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…

A part of his website, Shoemoneytools.com, provide subscribers with the necessary tools to rank higher in search engines, particularly Google.

I am going to just skim through his website offer here and may consider signing up for his $9.95 trial for 9 days later on. However, the price after the trial is rather steep at $199.95 per month!

There are four categories to the whole set of tools, namely, SEO Tools, PPC Tools, Link Building Tools and Valuable Resources. There is another whole set of other tools under each category.

Looking at the tools list, I am not sure if they can be found elsewhere on the internet and used free. But, it may not give the same result and you would need to know which tools comes first if you are still new like me. The guides in Shoemoneytools should be able to help those starting out.

Looking through the list of tools, I can roughly imagine what each does. What intrigues me the most is the Adsense Crawler. What does it do?

I guess the guides and walkthroughs would be beneficial in learning what tools to use for what and when.

He garnered in more than $130k with that picture of him showing the cheque, all from Adsense. If he’s showing what he’s done here in the tools, people should at least be making a fraction of that. But the question would be, would that fraction be enough to cover for the high monthly subscription to his tools. If for a few months there are losses in investment, people may not be able to sustain and commit any further. This may create premature cancellation of subscriptions and people just give up. No one knows when the profits will start pouring in, and hence skeptical thinking sets in to give up.

Maybe, what one can do is to sign up for the trial first, look at the tools and decide if it can be applied for profits. I would strongly suggest that newbies do not jump the gun. At least make full use of the nine days of trial to learn a lot of things. Do not go in blindly. Understand and at least have a realistic expectation of what the tools can do.

If you are trying the tools then…

To your success…

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…

Okay. I’ll skip John Chow’s e-book today. I had a much more urgent mission. I had to beautify my blog so that it’ll look presentable to my visitors. You would have noticed that it was a total makeover. I believe a good first impression is required to make my visitors stay and read my blogs. The last theme was good but this one turns out to be even better. I had to look for something much more refreshing and not turn off any visitors, as much as possible.

I went to look for a nice theme and found one at SkinPress.com … It was free although I was very much tempted to get the premium ones, well, of course for a price. I thought, let’s save that for later after I make some money from this blog.

I was on a roll to get it a little customized and learned a few PHP and CSS codes along the way. I also went to correct some wordings to make it even better.

The initial launch was not too nice with all the posts showing in full. I learned fast to add the “more” tag in each post. You can find out how and all other codes in relation to Wordpress usage from here.

I had a paid account with iStockphoto sometime ago and put it to good use here. I downloaded some pictures to accompany my post. If you notice from my featured posts, there’s an accompanying picture that I tried very hard to create a relation to the post.

And what else did I do?

Some other minor tweaking, like the font to the blog title. If you have Trajan Pro installed on your computer, you would see a different font on the title rather than the boring Verdana font. All this by learning some CSS codes.

I guess I only skirmished past the easy part of CSS and PHP in this session. The more advanced codes are very much complicated. I don’t think I would dwell in those in the near future.

Now that I am pretty satisfied with how my blog looks, I should concentrate further in making it work for me.

Till 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…

Does that mean I’ll be successful? Well, I hope it’ll happen someday. No more “I hope” or “I wish”. That’s positive thinking.

I would have to agree with John Chow that the first step has to be taken to achieve success. That’s taking action as mentioned in his e-book. And it has to have a time limit. I set to reach my goal in 2 to 3 years, with a posting each day. That’s over 700 posts! Well, maybe the interim success would be to earn the first cent in a few months time. I know it’s possible.

I’ve actually already made my first cent, but not from this blog. I paid for an advertisement space to promote a Clickbank product. I tried affiliate marketing.

My first cheque is USD73.99 and the second cheque at USD19.60.

Not very successful as an affiliate I would say, but at least I know it’s possible. I stopped buying the advertisement space to try other traffic generating methods. Another reason is, the product I’m promoting is really not that very suitable for the kind of content the site is offering.

That’s my mistake. Like John Chow said,

“… failure is required in order to succeed”. – page 5, para 5, Make Money Online with John Chow.

The mistakes I made…

• Too eager to advertise without doing much research.
• The site is offering “free” downloads, so the chances of people wanting to pay for a product are actually very slim.
• Hence, the click-through rate is very low, not to mention very low clicks too.

I did not make any profit from this internet marketing campaign, but I learned a lot along the way. I paid $150 for a month of the advertising space. You do the maths…

So much for the second dissection of John’s e-book. Next post will be more interesting, covering the whole list of John’s Recommended Money Makers, out of 130 advertising networks he posted on his blog.

Chow!

The world of internet marketing, affiliate marketing, monetizing blogs etc., all boils down to one common goal: to make money online. Although it is true that there are very successful people in this industry, there are also those who gave up halfway along the journey.

Well, I was one of the latter a couple of years back. I bought some e-books and thought it would be a breeze with such guides. The truth is, such guides are not as straight forward as I thought. There are a lot of unknowns that needs to be dug up to actually make that very first cent. I didn’t make that first cent a couple of years ago, so I gave up.

The thought of online money making crops up my mind again recently. I stumbled upon John Chow’s blog and was mesmerized on how he created his success around the World Wide Web. Now that he made $40,000 per month from his blog, made me wonder if such successes can be replicated.

I would like to invite you to join my blog and discuss along with others on how such successes can be achieved, through time and perseverance. I believe John Chow did not achieve what he had today without time and perseverance.

My first mission is to dissect John Chow’s free e-book and create discussion points for all to share. If you have not downloaded the free e-book, click here to download now.

Good day!