Make Sure That You Don’t Be the Crazy Street Peddler

If you live in a large city (or seen a movie featuring one) then you definitely know who I’m talking about. You know, that guy on the street corner who’s usually dressed in a long winter jacket even though it’s summer. Yes! Him. That guy. The one with the lingering body odor (probably from the jacket), the suspicious look in his eyes, and surprise, surprise something to sell.
Don’t be him.
One of the, if not the, most frequent problem that every blogger faces is the issue of monetization (ugly word really- making that which is not meant to make money, make money… sounds wrong). Anyways, we all usually go through the same phases:
1. We blog for a while, then realize that we aren’t making money from this “blogging” thing magically. Millions of dollars were supposed to just start rolling in once we wrote our amazingly unbelievable content right? Right?!
2. We finally accept our fate and realize that if we want to make money with our blogs we have to actually do something other than produce great written content… So we turn to Google Adsense. COME ON! It’s easy and simply to set up. Leave us alone.
3. We hit a point in time (some of us sooner rather than later) where we realize that making 26 cents a day from Google Adsense won’t lead to the riches and fame we envisioned. So in our desperate flee (from Adsense) we grab onto “affiliate marketing”.
4. This is the beginning of one of the happiest stages in a young bloggers life (if done right). We (the blogger) are making 50% + commissions from the affiliate products we’re referring to our blog readers. The money is practically rolling in! “Yeah, Baby, yeah”- bad impression of Austin Powers.
5. Then we ponder. Hmm, more products to affiliate, more money. BRILLIANT! … So we sell two more products, five more products, ten more products, etc. Pretty soon our blog is covered with a vast quantity of affiliate links to products we haven’t even tried for ourselves yet. But whatever, we’re still making money, so all is well… Until it’s not.
Blog subscribers start unsubscribing, unique visitor count goes down, commentators start getting a little more snippy, and worst of all sales are at a stand still… of zero. What happened?
Well you, my friend, are now a crazy pedlar guy. Congratulations.
You’re always there selling products to us. Selling products you either haven’t tried yourself or that you darn well know is of low quality. You don’t care about the customer (reader) anymore, just about the money. Take your products and go find another street corner, because you’re not getting our services or trust anymore.
“But… but… Arsene, where did I go wrong?” you say. I had a significant amount of subscribers, I kept publishing good quality content, and I affiliated properly. I did all the things I was supposed to do.
WRONG!
You didn’t affiliate properly. You just affiliated, nothing I saw there was “proper”.
Let’s get a quick lesson in how to affiliate properly, shall we.
Use Google Adsense; as a statistics tool (not as a monetization tool).
Put Google Adsense on your site for a couple of weeks or so and look for the ads that most frequent your site. You can do this either by browsing your own site and seeing what pops up, by letting a friend browse it from their computer (different search history and all that), or by polling your daily blog readers. Now write down the ads and the companies that own them. You know what you’re going to do next? That’s right…
Contact the businesses who’s ads kept showing up on your blog via Adsense.
You’re going to contact them and tell them that their ads frequently populate your blog, and why you think so (mommy blogger – baby ads, entrepreneurship blogger – business ads, etc. not that hard to explain). Once you’ve properly conveyed why their ads are a perfect match for your blog, you now tell them that you’re willing to show their ad on your blog on a monthly basis for a small fee (the price of these ads is largely determined by your blogs traffic; the higher the better). Even better yet, inform them that if they purchases ad space in bulk (in two, three, or four month terms) they can get a discount (10% or something); what business will turn down a better ROI?
Up-sell your ad space one step further.
Most bloggers sell ad spots in 125 X 125 pixel increments. But I’m proposing you it take one step further. Ask the business whether they would like to invest more, and in doing so they would be the sole ad on your site, and get a bigger ad space. This would increase their presence on your blog, and eliminate their competition with the other ads in one feel swoop! And who would turn that down?
And finally, once that’s all done you can relax (there’s more, but I’m not writing a book). It gets easier from here, all you have to worry about at the moment is whether or not the business is making their daily monthly investments in your blog (until you meet with the next businesses, then you have your work cut out for you again).
Did you notice what happened by the end of the post? if everything was done as said, you should now be only affiliating one (or a few) companies which you know about *gasp*. You’re not spamming your readers with crappy affiliate products anymore. You’re not recommending products that you personally have no connection with anymore. And most important of all,
You’re not a crazy street peddler anymore… Congrats.