Become a Blogger "part 7 / 7"

Ok this is it!

If you are like most people, this is the ultimate
level of what you want to achieve for your blog...

Monetization!

I hope by now you can see the path that I've been
leading you along. It's been a path where I've
helped you understand all the essential building
blocks, the foundations, for setting yourself up
with a really powerful income-generating blog.

Like I said on previous occasions... it's no use
trying to monetize your blog unless you have first
been able to provide some excellent value over the
long term, built up some nice traffic, and also a
nice consistent following of keen fans.

Only after this, are you able to start making a
decent income from your blogging activities.

It's different for everyone, but as an example of
one of the blogs I'm currently working on,
www.freemagiclive.com, my emphasis there has been
to create an extreme amount of value upfront for a
whole 6 month period, to generate a consistent
stream of traffic, and to build a nice and solid
fan base of rabid fans.

From my point of view, the blog now is finally
ready to get monetized only now after 6 months!

But of course, your path be very different to
mine. It may only take you one month, or even 3
months to get to a similar stage. It all depends
on the kind of niche you are in, the kind of
content you are creating, and how well you can
connect with the people inside you niche.

So, if it's already been 4 months, and you have
not made a cent from your efforts yet, that may
be ok. If you're like me, and only want to start
monetizing your blog after 6 months, after you've
built up some nice content, and a nice following,
that's fine.

But the bottom line is that you really try to
provide massive value up front first, BEFORE you
even start to think about monetizing your blog.

I'm hammering this into you, because it's
absolutely critical to your success as a
blogger... at least for the method of blogging
that Yaro and I are teaching.

So, with that out of the way, lets get into the
meat of todays's lesson...

There are 2 main models for monetizing your
blog...

1. The easy, but lower leverage model

2. And the hard, but more profitable model

Lets first have a look at...


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1. The Easy, But Lower Leverage Model
--------------------------------------------------

The basic premise of the easy model, is that you
sell advertising space on your blog, a bit like a
magazine does with advertisements inside their
pages.

If you know how to get traffic to your blog, it's
simply a matter of letting other businesses now
about it and getting them to advertise their
products and services on your site.

And of course, there are a number of different
ways of doing this.

Let's take a look at 3 easy methods:


--------------------------------------------------
a. Contextual Advertising
--------------------------------------------------

One of the easiest and fastest ways for setting up
ads on your site is to use something like Google
Adsense, which is one method of contextual
advertising.

Setting up something like this could literally
take you about 30 minutes to get set up and ready
to start making an income (sometimes there is a 48
hr time lag between signing up and your ads going
live).

All you have to do, is sign up to the Google
Adsense program and then put the right code on
your blog to start displaying ads from other
people on your website.

While this is one of the easiest, and fastest ways
of setting up ads on your site, it's certainly not
the most profitable way. But it's simple and easy
and may be a good starting point for you just to
get a feel for it.

There are other similar services around, but
basically, they all work on the same premise: you
provide the traffic, and they automatically
provide the links to advertisers on your site.

Here's the page for signing up for the Google
Adsense program:

https://www.google.com/adsense/

Other similar services include:

- Yahoo's Publisher Network

- Chitika

- WidgetBucks

Let's now take look at the next level up from
this...


--------------------------------------------------
b. Banner advertising
--------------------------------------------------

This is another easy tactic to implement on your
blog. It's by adding banners on your blog, and
embedding in them, your unique affiliate link to
someone else's product.

Every time someone clicks on the banner on your
blog, they'll get taken to the advertisers
website, and if they purchase their product,
you'll get paid a commission.

How to do this you ask?

It's easy when you use a cool little plugin known
as Max Banner Ads plugin. You can download it from
here:

http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mba/

Just as in the first strategy, this method can
work really well if you get a lot of traffic to
your blog already.

While it's a great strategy to implement in any
case, it's still not the best way to leverage your
blog for monetization. More on this soon.

Ok, next up is...


--------------------------------------------------
c. Doing Product Reviews And Getting Paid For Them
--------------------------------------------------

This strategy is a bit more labour intensive, but
it can provide you with a more secure level of
income.

The way it works is that you get paid for doing a
detailed review about a specific product, and then
posting it on your blog.

There are many different services that will pay
you a set fee per review. Here are some of the
services that you could use:

- http://www.ReviewMe.com

- http://www.SponsoredReviews.com

- http://www.PayPerPost.com

But, of course, you can also approach product
owners and ask them for a fee to write a review
for their product. This is a bit of a hit and miss
strategy as you may find it difficult to find
someone willing to pay you some cash to do a
review on their product.

But if you're keen, you can go to a place like
www.ClickBank.com and search for appropriate
products there and then contact the product
owners.

But my recommendation is to just use the above
services for this.

Next up is my favorite monetization strategy for
the magazine model, because it requires the least
amount of effort for the greatest return...

--------------------------------------------------
d. Sell Ad Space On Your Blog For A Monthly Fee
--------------------------------------------------

For this, it's key that you already have an
established stream of traffic to your blog. And
the more traffic you have, the more you can
charge.

Essentially, what you do here, is get other people
to pay you a monthly fee for the privilege of
advertising their product or service or website on
your blog.

You can have different options of course, with
different pricing points.

The most important thing here is that you can
convince your prospective advertisers that you
have enough traffic to support the price that you
are asking for.

And the best way to do this, is to provide your
prospective advertisers with the exact statistics
of your blog traffic.

For a great example of this strategy, have a look
at Yaro's advertising page here:

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/advertise/

Of course, the higher your traffic numbers, the
more you can charge advertisers for the privilege
of advertising on your blog.

An easy rule of thumb in the industry is to look
at your daily unique visits and divide by 10 to
give you a monthly charge rate.

For example, if you're getting 500 unique visits a
day to your blog, you can charge $50 per
advertiser on your blog - roughly. But it also
depends a little on the kind of niche you're in as
well.

That's it for the easy, but lower leverage model.
Let's now move onto the hard, but more profitable
model...


--------------------------------------------------
2. The Hard, But More Profitable Model
--------------------------------------------------

If you really want to skyrocket the profitability
of your blog, this is the model you want to go
for.

Yes, it does take more effort to get it to work,
but it's totally worth it if you can pull it off
well.

There are at least two avenues you can take here:

a. Selling other people's products (affiliate
marketing)...

b. And developing and selling your own products...

Let's look at each of these two strategies now...

--------------------------------------------------
a. Selling Other People's Products
--------------------------------------------------

This is one of the easiest ways of taking your
blog's income level to the next level.

But it's only easy once you've already built up a
loyal following. And for that...

... ok, ok... I won't tell you again. I think I've
drilled this into you enough now.

Now this is key:

For this (and also the next) strategy to work
well, you need your own email list. Sure, if you
have lots of traffic to your blog you may already
get some good results, but with an email list, the
number of people who buy from you will just be
increased manifold.

Yaro and I have had some of our most successful
campaigns by sending out a handful of well crafted
emails to our email lists.

Let's have a look at an example to give you an
idea of what is possible with this.

Say you have an email subscriber base of around
10,000 people. If you send out an email, around
20% of them are likely to click on your link which
equals 2,000 people.

Then, of those 2,000 people, say 3% may buy the
product from you, which equals 60 sales.

If the product price is 47, and you got 50% of the
profits (because you're an affiliate), you will
have made 1,410 bucks from your little email
promo.

Not bad for sending out just one email!

Of course, this is only an example and results
could vary greatly for this, but there are a
number of things you can do to increase your
conversion rates to make this a reality.

So, where do you find products to promote?

The best one we've found so far is ClickBank.

They are the largest digital provider on the net,
and they've really made the whole process very
easy. All you have to do, is sign up for your own
account that does not even cost anything, and then
you can start promoting other people's products.

You can sign up for your own account here:

http://www.ClickBank.com

Other methods or other places you can go to find
affiliate products are:

- http://www.PayDotCom.com

- http://www.cj.com

- http://www.Azoogle.com

Ok, let's now move onto the final monetization
strategy for your blog... this is the ultimate
one...


--------------------------------------------------
b. Developing And Selling Your Own Products
--------------------------------------------------

Developing and selling your own products is
definitely the most profitable thing you'll ever
do for your blog.

So, once again, the idea here is that you use your
blog to help you get traffic and build your email
list, and then you promote your new products on
your blog and also to the people on your email
list.

This is an extremely powerful way of marketing.

And the reason for this is because you've used
your blog to help build your list. And what this
has done, is create a very strong relationship and
bond with the people on your email list.

And remember the equation:

Big List + Great Relationship = High Income

It's as simple as that.

So, the only next challenge is to create your own
products.

There are at least three kinds of products you can
create:

- Text based products

- Audio based products

- Video based products

Text is the easiest to create, but has the least
perceived value. Audio is a little harder to
create, but has a higher perceived value. And of
course, video products are harder again to create,
but they provide a MUCH higher perceived value.

Nowadays, Yaro and I normally use text based
products as the stuff we give away for free, and
then create video products based on those text
products, that we then sell for a premium.

If you're just getting started with this, I
recommend you go for the text option first, build
up your confidence with selling things online, get
an income set up, and then move onto the more
advanced product creation strategies.

Inside another course, I may teach you how to
create your very own digital products, and then
how to sell them properly using online marketing
strategies.

But with the tools and strategies I've already
explained to you inside this course, you should
now have a pretty good idea of how you can go
about creating your own digital products that you
can market on your blog and to the people on your
email list.

This is how Yaro and I have made most our income
online. So, it's a really beautiful model.

That concludes everything I have to say about this
mini course. You should now have absolutely
everything you need to help you set up your blog,
create amazingly powerful content, get massive
amounts of traffic, and then start monetizing like
crazy.

I really hope you've enjoyed this mini course and
that you've found it very helpful indeed. I've
really poured my heart and soul into these lessons
and I've even considered to sell them instead of
making them available at no cost. That's how
valuable I think they are, because in some
respects, I did not hold anything back.

So, all you have to do now, is take these lessons
step-by-step, and start implementing your very own
successful blog.

These very same lessons have worked for Yaro,
myself, and many many other people as well. And I
can't see why they won't work for you as well!

But it does take effort :)

Here's to your blogging success!

******************


Gideon Shalwick
Become A Blogger