular with customers. Ultimately, as with blog content, you want to keep the public which patronizes your business, happy, so they will return.

I have mentioned this product rent concept here because, although, as a website owner, you will probably not have the same constraints and costs of doing business as the large supermarkets or department stores, you are limited in the time you have to manage your site. Writing posts, reviewing comments, replying to e-mails and performing whatever additional management tasks are necessary to keep your site functioning smoothly, will take some time and effort. You may, for practical reasons, want to limit your product offerings to a few of the most popular products with the highest profit margins. In this way you will earn the biggest profit from the smallest investment of time and effort. If you have an abundance of time, then you can do whatever you want. Consider, though, that a smaller number of really great products with a high profit margin may accomplish the same profit objectives as pages of products and may get more attention from online shoppers who have fewer choices to check out.

The analogy I would use to clarify the point I wanted to make above, is this: Modern day gold mines process 10 tons of gold-bearing matrix to get 1 oz. of pure gold. With the high price of gold, it is ,apparently, feasible to do this. Consider, however, how much more profitable it would be, especially factoring in time and effort, if a mine processed a rich, gold-bearing quartz vein that yielded 100 oz. of pure gold per ton. The point here is that if your time is limited and you do not want to have 10 pages of products, then one page of high profit products can serve your purpose quite satisfactorily.

The product selection and evaluation process I have outlined is a suggested procedure. It is not “written in stone.” However, if you are new to online marketing, or have a website to which you have not yet added products to sell, these suggestions offer a workable guideline that will provide you with a starting point to help you accomplish your commercial objectives for your site.

However you decide to find, select, and evaluate products for your site and however you promote and sell these products, I hope you have great success. Yes. It takes some time and effort to do this but it is part of the fun” After all, you are stocking the “shelves” of your own business. If you have a blog–this is the essence of How to Make Money With Your Blog.

Good Luck and please feel free to visit again,

–wil

There are other bloggers, and I am one of them, who believe there is no harm in designing your blog so that it can earn some income for you. After all, you will spend some money developing your website, and even if it is not very expensive to start a blog, you will need to spend some time doing it ( perhaps a lot of time, depending on how elaborate the blog is.) Why shouldn’t a pleasant past time be used to generate income? It seems a sensible and practical thing to do.

Those of you who have read a number of my posts are aware of the steps a blogger needs to take in order to set up his or her blog to make money. Although there are some requirements for monetizing a blog, there are not very many and it is really quite simple.

To monetize a blog so it can generate income for you, you obviously need 1) a website. 2) You need to place some advertising on your site and 3) you need to optimize the site to get more and more visitors. 3 things. That’s all you need. I don’t want to oversimplify: each of these steps requires some time and effort and sometimes money to accomplish but there are only a few things you need to do.

I want to comment more specifically on each of the above steps or requirements. You can set up a website for your blog in as little as two or three days. More realistically, however, if it is your first website, it may take longer, perhaps two or three weeks or more before your blog is up and running. You will, of course, need to work through the process of setting up the website as discussed in my post: “How to Set Up Your Blog“

Secondly, you will need to place advertising on your website. You will need to make decisions about what products you want to advertise, where you want to place them and whether your products are going to be digital downloads ( information or ebooks that can be instantly downloaded) or physical products that must be sent to the customer.

There is good money to be made (as in a “substantial” amount) with affiliate advertising, in which you place ads on your site to advertise products of others who then pay you a commission whenever a sale is made from your site. You can place these ads on each page or devote a special page just for these products. You can write a positive review of a product to promote it so that visitors to your site will want to investigate further. Once they click on a product, they will be taken to a carefully designed landing page provided by the supplier of the product, that more fully promotes the product and its benefits. You don’t need to do anything. The company supplies the product and takes care of the details of order-filling, shipping and payment. Your commission is sent to you by check (cheque) or by electronic transfer (or wire) to your preferred bank account, details of which, you provide to the company when you register as their affiliate.

Physical products are a different matter. Unless you have a warehouse or other storage facility and lot’s of time, I advise you to choose products that are warehoused by the supplier who will also be responsible for filling the order, shipping and collecting payment. There are many companies which will do this. You will need to search online for these. Your only responsibility, in this case, is to advertise the product, perhaps write a nice review and then, when a sale is made, you receive your commission as described in the previous paragraph. Here are some top Affiliate Networks with which you can register as an affiliate:

Clickbank, Commission Junction, Befree, Linkshare, Websponsors, Sharesale,

Performics, Clixxchange, Clixgalore, Fastclick, Affiliatefuel, Darkblue, Fineclicks etc.

The third requirement is “traffic.” If you have done everything else right and have the most spectacular website on the Internet, nothing will happen for you unless you have traffic. Unless there is a steady and growing stream of visitors to your blog, well, it is like having a new computer still in its box. Unless it is hooked up, plugged-in and connected to the Internet, nothing will happen. That’s why the techniques of SEO (search engine optimization) are so important. Building traffic may take some time, but you should regularly monitor the volume of traffic/visitors you are getting and consistently work to increase this volume.

Suppose after 6 months or a year you are still not earning any money from your site? You then need to do some troubleshooting and objectively evaluate your blog and everything you have added to your website. Are your posts interesting, relevant, informative and frequent enough to engage the viewing public? Do you have enough products of the right kind that appeal to potential customers? Perhaps you need more and different products. Have you spent enough time making sure that your website is organized and “search engine friendly?” Do you have a few pages of useful material that will show the search engine spiders that your site has depth and relevance? Do you have some back-links from ezinearticles you have written as well as to other interesting websites that have a significant volume of traffic? If you are not yet making any money, the reason is probably going to be found in your answers to the above questions.

All this sounds like a lot of work and I don’t want to minimize this by telling you it is really easy, however, it is not very difficult either. It takes some time, perhaps some money(not very much,) some attention and the most basic ingredient to any successful enterprise:

The desire to make it work.

Good Luck, and let me know how you are doing.

Take Care–Wil

     Hello and welcome to my blog, Bloggasaurus : How to Make Money with Your Blog . For the curious, I named my blog after an imaginary dinosaur-like creature. Dinosaurs had voracious appetites for whatever they consumed and I am, similarly, an enthusiastic consumer of blogs, so, the name seemed appropriate. There is much more to this blog than a single theme. This is also a blog about blogs and blogging; about building an online community, about discovery of new information and about exploring any fascinating topic that comes along.

     The reason why I centered my blog around how to make money is because the people around me, lately are so focused on earning a decent living and on keeping their jobs in these very difficult economic times. People are stressed out because they are finding that conventional wisdom is not working for them. There are practical limits to how wisely you can spend and how smartly you can budget, and still maintain a comfortable standard of living.

     This theme is one in which I am especially interested, myself, because I know that making a lot of money does not guarantee happiness, but not having enough to do the cherished things you want to do and pay the expenses you need to pay, most assuredly will not guarantee happiness either and often results in frustration, anxiety and a lot of stress.

     Many of my friends are employed but find that their pay is no longer adequate to cover all their expenses. They feel that, far from progressing in life and becoming more prosperous, they are losing ground; slipping down the slope to economic limbo; spiraling downward toward the virtual line defined by currency amounts, that represent a border between the middle class and poverty level.

     If this is how my employed friends feel, how about the unemployed? These people are hurting and need to find some means to earn a living. Neither my employed friends nor the unemployed, it may be said, know how to turn their situation around. If they could have done that, They would have done that already.

     I believe the answer is simple and maybe that is why it is overlooked: People have to develop an income that is not controlled by someone else, other than themselves. Employed people cannot force their employers to pay them more when they need more money. They dare not leave to find another job because so many are unemployed that your job would be quickly filled and you would find it very difficult, right now, to find another.

     Therefore, my friends’ employers control their employees’ money and, by extension, their quality of life. Doesn’t it bother you to know that someone else’s evaluation of what you are worth, determines the quality of your life, (speaking now of material things)?

     This is why I have concluded that Internet business, online business, if you prefer, offers the best opportunity to “hire yourself” or to create a business that can earn extra money ( sometimes a very substantial amount.)

     There are a few different ways you can earn income online. By setting up a simple web site, you can take advantage of the commercial possibilities offered by your blog. We will discuss these possibilities in greater detail in the coming posts.

Take Care and Be Well,

–Wil