A blog focused on helping bloggers and online retailers make more money online.

When I cited “Be an Affiliate” as a great way to make money blogging in my first blog post on Top Ten Ways to Monetize Your Blog for 2010, I didn’t get into too much detail about my thoughts on the subject. So after thinking about this topic for a short while, I decided I wanted to talk more specifically about a principle behind affiliate marketing and one tactic to use when looking to solidify advertisers. So, yes, without question; when you as yourself “should I put ads on my website” it makes sense as part of an overall strategy to make money blogging. But the keyword here is strategy. Your website is obviously a great way to earn an extra income but the overarching theme I want to get across is that although your content is valuable, so is your online presence and the integrity of your persona. Although affiliate marketing is a great way to supplement your income, just simply aligning yourself with all sorts of products or services shouldn’t be taken lightly. They may pay well, but you should be making long term considerations on the services and products you’re aligning yourself with. After all, your community is your biggest asset.

So if you are thinking about being an affiliate marketer, here are a few things off the top of my head that may be worth consideration:

You should consider having some sort of experience with the retailer, product or service you are promoting. But if that is impossible or unreasonable, in the least have an alignment with the industry that those retailers, products or services live in. Affiliate ads should be contextual and relevant or else you risk alienating your audience or losing first-time visitors because they are unable to relate to large areas of your site.

Now here’s a little thought of mine. If you’re going to invest the time into building a relationship and rapport with a merchant or advertising network, why not make that relationship a local one? This all ties in to the idea of reciprocity, the value of your time and your own ROI. Aside from being able to build a solid relationship through offering your unique and high-quality traffic, should your targeted merchants or retailers be local you could positively gain from accessing their network and community as well.

York Street Shops, Ottawa ByWard Market: Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia; Trappy.

To illustrate this, I saw a blog post the other day by Definition 6 about leveraging your friends’ communities. The blogger came up with this equation that sums up my thoughts on direct affiliate marketing (well, this also definitely extends to many other things), and went something like this:

Community = (Me +My Friends) x (You + Your Friends) x (Your Friends and Their Friends).

Tying these two thoughts together, I really believe that although bloggers understand this equation, that few actually adopt it as a strategy. As you look to build relationships by leasing advertising space on your blog, why settle for just a mere monetary payout? See what type of leverage you can build for yourself in accessing their trusted network of followers or online communities. Not to mention that you are in essence offering the “(Me + My Friends)” portion of the equation out already. Local is a great place to start because there can be tangible rewards for your efforts. Assuming you actually use many of the products you promote, or align the brand:

• You could expedite a product trial process by being within commuting distance of the retailer
• You could encourage face-to-face interaction, strengthening the bond or affinity between yourself and the retailer
• You could help to promote local shops and services that may not otherwise have access to a qualified online consumer base
• You could grow your own online community through cross-promotion
• The opportunity to be able to tweak the affiliate ad to your liking as to fit with your blog space may increase with a direct relationship with the retailer

In a supplementary post, I will talk about some tactics to use when approaching retailers for affiliate relationships. However for now, hopefully this is something you can chew on. Any thoughts on this? Have you bloggers had any good experiences when dealing local for affiliate relationships?

Following up on our series of the Top 10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog for 2010, I’d planned on discussing how the component of expressing yourself within your blog posts and blog community is absolutely critical as part of your strategy to grow your audience and hopefully help in your quest to make money blogging.  It was interesting timing for this post as just this morning I attended our local Social Media Breakfast Ottawa (#SMBOttawa) put on by three great hosts; Simon Chen (@sylc), Ryan Anderson (@ryananderson), and Rob Lane (@roblane). In the past few Social Media Breakfasts I have attended, generally the themes have surrounded tactic-related social media strategies and observations on engagement in the social media sphere. However today, I had the absolute pleasure of listening to a sociologist’s perspective on social media interaction – discussing specifically the “social” in social media – the human side of social media, if you will. And as such, I’d like to shift what I originally planned for this post closer towards the idea of expressing yourself properly based on the audience you are looking to attract.

At this morning’s discussion, Sam Ladner, PhD, talked about the need to understand how and why social groups interact within the communities they participate in (both online and off). For those of us attempting to build an online community (via a blog as just one example), developing a good understanding of our audience personas as well as how the individuals in these groups use “audience segmentation” - the concept of how groups of people are inclined to frame their online personas based on the audiences that can view them in a particular social network – is particularly crucial to being able to foster a truly engaged community. She discussed the idea of “embarrassment”, and how that sentiment is ultimately a community builder’s worst nightmare; putting an audience member or group in a position where the way they can be openly perceived to their own audiences becomes a source of embarrassment, or worse; shame. The goal of bloggers as community builders should be to create a place of engagement where your readers are not only free from threat or embarrassment or shame (or scrutiny, judgment, etc.) but additionally create a place where your readers are encouraged to participate in a way that makes sense with how they would interact on a human level and the circles in which they run.

Audience Segmentation Fail

(Photo courtesy of FacebookFails.com, and idea courtesy of Sam Ladner)

Take for example, females participating in online social networks. It is important to understand not only how, but also the reasons why the way certain females participate in these social networks and how these differ vastly from one group persona to another. Grasping these differences and using the intelligence when developing content in forms of blog posts, contests, comments and even requests for reciprocity is key to creating an optimal environment with which to grow your community. Although both of the “female” demographic, the way in which “mothers” participate in online social networks is largely different from they way “single, 20-somethings” interact on the very same online platforms (i.e.: Facebook, Twitter, etc.). While mothers are more likely to participate for reasons based on the sharing of ideas, conducting research and looking for help or suggestions, single women are more likely to create and use their online experience as a compliment to their real-life social interactions, a way of reinforcing their identity and actually planning social events. This is just one example that Ms. Ladner cited, but the principle remains that bloggers need to not only understand WHO their target audience is, but HOW and WHY they interact and the types of content they are most likely to be willing to broadcast themselves as being aligned with – without the threat of embarrassment. For example, although both “mothers” and “single, 20-somethings” may in fact read ‘Martha Stewart Living’ within the confines of their domestic sphere, one group may be more inclined than the other to broadcast it as a “like” on Facebook based on the audience it’s being portrayed to and the reasons why they’re online. The same applies for your blog: if you decide that you want to talk about a certain topic, event, idea, whatever – that’s absolutely fine. Just keep in mind that even though your audience may agree/disagree with your thoughts, they may choose not to interact because they may not necessarily want to be perceived as aligning themselves with it in a place that can be both publicly searched and archived.

She also gave a great example on how we should approach our interaction on the social communities we build as being the “perfect host” at a dinner party. As the community host, we should create an environment with which our “guests” feel as though the never have to ask for something while equally being welcome to ask for whatever they want; and additionally make them feel as though they are able to both arrive and leave when and how they please. A good host also knows when to make the right introductions, directs their guests towards people with similar interests and affinities without prompting. It’s this type of approach that I see as key for bloggers to adopt within their own social communities, and that’s how a true two-way interaction is created and reinforced.

For bloggers looking to grow their communities and make money blogging, tying these concepts and approaches into the notion of expressing yourself properly means spending a good amount of time trying to deeply understand the audience you’re attempting to attract: what types of things they are likely to say and equally what they are likely not to say, what are their goals, the types of social circles they run in, etc. Identifying and understanding these elements will help define the reasons readers should engage with your blog and the types of information and interaction you can provide that is likely to supplement their experience and make them feel welcome and safe.

A special thanks goes out to Sam Ladner for her keen insights and perspectives, and helping me beef up my blog post today!

While the prediction figures are slightly staggered, an overall positive projection in 2010 online advertising spending is still evident with gains of between 5.5% – 13.9% growth this year according to multiple sources.

eMarketer is forecasting US online advertising spend to see positive growth of 5.5% this year up from spending that decreased 4.6% last year. According to their article today on Optimism for US Online Ad Spend: “Other firms have published projections in the past three months predicting that 2010 ad spending will increase more steeply. Forecasts range from growth [in revenue] of 7% (UBS and Deutsche Bank) to 14% (Citi Investment Research).”

While according to Advertising Age’s article on Global Ad-Spending Expectations Improve Again, global ad spending on the internet rose 12.6% last year and will continue to grow to 13.9% this year (ZenithOptimedia; Publicis Groupe).

eMarketer’s stats on ad revenue growth show a 13% revenue growth projection in Display Related Ads for 2010, specifically a 12% increase for banner ad formats:

The takeaway for bloggers is that these positive projections could translate to similar growth for those of whom are monetizing their original content through similar ad formats. Bloggers should look to take advantage the optimistic ad revenue environment for this coming year and position themselves for healthy returns in 2010.

Our fourth installment in our series on the Top Ten Ways to Monetize Your Blog for 2010, I’ll touch on the importance of quality blog content that’s interactive and interesting. In relation to making money blogging, this is important as you need to actually keep your blog community engaged, plugged-in to the original content that’s on your page, getting your community to link back to your site and talking about the great experience they’re having on your blog to their friends and other communities they spend time in. As we know, increasing traffic should be one of the main goals you have as your driving force behind your blog monetization strategy.

Besides amazing content, it’s good practice to give your readers the ability to jump in on the experience they’re having on your site. Before you roll your eyes thinking you’ve heard this countless times before, this means more than simply allowing your readers to re-post your blog to Facebook and Twitter or leaving their thoughts in a lonely comment box. You should allow them to vote on your entries or questions you pose, encourage them to post fun and creative video responses, run contests or competitions. Ask their opinions, and try to have some fun with it!

Polls on your Blog

Here are a number of available online blog poll builders you can use to run on your blog. The trick is to find the one that is the easiest to incorporate into your blog, yet still matches the theme and doesn’t detract from the polish of your website. Just click on the logos to be taken to their webpage:

1. BlogPolls.com

2. PollDaddy.com3. Bloggeries.com/blog-polls/build/

And here’s a tool that can help you create quizzes or surveys and they’re easily integrated and compatible with WordPress, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace:

Or add a poll right from within WordPress or Blogger? Check the plugins section or the help files!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/polldaddy/
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42077

Contests or Competitions on your Blog

Running contest or perhaps a competition on your blog can serve a number of different and great purposes. Depending on how you run them, they can be a great way to entice more participation from your readership, grow your subscribers, your backlinks, your rank on bookmarking sites such as Technorati, etc. Or simply grow your community by reaching new readers and bolstering the virality of your posts. All good things.

Here’s a good post that ProBlogger put together on How to Run a Successful Competition on Your Blog.

Ask for Feedback or An Opinion

If one of the goals of your blog is to serve your online community (which it should be), then it’s a no brainer that interactivity can be spawned through reader feedback. Ask the opinions of your readers on anything you’re unsure of! Are you working on a project and having trouble making a decision? Post it to you community and give them the opportunity to pitch in. Thinking about redesigned an area of your blog? Creating a logo? Trying to decide what cereal to eat for breakfast? Ask anything! People like to be heard, all you have to do is give them a soapbox.

Overall, giving your readers further reasons and ways to reach back to you will encourage a more livelier discussion, and a well-rounded and better engaged community.

Have any other great tools for reader feedback you would like to suggest?