If you are a blogger, you probably have a few things you are very passionate about.   Through the course of a typical week, you probably link out several times to various companies, products, or services that you endorse because you personally enjoy them.   If it is not a paid review or an affiliate link, then you are doing so for free. 

Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but why not get paid for it?   People seem to have a misconception that affiliate marketing requires you to endorse products you don’t use, which is completely untrue.   MOST companies now have affiliate programs of some sort, so if you are endorsing anyone, you can get paid.    Your web hosting company and your domain registrar more than likely have affiliate programs.   Any book or TV show reviews you do can be endorsed through Amazon.  Anything sold on eBay can be endorsed through their affiliate program.   There are such huge advantages for companies to run an affiliate program that most companies are doing so. 

It was with that in mind that about six months ago when I decided to make a change in my online practices and shift my focus primarily to affiliate marketing.   The first thing I did before launching any new campaigns was to dig through my existing websites and popular individual posts looking for affiliate opportunities.   Because of the amount of content I had produced over the past two years on my network of websites, this was a fairly big task and took most of one weekend to complete (about 13 hours).  

Like I encouraged others to do in one of my last posts, I started with the basic 6 affiliate companies.    I also spent some time looking through my blog analytics and figured out which companies I was sending the most traffic to.  I then went to Google and searched for the companies name and affiliate.   I was surprised that 3-4 of of these companies had affiliate programs as well!

Once I was done signing up for relevant affiliate programs and collecting affiliate links, I went back into those posts and updated these existing links within my posts to be affiliate links.  I chose to mask my affiliate links because it makes it much easier to use them on multiple websites, but it really isn’t needed as you are targeting search engine traffic.   I then took any others that were relevant and added them to the blogs sidebar. 

After each day, I began to check on my progress by logging into my affiliate accounts.  Each day it seemed my eyes widened more and more.   Within 30 days I had made almost $1,200.00 just from these affiliate programs.   This was without factoring in and new affiliate campaigns, just links I had naturally done on my sites over the years.  It was an exciting time, but also depressing to think about how much money I had lost in the previous weeks, months, and even years by not learning the secret to making money online earlier.  And these were all links I made originally without any income in mind, but just because I enjoyed the product or service.  

In the months since, that income has been pretty consistent and I’ve been growing it with new niche sites, new campaigns, etc.   It is fun to see the income rolling in 24/7, and have that money come from work I’ve done in the past.   Any work I’m doing now will hopefully be adding to that income six months from now!

If you have a lot of content indexed in the search engines, I highly recommend you carve out some time to research affiliate programs and update your links.   You’ll probably be surprised with the opportunities that present themselves. 

In the past few weeks I’ve talked a bit about how to easily make an eBay niche store and some tips on finding the most success with BANS. Based upon this sites analytics, it looks like there was a lot of interest in this product, so I figured I would finish covering this product before moving on to the next one I’m using to make money online. In this post I will be presenting another idea to help you customize your BANS site to look the way you want it to.

When you create your BANS sites, the first thing you’ll notice is that they are easy to setup and come with all the functionality you could possibly need in an eBay niche store, without any extra work. The one flaw they have is that they all pretty much look like. You’ve got a few templates to choose from, including two or three sidebars, but the colors, the search function, and the footer are all pretty much the same. Ideally you want to grab the web surfers attention when they find your site so they stick around and click on affiliate links, advertisements, or your eBay store’s merchandise.

One thing you can do is look into getting some unique BANS templates for your sites. I wish I would have thought to check for something like this when I first purchased the BANS software, because I put a lot of time into reorganizing the styling the theme to look how I wanted it to.   You can check out one of my top earners, my Poker Supplies store, to get an idea of what I’ve been using for some of my BANS sites.

With BANS templates, you can easily plug in a unique non-BANS look without any extra effort (though you’ll still need to do the banner obviously). So far, the best BANS templates I have found were made by Ian Fernando. Here is a sample of how they look:

The eye appeal for these themes is incredible and they allow you to easily integrate a lot of your pages and other advertisements flawlessly into the theme so they look natural. If this looks like something you would be interested in, you can find out more information on Ian’s website.

When you are reading through your blogs feeds, do you enjoy when someone asks for their readers input? I’m not talking situations where someone may write out a detailed post and finish it with “what do you think?” People that do that are generally just trying to encourage readers to comment. What I’m talking about is when a blogger writes a post wanting you to help them or get input on something.

Sometimes I feel that people have the wrong idea about blogging. Though it can be, blogging was not intended specifically to teach you something. Blogging was actually intended to be a conversation, which requires two or more parties to respond to each other. If you leave a comment on a blog post, doesn’t it make you feel better if the author responds to your comment (whether in general or specifically)?

I’ve always taken the approach that I have a lot to learn from my readers, so occasionally I will ask for help on things. Loyal readers input is extremely valuable, so I am never afraid to brainstorm, bounce ideas off readers, poll readers, or whatever else. Whether you are a pro blogger or not, none of us know everything and there is always things to learn.

So, with that said, let me ask you this. Do you approaching blogging as a way to teach your readers, or do you attempt to engage in a conversation and learn from your readers?