Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
I’ve mentioned several times in previous articles that I’ve always had my best results from affiliate ads. Since that’s the subject of this article, let me clarify that a bit. The last thing I want to do is leave you with a false impression that PPC ads aren’t valuable. Quite the opposite.
PPC ads have one distinct advantage over most other forms of online advertising – they start making money immediately. That’s important whenever you start a new web site in an attempt to add to your online income. We’re all prone to discouragement. If we put in a lot of work and get our blog going, then nothing happens, our first reaction is to abandon the effort and write it off as a failure.
The truth is, making money online usually isn’t as “instant” as most would have you believe. While many people do make large amounts of online income, and many of them rather quickly; most make it more slowly. PPC ads give us that instant encouragement that something really is happening and we really are making money online – even if it’s just a small trickle at first.
Affiliate ads will make larger amounts of money in the long run – at least they do for me. I have friends in the internet marketing business that make an impressive living off nothing but PPC web sites, but I have more friends who, like me, take a more balanced approach. I look at like I look at my investment portfolio – diversify!
If you’ve been following this entire series, then you’ve already set up one or more affiliate relationships, either directly with the vendors you plan to use, or with affiliate clearing sites like ShareASale or Commission Junction. Placing the ads into your blog is the next step.
I use a 2-stage approach. First, I have a sidebar panel that I put a group of ads in that are related to my blog. Second, I place appropriate affiliate ads in some of my blog entries. If you’re reading this entry on WorkFromYourRV.com, you can see the ad panel to the right. These are all affiliate ads that have relevance to my blog’s subject and, when clicked, take you to the vendor’s website where you might possibly purchase their product. If you do, I get a small commission. Same with the ads in the blog entries. These are usually more focused and are relevant to the specific blog entry in which they appear. This type of sales is as old as sales itself. My Father-in-law spent most of his early career as a shoe salesman in the days when his entire income was commission from each pair of shoes he sold. This is no different, just adapted to the Internet.
One note of caution here. If you’re in this for the long term, choose your affiliations wisely. Nothing will kill a blog, or even an entire online business faster than recommending disreputable companies. Your readers are YOUR customers – always remember that. They took your advice when deciding to purchase a product, and will likely blame you if the experience goes bad. Personally, I BUY EVERYTHING I RECOMMEND. I realize that can get expensive, and may be out of your budget, but it is the only way I know of to insure the product is legitimate and has value. All of my friends in this business that are successful have the same attitude. You can’t please everybody, but you certainly can make your best effort to get close.
To put affiliate ads in the sidebar of your blog, look for plugins or widgets on Wordpress.org and follow their instructions. Most are reasonably simple and will present your ads in a clear way on your site. For example, if you signed up as an affiliate for Amazon, you can take a look at the AmazonSimpleAdmin widget. It allows you to embed Amazon ads almost anywhere in your blog. If it’s appropriate to display related eBay ads in your blog, then you may want to check out the WP Tag Ads widget or the eBay Sales Lister widget. These scan your blog tags or content and select appropriate eBay ads to display. If you are interested in a Zazzle store, there’s even a widget (Zazzle Store Gallery) that will display products from your Zazzle store.
To embed other affiliate ads into your post you can simply ad an image to your post, or you can use a plugin. I personally like to just insert the images using the Wordpress post editor while I’m writing the post. That way I get full control over where in the text the affiliate ad appears. Just insert the image, then replace the image code generated by Wordpress with the code given to you by your affiliate. If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, try a plugin like the WP-Affiliate plugin and see if that matches your needs better.
In the next few articles we’ll cover more about the layout of your blog and how to start driving traffic to your blog. After all, if you don’t have readers, you can’t have customers. Watch for new videos as well.
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now it’s time to start adding Google Adsense and other ads for affiliate sales into your blog. This is known as “monetizing” your web site – getting it to make money online for you. Google Adsense is a great place to start. Personally, I’ve made more money from affiliate sales than from Adsense ads, but I don’t dismiss Adsense. It has made me plenty of money online as well.
Adding Adsense into your blog can take one or more of three forms. You can put ads into your header, put ads onto your side bar, or put ads into your blog posts themselves. Personally, I steer clear of the last one, but that’s really only a personal preference. I prefer to only include appropriate affiliate ads in my blog posts, when I advertise in them at all. Many times I don’t even put ads in the posts themselves. If you decide to place Adsense ads into your blog post there are several freely available Wordpress plugins that will do it for you automatically. My favorite is the All-In-One Adsense And YPN plugin. Search the plugins available on Wordpress.org for other Adsense plugins if you’d like different options.
Putting Adsense ads into your header can be a little more problematic. It usually requires editing the style sheet (style.css) and the header.php file for your selected theme. Since each theme is potentially different, it’s difficult to explain exactly how to do that in a blog article. Some theme make that easier than others. If you not a PHP programmer, and want Adsense ads in your header, look for a theme that has that capability built in.
Adding Adsense ads to your sidebar is easier than adding them to your header. There are several plugins and widgets available on Workpress.org that will do this for you. Widgets are a bit like plugins, but with more capabilities. One good plugin that allows Adsense ads to be added to your sidebar is WP Simple Adsense Insertion. It can be used along with, or even in place of All-In-One Adsense And YPN mentioned above.
My first choice for places to put Adsense ads is in the header. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had much better results with affiliate ads than I have with PPC ads, but I still recommend using PPC. Usually, putting them in the header is enough, although I do sometimes add them to the sidebar – usually below everything else.
In the next few articles we’ll talk about using affiliate ads and talk more about how to incluse Adsense and affiliate ads in your blog.
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
You’ve got your blog online. You’re posting articles to it regularly. You’ve signed up for Adsense and some affiliate programs. Now What? This is where the real fun begins! Now you’ve got some decisions to make.
Are you going to do this the inexpensive way and do most or all of the work yourself, or are you going to invest a little money into your online business and get it up and running faster?
The answers to these questions really depends on you, your budget, and your tolerance for risk vs. reward. Wordpress has everything you need and you can get most of it for little to no cost. The downside to this approach is the extra time it takes, not to mention the lost income due to trial and error. I’m going to give you many of these tips at no cost. Unfortunately, the information I’ll give you for nothing will require a lot of work on your part, and a lot of time to accomplish.
The first thing you need to do is make your blog look a little better, and more importantly – more authoritative. This doesn’t require fancy graphics only a professional artist could love, but it does require a little work. There are plenty of free Wordpress themes and plugins available. If you can find one of these that fits your blog well, great! But remember, your primary purpose here is not just a hobby – IT’S A BUSINESS! To that end, you might consider investing a small amount in your business to take it to that next level of professionalism.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to professionalize your blog site, and make it more authoritative looking, is to use one of the many commercial themes that are designed specifically for this purpose. The one I like is WP Remix by Premium Themes. WP Remix is a professional looking blogging theme that is one of the easiest to use I’ve tried. Most of its functionality is drag and drop. It works great and is ready for you to start adding your affiliate links and Adsense ads into right out of the box. I recommend you give it a look and see if it isn’t worth the small investment to save you hours of manual setup and configuration.
If you are the do-it-yourself type, or you’re just on a really tight budget, you can do all of this yourself with free to near-free resources. In the next few articles I’ll show you how to add your Google Adsense ads and affiliate links into your Wordpress theme.
In the meantime, here are a couple of videos that will show you how you can upload a new theme to your site using Filezilla, a free FTP program. You can download Filezilla at http://www.filezilla-project.org.
View the demonstration on installing a theme in Wordpress here.
View the Filezilla upload demonstration here.
Getting Ready For Online Income
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that we’ve started our blog, we need to get working on the main reason we’ve been doing all this in the first place – making money online. This subject is huge. There are as many ways to make money on the Internet as there are Internet sites it seems. Before we can make any money however, we must have something to sell to our blog’s visitors. That’s not quite as difficult as it may seem.
We’re going to focus our online money making efforts in only 2 areas for now. This will simplify our task for now and give us a great starting point on our way to online financial independence. We’re going to focus on Pay-Per-Click advertising and Affiliate Sales.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a marketing model where you place ads on your site that are related to your site’s content. If one of your visitors clicks on that ad, you make a small commission for that click. That can be as little as a few cents, or as much as several dollars, depending on the PPC ad. One of the best known places to get PPC ads for your site is Google AdSense. Google Adsense is easy to sign up for and will automatically scan your blog and supply content-appropriate ads for it.
Signing up for Google Adsense is easy. Just go to https://www.google.com/adsense and click the sign up now button. Go through the help and tutorials to learn how to generate the ad code and then just plug the ad code into your blog pages for instant PPC income. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than I just made it sound, but you get the idea. In the next several articles we’ll be exploring different ways to get this done easily and effectively. All you really need to do now is get your Google Adsense account started.
Affiliate sales is another great way to get started making money online. Internet marketing is growing every day as more of the world’s population comes online and discovers the convenience of online shopping. Affiliate sales is the single most profitable method I use in my online business. I make the majority of my income in Affiliate marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is similar to PPC advertising. You put ads and links on your blog that are related to your content. When your visitors click those links, they are taken to the advertisers site to purchase a product. If they purchase, you make a commission. Commission sales are as old as sales themselves. They’ve been around since the beginning of marketing. They’re an easy way to make money, especially if you want to live the RV lifestyle as I do. You don’t carry inventory or worry about shipping products. You simply refer people to the advertiser and they do the rest.
To get started with affiliate sales you need to sign up to become an affiliate for products that are related to your blog web site. That’s easier than it seems. Even Wal-Mart has an affiliate program! Go to web sites that sell products related to your subject and look for links for affiliates. Search their sites for these links, or even email their marketing headquarters and ask.
Another thing you can do is join several of the affiliate clearing house sites. Sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale and ClickBank all have lists of hundreds of sites with affiliate links. Join these sites and then just sign up for the programs that match your blog’s content.
Again, affiliate sales can seem more complicated that I’ve made them seem here, but they’re really not once you get the hang of it. There are plenty of ways to make it easier and we’ll be discussing them in later articles. All you need to worry about for now is to get signed up to be an affiliate for companies related to your blog’s subject. Take some time to go through the affiliate sites’ help and tutorials. In later articles I’ll show you plenty of ways to get these ads into your blog and start making money online.
Getting Started With Blogging - Part 3
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that you’ve got a short list of your interests, it’s time to get a web site. There are thousands of places on the Internet to do this, many better than others. I highly recommend GoDaddy.com. They’re the biggest and most reliable while still being reasonably priced. Every web site I own that I don’t host on my own servers is hosted GoDaddy through their membership subsidiary BlueRazor.com. Bluerazor is for people like me who have hundreds of sites.
Click here to go to GoDaddy (it will open in a new browser window) and start the process by looking for a good web site domain name. You web site domain name can be anything that describes your subject and it should be fairly easy to remember. For example, if your hobby is star gazing with telescopes you might try something like TheRVStarGazer.com. (which was available when this was written by the way) Any good name will do.
You can research these at GoDaddy’s web site by typing in your choice in the upper right search box where it says “Start Domain Search” and click the GO! button. If your choice is already taken, GoDaddy will even make some alternative suggestions. If you want, just use your name, like GeorgesBlog.com. It doesn’t really have to reflect the subject. One advantage to using your name is you can always write about more than 1 subject if you choose.
Once you’ve picked your name, simply go ahead and purchase it from GoDaddy along with their Economy hosting plan. At the time I write this, their Economy plan is as low as $4.25/month paid in advance, and it is all you need for a blogging site.
Click here to watch a short video on how to set up your hosting account on GoDaddy.com.
The next step is to install Wordpress on your new site. Wordpress is a free blog software package and is by far the most popular in use on the Internet today. It’s easy to use and GoDaddy makes it easy to install. Go to your new hosting account and install Wordpress.
Click here to watch a short video on how to set up Wordpress on your new hosting account.
The final step is to do a little setup work on Wordpress. Wordpress is actually ready to go right out of the box, but it’s pretty generic. You’ll want to personalize it a little, maybe change the theme for a different look, and remove some of the initially installed content. This is quick and easy. For lots of information on Wordpress you can visit their site at Wordpress.org. there’s even a “For Dummies” book for Wordpress that you can buy on Amazon by clicking here.
Click here to watch a short video on how to personalize Wordpress and start blogging.
That’s it. Congratulations! You are now an Internet blogger. It’s time now to start blogging, and more importantly, start making some money with your blog and the Internet. The next few articles will give you some tips and tricks to start getting the cash flowing in your new blog.
Getting Started With Blogging - Part 2
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Last time I talked about the 4 things you need to get started. This time I want to cover just the first item in that list. Finding your niche to use for your blog.
This is really quite easy. Find something you are passionate about. It might be your job or hobby. It might even just be something you really like, but never really did as a job or hobby. For example, a friend of mine has been interested in Geology for a long time. He finally took a college-level course in it and got completely hooked. When he asked me to help him decide what to use for his blog, this was the first thing I thought of. Why not? He likes it. He knows a lot about it now because he’s made a passion out of studying it. And, there’s probably a lot of other people out there that would be interested in it. It made sense to me.
Whatever you pick, just make sure it’s a subject that many other people might be interested in. It won’t do you a lot of good to pick a really obscure subject and then wonder why your web site doesn’t get any traffic. Very common subjects work really well, even though there may be a lot of people out there with web sites about it already. Take the fast-food restaurant approach … just because there’s already hundreds of thousands of them doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more.
think about it and make a list of several subjects you’d be interested in blogging about. Don’t decide just yet. Write down a few of them. Then read the next few articles before you actually start. Next time we’ll talk about getting a web site picked out and running.
Getting Started With Blogging - Part 1
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Getting started blogging for income is easier than you’d think. All you need are 4 things …
1. You need an area of interest or expertise and the time and desire to write occasional articles about that interest. We all have areas of expertise from our training, professions or even just our hobbies. Believe it or not, the Internet is so big now that you’d be amazed at how many people share your interest. Those people are searching the Internet every day looking for more information. The whole point of your blog is to provide them with information about that topic, and possibly have them click a link for further information that you can make a small income from. After all, you’re reading this because you were looking for information on how to make money on the Internet using a blog or other such web site.
2. You need a web site. This too is easier than you might think. It’s possible to get a web site on line and ready to go in just a few minutes with a very small cost. And don’t worry about not being a web programming geek; you don’t need to be. With free software like Wordpress (the software used on this site) and others, you don’t have to worry about programming the website. Al you have to do is write the articles.
3. You need affiliations with people who sell products so you can offer these products on your web site to your visitors. You can even have a product of your own, but that can get a bit more complicated. Again, these affiliations are far easier than you think and cost you nothing to get.
4. Finally, you need the knowledge and ability to get people to click on your web site and read your articles. In the Internet Marketing world this is known as traffic. Just because you build it, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll come. That make work in the movies, but not on the Internet. This part can get a little tougher than the other 3, but really isn’t that difficult either and you can learn to do it easily. I’ll spend most of our time in this area.
In the next few articles, I’ll expand on how to do each of these 4 steps and where you can get help with each of them.
Blogging - What’s It All About?
This is the first in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Web Logging, or “Blogging” is very quickly becoming one of the most popular Internet-related activities for millions of people all over the world; it represents a great opportunity for those who create blogs and for those who use them. Very often misunderstood as just a way of keeping personal diaries online, blogging is far more complex. The range of topics blogs deal with is incredibly wide; from politics and economics to sky diving and snorkeling. The next very important aspect after blog content is actually the interactive format of the pages that allows users to take action on the site.
Part of the history of blogging includes the very first attempts to run an account of one’s personal life, and many of the blog owners liked to call themselves journalists or diarists. In the early days of blogging around the mid-90s, people enjoyed the experience of belonging to the online community that went beyond all sorts of boundaries. This was the time when the very first combination of text, pictures and videos were included in a blog, as the most accurate way of reflecting one’s life. Sometimes, bloggers transmitted live images with the help of various portable devices, creating the so-called semi-automated blogging.
At the beginning, blogs were not individual pages, as they mainly functioned as components of larger websites; nevertheless, with the rapid development of technologies, it came into everyone’s power to create and support a personal independent web log. The only condition to enjoy a successful blogging experience is to stick to high quality content that makes any visitor return to the site and even take action on it. Creativity and innovation are probably the best ways to define the blogging experience since we can identify a true craze to be seen online.
Blogging is one of the most effective ways I’ve found to supplement my online income. I use blogs (like this one) all over the internet to promote products I receive commissions on, support my own products, and earn income from pay-per-click advertising. In the next few articles I’ll explain what blogging is, how to do it and how I use it as a major part of my online income.
How I Make a Living From My RV Working Over The Internet
For some time now I’ve been answering what seems to be the same email over and over. It goes basically like this:
“Phil, how’s it going with CoolRVToyz? I read on the site you’re a full-time RV’er and I have a question if you don’t mind. I’m wanting to go full time as well, but can’t really afford to retire yet. Can you share a few of your secrets about how you make your living over the Internet? You don’t have to get specific, but any information you’d be willing to share would be gratefully received. Thanks.”
Truth is, I’ve received so many of this kind of email from my camping and RV friends that I actually started copying and pasting my answer from the previous one and changing it around a little just to keep from typing so much.
To that end, I decided to open yet another web site - WorkFromYourRV.com. In reality I own over 100 Internet domains that I use for various reasons in my Internet business; so what’s one more. Most of them deal with camping, campgrounds, RV parks or GPS related information. None of them dealt with the subject of internet marketing. I wanted to avoid including this type of subject matter on CoolRVToyz because, well, it just wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of that site. CoolRVToyz is all about cool stuff for your RV lifestyle; in particular the Ultimate RV Parks & Campgrounds Directory - our flagship product. I didn’t want to start cluttering up the camping theme of that site with Internet Marketing “junk”.
Being a full-time RV’er presents specific challenges when you’re trying to run any kind of a Home-Based business. You obviously can’t carry much in the way of inventory in the back of your RV. Inbound shipping is problematic at best, especially if you move a lot like I do. Communications are also problematic since you don’t have many of the normal business tools like land-line phones, fax machines, etc. Those challenges can be overcome however, and it is completely possible to run a business from your RV while still maintaining the type of camping lifestyle we all love and enjoy. That’s why I opened this web site.
The purpose of WorkFromYourRV.com is to pass along what I use to make a living over the Internet while working from my RV. But, before I give away any “secrets”, I must provide a bit of a disclaimer of sorts.
Please read this next paragraph carefully:
In my Internet business, just like any other business, I work hard. If you came to this site looking for a way to get rich quick, you’re on the wrong site. Yes, there are a few opportunities out there that can make you a great deal of money if you catch them at the right time and do everything just right. However, the vast majority of the schemes over the internet are outright scams! Even the good ones don’t always work for everybody. I have failed at some of the things I’ve tried, even though I’m still convinced to this day they would make a profit if I had just worked on them a little harder, or differently. Some of the things I’ve tried made a little money and some made a lot. But, just because one particular idea made a lot of money for me, doesn’t necessarily mean it will for you. Each of us is different and will approach each challenge differently. I have a reputation to uphold, which is one of the primary reasons I’ve avoided this subject in “public” for as long as I have. I will do my best to only bring you ideas that have a reasonable chance of making a profit on your investment, but I can’t, and won’t offer any guaranties. In the end, much of your success will be based on your willingness to pull a few weeds in your garden, and never lose site of the big picture. Working over the Internet is a bit like trading stocks. You have to look at the entire portfolio and not get too hung up on how much you made on one stock versus how much you lost on another. As long as the overall portfolio continues to make you money, you spend your time refining it.
The Internet is a quickly changing landscape. What works today will not necessarily work tomorrow. My efforts on this site will be to keep you up-to-date with what I am finding out there and provide you with pre-screened ideas that I am either using myself or think are good ones to try. I can’t try them all, even the ones I think are pretty cool. After all, it’s just me and my RV. I’ll always let you know however which ones I’m using myself and which ones I just think are worthy of consideration. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you new information as I run across it.
Happy RV’ing …
Phil King
