I do not want my current readers to suddenly feel that the blog is filled with advertisements top to bottom. I want to prime them from the start that this is the way my blog is going to look now and in the future. Maybe the Wordpress theme might change, since I am a very picky guy, especially in terms of designs and layout of my site.

I look for themes that are ready to publish advertisements with already allocated ad placements on the theme itself.

Google Adsense is a must on my blog. I guess that’s what majority of bloggers who want to monetize their blogs do. But I won’t stop there. I sign up for both Kontera and Adbrite as well to increase the earning potential. Although, I am pretty confident that I won’t make much initially, I want to make sure that these are there when the traffic starts to build up.

Other advertisements I considered for my site are affiliate banners. There are many sources of affiliate networks that one can sign up easily. One of them is of course, Clickbank. There are many others too that do not necessarily belong to an affiliate network. Take Shoemoneytools.com as an example. It pays 50% commission on sign-ups made through your affiliate link.

I am in the midst of creating sub-domain names for these affiliate links so that they look pretty in the address bar when the mouse cursor hovers over it.

There are many other methods to monetize the blog. I will take it one step at a time and explore what works and what not, especially for newcomers like me. Now that some of the monetization are in place…

Let’s look forward to the traffic…

But as you can see, I start off on the right footing in following John Chow’s advice on Beginner’s Blogging Tips.

John Chow’s Free E-Book “Chapter 3, Page 9”.

Talking about passion; I love to write.  I can write my mind off and sometimes it doesn’t really matter to me if it made sense or not. I gather a lot of ideas from writing. Not to mention that it improved my language skills too. I love to elaborate on things that may seem simple. From there, an argumentative platform gets created and ideas pour in abundantly. I don’t usually save what I write, because it was there to just put my mind in writing and improve my skills.

I started off this blog in trying to write about making money online and find out how certain people reap in that success from blogs. Although I started with really no experience in making money online, by starting out really new, I can share what many bloggers go through; starting out. There must be a starting point at something. If I were to be a successful blogger, I must start blogging right? Well, so this is it, my first blog.

Domain Name and Hosting Your Blog

I could easily use a free blogging platform and start my blog. It wouldn’t cost me anything except time and passion. It would be a real waste if I were to see that blog grow into something and doesn’t have an identity of its own. I decided to purchase this domain and start off from there. Whether or not it makes a name out of itself is a separate matter. What is important is that I create an opportunity for it to grow with an identity and not regret later on.

Having wanting to own a domain name comes the cost of maintenance; domain renewals, hosting fees and premium themes. I treat this as a small investment for bigger things to come. More importantly, it gives me the drive of confidence and provides an anchor to avoid me giving up. It is always easy to give up on something if it doesn’t cost you anything. With this small investment it ties me down to make sure it works, or at least try hard to make it work. Also, I may not be as committed with a free blog.

Another good thing of having a hosted blog is that I can be flexible with the designs and whatever I want to be included in the blog. I can choose from thousands of themes, both paid and free. Even when its free, I can still customize it by learning some PHP and CSS codes.

I purchase this domain from GoDaddy.com and hosted it on HostGator. There are several discount coupons you can use if you just search them on Google.

Custom Search

The hosting fees are minimal actually starting at less than 10 dollars a month. I found a coupon that gave it to me free for the first month. As for the domain, I bought it for 5 years. Plus a coupon, it really isn’t expensive.

I hope this post motivates you to start a blog if you haven’t done so. You need to make that first step of being confident that you can do this and just put your mind to it. The rest of things should come freely after you make that first decision to start blogging.

See you at your blog…

That’s the commonly used term in the internet marketing industry where you create opportunities to earn money from your websites, be it blogs or any other personal or commercial sites.

In John Chow’s free e-book under recommended money-makers, there are several advertising or affiliate networks that allow you to create this monetizing opportunity. However, I feel that not all should be applied right away unless you have met certain criteria to even make money from it.

Text Link Ads and other similar advertising networks, should be approached only after the site or blog have matured with strong enough traffic. This is because such networks act as middle-men between you, a publisher, and advertisers. It is common sense that if your blog is new, with measly traffic, no sane advertiser would pay good money to advertise on your blog. With this in mind, the advertising network wouldn’t even want to approve adding your site to their network of publishers, as it will undermine their reputation of providing quality publishers to their paying advertisers.

CPC networks would make the ideal choice for newly created sites to monetize. Such networks include Google Adsense, Kontera Content Link and Adbrite. There are many others too if you were to browse through John Chow’s 130 money making networks. Although the returns would be small or even negligible in the beginning, at least it can get you started and motivated to put in more effort.

You would notice that my blog is running these CPC Advertising Networks to get the site started with advertising.

If you are using Wordpress like I am, there are many plug-ins that would help you organize the placement of these ads. I like Kontera very much as I don’t have to worry about placement. It actually makes use of the words in the content and creates clickable adverts from it.

One other way is affiliate marketing. See the 125×125 ads on the right sidebar. Those are affiliate products featured on my blog. This is also known as CPA (cost per action) Ads, where the action is to purchase the product. The affiliate earns a commission when the purchaser clicks on the advertisement and buy the product.

When your site has strong followers and traffic, you can even sell this 125×125 ad button space for a flat fee. John Chow sells his for $500 per month per spot. He opens up 8 spots for sale; $4000 per month!

If you look at John Chow’s Advertise page, you’d notice that there is an “Ad Age” shield that shows that his blog is ranked #10 in the marketing blog industry. ProBlogger is there too in the top 50! That’s where the leverage is to set the advertising space prices. You can also look at the list and learn from the best.

That’s what I’m going to do. Learn from the best!

Until next time…

First stop, Kontera Content Link.

I was able to register without a hitch and upon clicking the link included in the confirmation email, I was all ready set to go.

Since I’m using Wordpress as my CMS, I downloaded the Kontera plug-in off the site. I had some trouble initially with the plug-in downloaded off Wordpress admin page. You can read the installation instructions that came with the download. Under Kontera settings, if you don’t see your publisher ID, you’ll need to search for it.

I can see my publisher ID in the “create tag” section in the code block that reads like this…

var dc_PublisherID = xxxxx –> where xxxxx is your publisher ID you’d need, to key into your Kontera settings.

If you are using blogger, you can simply click on the  button. And you will be brought to blogger.com to log into your account. As simple as that.

I’m not too sure if the phrase below that was extracted from John’s ebook still applies today…

“… Kontera requires a site have a minimum 500,000 page views per month before being accepted…” chap. 2, page 6, para 2

I have activated the plug-in, insert my publisher ID, and now waiting for the tags to go live, that may take up to 24 hours. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll find out why and let you know.

See you in the next post…