Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing my first Google Plus Hangout on Air with Wade Harman and Carolyn Capern on the topic of how to make money with your blog. Myself and Carolyn were on the show to ask Wade questions about how he makes money with his blog and Wade also answered questions from the audience. At this juncture I’d like to say thanks to Wade for having me on and making my first HoA such an enjoyable one.
I’ve outlined some of the questions which were asked during the HoA for you below and hope that you’ll take the time to watch the HoA and, with some luck, learn a thing or two about how you can make money with your blog.
How To Make Money With Your Blog
1) Carolyn – How can you overcome the moral side of making money online or with your blog?
– It all depends on what you started out blogging for in the first instance. Wade started out blogging to make money and so there were no moral hangups about making money from his blogging.
2) Jeff Sieh – what is the best way for a newbie to make money on their blog and is there a minimum number of visitors?
– no minimum number of visitors required and the best way to start is to just jump in and give it a go.
3) Me – Main Revenues streams that are available and which are the easiest to monetise your blog?
– CJ.com, shareashale.com, clickbank – thousands of products which you can choose from to make money from your blog.
3b) How can you increase conversions? Any power words or tricks of the trade that yield better conversions?
Best way to increase conversions for mailing list is to use and “ethical bribe”, ie, give away a few chapters of an ebook for free when they join your mailing list. Make sure that what you give them for free is something that helps them as that what it’s all about. No real tricks but honesty is the most important. Build up trust with your audience and you’ve a better chance of conversions.
4) Rand Wilson – at what point traffic wise is the right time to put advertising on the blog and what is the best ad network for new bloggers? If you’re in it for the money only then anytime is fine. EdgeAdExchange from Randy Hilarski is worth checking out as well as the sites mentioned above.
5) Carolyn – what are your most lucrative affiliates and what criteria do you have to choose your affiliates?
TweetAdder and CommentLuv. The criteria for affiliate selection are products you trust and use.
How to Make Money with Your Blog – HOA Screen shot (just in case someone says “photo or it never happened)
6) Rand Wilson – for building traffic how much time do you recommend spending on content creation vs SEO vs social media/other promotions?
Wade doesn’t do much on SEO but spends a week researching posts before publishing. By trying to help people as much as possible in his posts the articles are spreading and gaining traction themselves, this coupled with his Google Plus usage has helped drive traffic and sales.
7) Lena Sinclaire – on the topic of affiliate marketing what is the average amount of payout that affiliates tend to give?
It depends on which affiliate, tweetadder for example is 50% commission. More important to sell lots of good products with low percentage than a lame product with 100% commissions so people continue to trust you and become repeat customers.
8) Greg Trujillo – There have been discussions about publishing your post and then adding an affiliate ad or link a week later, any thoughts?
Wade hadn’t come across that discussion but it is something he has done himself. When a post was getting some traffic love retrofitting an affiliate link makes sense.
9) Andy Nathan – JVZoo and Amazon are other affiliates worth checking out if you want to make money with your blog (and Wades affiliate scheme for his book).
10) Carolyn – what criteria do you use to decide what to give away and when do you decide to ask people to pay for it? Very situation specific and all depends on the content you’re writing on your blog.
11) Thomas Thibodeau – if you’re trying to monetise your blog is it important that you have your own website? If not, what are the advantages/disadvantages of using 3rd party sites like blogger or wordpress?
As far as making money it’s not that important but it’s always a good idea to own your own website.That way you own the content and have more control. Everything that you write on Blogger isn’t yours, it’s Google.
12) Me – do you spend much time on split testing to increase conversions? Noticed anything with regards to fonts, colours, text, images that increase conversions?
Better to provide honesty and truthfulness than focus on conversions and to test the product to make sure you can stand over it.
13) Carolyn – what are your best tips for approaching sponsors or advertisers individually?
Took two weeks for Wade to get his first sponsor for his show but he just told them who was going to be on the show, what they were going to talk about and what his goal for the show was. He did it all via Google Plus (and a phone call) and has been able to get PicMonkey as a sponsor. Good to have an advertising page on your site so that potential advertisers know your rates and that you are seeking out sponsors/advertisers.
How To Make Money With Your Blog
One of the key points to takeaway from this HoA is that making money online with your blog won’t be an overnight success, as Wade says he was hoping to crack the money making nut in a month but, it’s been a looong month. On your path to blogging success there will be many ups and downs but nobody said it was going to be easy. The key thing is to persevere, enjoy what you’re doing and in time you’ll start to make money with your blog.