Concept Affiliate

Making money from your blog

Saturday, May 7, 2011

So maybe you are new to blogging or maybe you just want to monetize, either way I am sure you have thought to yourself - How can I start making money from my blog. The answer may not be ask complicated as you think. There are many ways to achieve this most strive after adsense revenue, but this is the worst option and requires master bloggers to gain any real income. The best way in my opinion is to use affiliate programs to offer services or products your readers actually want instead of any old random ad flashed in their face. I am not saying do not use adsense just avoid the hype and realistically think what can be the best money earner and how your blog is best suited to make a living. Let me tell it this way, lets say you have a blog about web hosting, reviews on that topic or want to recommend a great web host to others, would it not be reasonable to offer the service you recommend to others while receiving a commission when your readers sign up for that great host? In many ways making money from your blog using affiliate programs is a great way to connect with your readers and find what helps them best and what just doesn't fly.

The frown on advertising in blogs

So many bloggers rant about using advertising in a blog and shrug off the usefulness of what it can mean for their web visitors, but the funny issue here is they all eventually fall in line and start displaying ads to help the cost of blogging full time. Generally one who is knew to blogging feels at first making money some how is a grand sin so they rant and rave about how you shouldn't fall into the evil money pit, but honestly are you really going to blog for the next 10 years for the fun of it? or are you going to blog, have fun and make a living helping others do what you love.

Final thoughts

Once you come to the decision that you want to make money from your blog, affiliate programs are a great way to step you in the right direction. We highly recommend a program called Affiliate Future
They have great customer experience and overall their program is easy to use and understand. By far one of the best affiliates to make money with your blog in the world. Sign up with them today, its free and always will be. No scams or trials to be seen anywhere just a good sold program to earn money from your blog.

Is my site in the google sandbox

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

For one minute stop having a panic attack because your new website or new blog disappeared from google search. I recently went through this, not on this blog but another. One of my blogs which was 3 weeks old was jugging along at 60 organic search hits per day and I was very satisfied with it then....One morning I awoke and was ready to check up on my blog to only find or should I say, only not to find my site anywhere on google or at lest the 500 pages that i checked. My heart raced I started to panic thinking all my hard work was gone, simply gone. I ran to the google help forums, which was no help, then ran to get google to reconsider my site for the search engine, sent them a big whopping email and begged them to reinstate my blog. In the meantime I researched more and more almost non stop to figure out what I did wrong, but I just couldn't find anything wrong which frustrated me. All I kept seeing on this topic was people saying if my site was new and I could chuck this up to the google dance or I did something wrong or had to many affiliate ads, or spammed the net and thus why my blog was in the google sandbox.

Then as if that wasn't enough they said it could take a year! to get out of it "Oh no!" I cried. After I came back to reality I thought hey if my site is in the google sandbox I will just write 100x more articles and get yahoo and bing search engines to like me, so away I wrote. After 20 articles that day I was tired and decided to go to sleep, are you ready for this? Would you believe the very next morning I woke up I was about to start work again only to have checked my stats on the blog to see a huge amount of traffic back from my old friend google. That's right the very next day! I almost peed myself with joy I was so happy and even happier I proved them all wrong.

In one day my little blog proved three theory's wrong, google had sand and I had a shovel. I am sure you have read that if your blog is new you get a first artificial boost in traffic then your site drops to where it would naturally appear, apparently back in the 500 pages and would have to build it's way up, WRONG! unless you have spammed or link farmed or have useless content and you target keywords then you will be fine. Build up from page 500 I don't think so! the very next day my blog jumped back higher on the search engines then every before and has stayed there ever since.

The second thought that buzzes around is if you use or make affiliate pages, what a load of BS. I was worried at first because I did make some affiliate pages and though this was the problem, but as long as your website has natural hand written content by you that is not copied you will be fine.

The third theory is my site was penalized, again nope. This only happens if you are a bad person and go against googles guidelines which I did not.

Are you in the google sandbox?

I know you may be upset right now but please just give it time, if you are sure you have not copied content, have useless pages, or use link farms then your site should be back within a couple of days. One thought I had that makes sense was if google comes along to crawl your site and for some reason the servers kick out googles spiders then to google your site sucks and tells its daddy on you and puts your site to the back of the pack. Now when the googles spiders forgive you and return to find a nice healthy site they report back and can change your rankings overnight. This might have not been your fault at all and just a error that will correct it's self.

It's really funny to see that all the top blogs are ready to tell you your site is in the google sandbox when there is many reason for why google flipped your site the finger, they all say 6 months is the average time in the sandbox and never below 1 week, really? how about one day if my site was truly in this theoretical place but google keeps hush hush on this so we will never know. Currently as I write this blog post I am reading another blog that says sites under 2 years old all get the sandbox, im sorry I have to be childish here and type LOL. You have got to be kidding me right? listen do not believe everything you read because sometimes they just write for traffic. If you need any help leave a comment and I will look into it and try to give you an answer on what may be happening to your site.

Making affiliate stores

The key to a successful business is to be there managing the business and understanding your customers and their needs, but making use of a company who already does all the work and you just have to send them referrals is completely different. The concept differs in the being there part, building on a website to send customers to someone else and you still get paid for moving no product or any customer service skills has changed the way business is done on the internet. This is business on a whole new level where business meetings take place in your underwear on webcam and while you sleep your wallet is growing and inflating with no effort. Now I don't want to sound like you should not care about your web readers or visitors if you will, I simply mean the affiliate company does all the work. Now If you truly care which you should, sometimes the affiliate companies do not have time to answer emails quickly and therefor the people you send to them might contact you instead to get questions answered so take the time to help them.If you are running or making a affiliate store you need to be there for your customers, even though you don't have anything to do with the product or service you can still be there for the people you send to them.

How affiliate stores work and how you can use it to your advantage

You have two options here and both are easy but one is free. You can pay a web company to build a webpage around the affiliate you chose which can be pricey or you can build your own website or blog and build it around the affiliate and make money that way. I believe everyone has thought at one time or another " hey I want to start a business" but then came to realize how much effort and money goes into building one from scratch. So naturally using a business that is already in place in the form of affiliate programs is a sure fire way to fill that piggy bank. Imagine it this way if someone approached you and said I will get you all of my products, store and branding if you just help send the customers my way and I'll pay up to 35% to you of what the customer buys, wouldn't you? People who make affiliate stores do very well and so can you.

Are affiliate programs illiegal

Depending on where you live in the world some affiliate promotions are a grey area usually not enforced but still resides in grey land. The poker community for starters can be illegal to promote in some regions, especially when age comes into play. Liquor and tobacco is another instance of grey areas for you to promote. I am not saying do not do it, I mean I have not ever heard of some one getting a knock on the door for using a affiliate programs since one is truly not responsible for the operation of the affiliate program and any legality issues that come for the ride, you are simply pointing people where the websites are. Now if you are telling people to break the law by using a certain affiliate then well it may just be illegal and ultimately the area in the world which you live will play a major role. So if you are going to promote a program that is in a grey area be careful on which words you use to pre sell the affiliate.

Making a living using affiliates for blogs

By far this is the most interesting idea, working from home and making money has all of us dreaming away of what could be. Wait what could be or should we say what is going to be! Making a living from using affiliate ads is 100% possible, it all boils down to how much time you have to invest in writing on your blog or even making a affiliate store. You do not need to even worry about hosting your own blog on a server where you pay an arm and a leg. Take this blog for example which is hosted on blogger, a free blog platform that anyone can use. So just to grasp this concept I am talking about think of it this way, you do not need to pay for anything, work when you want and how you want, and pay absolutely nothing ever and only receive. This is like taking candy from a baby Which do not do you mean person.

How much money can you make using affiliate programs

Many factors make up calculations including time, type of ads, quality of your blog or website etc. In most cases affiliates pay from 5% of the sale up to 35% yes there can be higher but do not expect to find higher commission rates. Basically you have a affiliate ad on your site and when someone clicks you have a chance of them buying and if they buy you will receive anywhere between 5 - 35% of the price or item they bought. So you want numbers right? ok here is an example: 10 sales of 50.00 = the possiblity of receiving a commission of 25.00 dollars to 175.00 dollars. If is was 100 sales the top end would be 1750.00 and lets say 500 sales the possibility of 8750.

Don't worry about thinking oh my god 500 sales because really if you want a reality check all you site needs is about 50,000 visitors a month which if you do your home work is not hard to achieve. It may be much easier though because we based that on 50.00 dollar sales now imagine at 250.00 dollar sales, then the number of visitors you need to convert is much smaller. Now this may shock you but it shouldn't because I am hoping you did not think you could become well off tomorrow. Over a span of a year to 5 years you can make over 10,000 a month and is up to you if you will. Really the sky is the limit with affiliate programs just consider this is a business and if you go to any business owner down the street and ask if they became rich the next day after opening their doors, I am sure this will induce a full hearty laugh.

Should I use affiliate programs

Using affiliate programs are a great way to help provide the cost and time of running a blog or website. Depending on your niche you might want to hand pick the affiliate programs instead of just throwing up any old affiliate that has nothing to do with your site. Do not be worried that your niche isn't right for affiliate programs since there is hundreds if not thousands to choose from and implement and if wisely chosen they can become your sole income, of course that is provided you have done the leg work already and you took the time to build your website up without slapping a program without any traffic coming into your blog.

Can affiliate programs make money

This is an easy answer is: of course they can and you shouldn't feel bad about using them either. Many times a reader that comes to your blog will be searching for hours on google to find a product or service that is reliable and fail, so offering an affiliate ad to help your reader find what they are looking for is not only good, but helpful at the same time. When deciding to use affiliate programs one should only consider two things. The first is making sure the affiliate program is not a scam and has many reviews, positive reviews is a must. You do not want to use a program that many users are having difficulty with and there could be many reasons so just ask around and read up on the exact one you choose. The second is please choose the right affiliate for your niche for instance if your blog is about google then don't put affiliate ads that are about stuffed animals!

Can you point me in the right direction

Well I was going to save this for a later post but out of the top of my head I already can point you to a great affiliate program, The name is AffiliateFuture and they are one of the most highly recommended programs out there.

Final thoughts

Stop thinking should I use affiliate programs and start using them today, wasn't that a great final thought?

First post - The concept

So here we go on our way to providing the information you search for without complicated answers. In this blog we will eventually cover affiliate programs, how to use them, why you should use affiliate programs, various other internet marketing idea's and website traffic topics. Sometimes making money only may seem like a joke, the light that you can see but can never reach. It does not have to be this way, in fact it is so easy but its not free money. You will have to do the work and the road is long but once you reach the end you can look back and realize you finally made it.

Most web sites that offer ways to use affiliate programs or make money online promise 10,000 dollars per month by using their program or buying their E book! are they lying? no is the simple answer, but getting to that kind of monthly income is extremely hard and can require years of work and not the next day fix they claim. More realistically expect to reach maybe 2,000 dollars per month in under a year and growing upon that year after year. There is so many variables that in this first post I do not want to cover the full expectations and explaining every detail, instead only to give you a brief understanding on what this site is about and how future articles will help you or guide you in the right direction, not give you the winning lottery ticket to success. I may be blunt and you will come to know this but I am tired of other pages feeding their readers bull, instead of truly trying to help them. I hope we can grow together, share idea's and learn for each other and I will do my best to share the knowledge I have learned.

Although This website is designed to make an income, I am a true believer in helping others to help yourself and even though I do not know you, my heart is a kind one and I don't want people to struggle through life like I did where no one was willing to lend a true anonymous helping hand.