Monetize Your Blog - Important Tips for Affiliate Marketers

A blog is basically a website that is very simple to set up and maintain . It allows people with little or no technical experience to get a customized site up in a few minutes. But how can you monetize your blog so it can start making money for you?

There are multiple ways a blog can be used to earn money , from asking visitors to leave a donation to selling off the whole blog, but this article focuses on one of the simplist ways to monetize your blog, becoming an affiliate.

An affiliate is someone who promotes a product or service with a hyperlink that points back to the vendor. If someone clicks on your link then buys the product tracking software will associate you with the sale and you will earn a sum of money .

So if you are trying to monetize your blog you include links to various vendors.

There are some do's and don'ts when it comes to marketing on your blog though.

DO's When You Monetize Your Blog

- Have a blog that deals with a specific interest or niche. It is much easier to get targeted traffic if you are selling to a particular niche.

- Have a primary product. When you set up your sales funnel you want to be directing your traffic to something specific, if the product isn't interested in your primary product, for whatever reason, they may choose one of the other products you have on offer.

- Consider the long term and brand yourself, your blog is a reflection of who you are, as return traffic can be a valuable source of income it is vital to nurture your reputation.

- Provide excellent , relevant content, if you write nonsense it will reflect badly on both yourself and the products you are trying to market also comments and Facebook 'Likes' affect your Google ranking. There is a lot of competition out there so just having a pretty ad isn't going to be enough.

- Take the opportunity to market the tools that you use. If you use hosts, autoresponders, keyword research tools, or whatever, and you are satisfied with them, promote them. You have the advantage of already knowing and trusting the products. Also if you are involved in any kind of marketing where you may be getting others to join you in the business having affiliate links to the tools they will need could prove quite valuable.

- Check affiliate links often, you don't want to be sending people to a page that does not exist and you want to get the credit when they click on your links.

DONT's When You Monetize Your Blog

- Lie, if you have never become a member of a site or used a product don't claim you have.

- Sell illegal or poor quality products or services, remember you only want to be associated with products that will give your prospects a positive experience.

- Make income claims, as well as being unethical it could also be illegal according to FTC guidelines

- Sell competing products, people will find it difficult to trust you if you are an affiliate for competing products

- Make the advertising so intrusive it takes value away from the content. If someone visits your site and there are lots of flashing ads and pop-ups that are hard to close, people will just move on and not even read your content, people should not have to fight their way on to your blog.

Overall it is fairly simple to monetize your blog but their is always a trade off when it comes to advertising, you don't want to come accross as a person who has no integrity and will say anything for a sale, however you don't want you advertising to be so unobtrusive that no one ever sees it.

For more tips on setting up a small business online, and and to read this article on my blog, visit Paul at his blog or his website http://biztrainonline.com