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…

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…