DazzlinDonna » How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas

How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas - Part Nine

In the first 8 parts of the series, How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas, you learned quite a few things:

What you were going to focus on as a topic
How long to expect it to take to come to fruition
How to purchase a domain name
How to purchase a hosting plan
How to install WordPress
How to personalize WordPress with a new theme
How to begin blogging

You’ve put all of this together and now you are asking the burning question, “How do I actually make money doing this?”. As with so many things, the general answer is simple, and the details are a bit more complex.

Generally speaking, you will earn money in one of two ways:

Advertising. Advertisers pay you to place their ads on your site.
Affiliate Sales. You promote products you believe in to your readers, and in return, you get paid for any sales that result from your promotions.

Let’s begin with affiliate sales, because the details are pretty straight-forward. The concept here is that companies are willing to pay you a percentage of their sales if you send traffic to them and that traffic purchases a product. So, in our kite flying example, you may become an affiliate of a kite manufacturer. You tell your readers about a kite that the manufacturer makes, and you recommend that they purchase it. You link to the product with a special link code given to you by the manufacturer. Your readers click the link and some of them end up buying the kite. You receive a percentage of the sales price for each of the kites sold to your readers.

Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time, and the industry is stable. It works well for some and not so well for others, but that is typical. Much depends upon the products available in your niche, and the type of readers you have (whether or not they are actively seeking to purchase something). In any case, it is ALWAYS a good idea to at least try affiliate marketing. Sometimes, it can be very lucrative and you would hate to miss out on that.

The quickest way to start testing the affiliate marketing waters is to sign up with Commission Junction. It’s free and easy. Register an account and begin searching through their thousands of affiliate merchant listings for any products that match your topic. Sign up as an affiliate for those that you think would be a good fit, grab the special link code they offer, and place the code on your site. From then on, any clicks on that link that result in sales will earn you a commission. (Note: We’ll discuss the best way to add code into your site near the end of this post).

Now let’s turn our attention to advertising. The general concept of advertising is simple. Just as a magazine or newspaper makes the bulk of its money from the sale of advertising on its pages, you too can make money from the sale of advertising on your site’s pages. Advertising, however, can come in several different forms, so the details can get a little more complicated. Still, advertising can be very, very lucrative, and you should seriously consider using it as a form of monetization.

The various forms of advertising usually consist of:

Graphical banner ads
Text link ads
Contextual ads
CPM ads

Each of those may be a direct sale from you to an advertiser, or may be managed via a third party. Generally, if you sell an ad directly to an advertiser, with no middle-man in between, you earn more money for that ad. However, it can be difficult and time-consuming to manage direct ad sales to multiple advertisers on multiple pages. This is usually something you won’t want to even consider doing until your site is well-established and is receiving a lot of traffic.

The better bet for you at this stage is to let a 3rd party manage all ad sales for you. They do all the work in arranging the ad sales, and in return they get a cut of the profit. You get less money, but you are doing almost no work to get it.

Since this is all new to you, I recommend doing what everyone else does in the beginning. Start with Google Adsense.

Adsense is a contextual ad program that allows you to show ads on your pages that are directly related to that page’s content. Because they are related to the content of the page, the readers are more likely to be interested in those ads. You get paid any time a reader clicks on an ad. Unlike affiliate programs, the reader does not have to actually buy anything for you to get paid. Just clicking the ad results in payment to you, however, that payment is much smaller (perhaps just a nickel or a dime). However, lots of traffic generally results in lots of clicks, and those clicks can add up to thousands of dollars per month. Now, I’m going to say this in big bold words to make sure you clearly understand this. NEVER, EVER, CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS! NOT EVEN ONCE! YOU WILL VERY LIKELY BE BANNED AND WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO MAKE MONEY FROM ADSENSE EVER AGAIN. DO NOT CLICK YOUR OWN ADS. DO NOT ASK YOUR FRIENDS TO CLICK YOUR ADS. DO NOT ENCOURAGE YOUR READERS TO CLICK YOUR ADS. READ THE ADSENSE TOS (TERMS OF SERVICE) CAREFULLY.. Ok, have I made all of that clear enough? It is extremely important that you heed the words or you will be forever upset when you get banned. If you are banned from Adsense, you’ve lost a potentially lucrative source of income. So…don’t do anything to get yourself banned.

The easiest way to place any of these ads on your site (affiliate or Adsense ads) is to use a free WordPress plugin that makes it a little easier to insert code without you having to understand how. I suggest using Adman. Download it, place it your plugins folder, activate it, and use it. You can find detailed instructions at the Adman site.

There you have it. By running a mixture of affiliate advertising and contextual advertising (Adsense), you have a fully monetized site that will begin to earn you some money. If you only have a handful of people coming to your site each month, you probably won’t earn much (maybe enough for a cup of coffee). But as your traffic increases, so will your income. Everything you do from here on out will be working towards creating good content that will attract more good traffic, so that more money can be made.

With time, you’ll want to learn how to become a super affiliate or a pro blogger. The more you know, the more money you can make. I’ve only given the basics here because you are just starting out. You can only handle so much information at one time. But at some point, when you are feeling more comfortable in your new career, you’re going to want to move on the next steps to earn more money. When that time arrives, I suggest the following resources:

In addition, once you’ve mastered the basics that I’ve outlined in this series, I’d suggest spending some time with the following resources as well.

Problogger Make Money Advice
Choosing Profitable Blog Topics
DoshDosh
Blogging for beginners
Good Headlines

The next post will be the last in the series and will summarize the entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

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