If you haven’t seen it yet, I put this video together yesterday for Firepow members but I thought I’d share it with you too.

It looks at 3 important things you might consider doing to improve the click through rate for your affiliate links and banners on your blog posts…

I’ve been getting asked alot lately:

“Why isn’t my blog making money?”

So I thought it was time for a blog post.

This is more targetted to those using blogs for affiliate marketing, but equally if you’re selling your own products, trying to get opt in subscribers, or Adsense clicks. Here goes…

Fortunately, there’s only two reasons why your blog isn’t making any money.

1. You’re not getting enough traffic.

or

2. You’re not pushing enough of that traffic towards the links that make you money.

The first, you find out from your traffic stats, from your hosting cpanel, or external analytics software.

The second, you find out from the tracking stats of your affiliate program, the stats in your Adsense account, or your own personal click tracking for your outgoing links or “actions”

From this analysis, one of two questions follow:

“WHY am I not getting enough traffic?”

or “WHY am I not converting enough of my visitors into making me money?”

The first question is easier to answer: you haven’t promoted your site yet. There’s so many ways to get traffic that we couldn’t cover them in a single post, but what you need to do in that situation is clear… more promotion.

But the second question is harder to answer. If you’ve already got traffic and you’re not making money from it… what do you do?

Here’s a simple 3 steps to monetizing your blog.

1. Before you can monetize your visitors, you need to understand them. If you’re like most bloggers, (or content site owners of any kind) you’ve got lots of traffic, coming from different places, and landing on different pages of your site.

From looking at your traffic stats, you can see where your traffic is coming from and which pages their landing on.

Next you have to be clear about what the people who are reaching your site are really looking for…

For example, someone who found your site in the search engines, from the term “how to train your dog” is looking for something different to the person who found it searching for “best dog food tips”.

And that’s just the beginning.

You have to know what people are already buying in your niche, what info they’re MOST looking for, and what feelings or desires they’re most looking to fulfil through your content.

When you know these things, then you can make decisions about WHAT you promote on each page of your blog, whether it’s an affiliate program, an Adsense ad block, or an opt in to get specific info from your website.

2. Once you understand them, you need to convince them. So once you know WHAT you should be pushing or using to monetize your visitors, you need to work out HOW to push it. What’s the right way to present your monetization/offer/advertising to them that will result in the greatest profit.

The “how” part actually needs a few steps:

a) First you need to get their attention with your links. Some common cures to your ads/links not getting enough attention are:

- Their positioning: You have to put your ads where people will see them. Too many people are ashamed to be advertising on their site, so they hide their ads/links away where no one sees them. If you’re promoting things that you know and believe in, you should be proud to be advertising it.That putting the ads “above the fold”, getting them into the post content, where the readers eyes are going and they are “engaged”.

It can also mean changing them around regularly so people don’t become “blind” to your ads. Maybe one day there’s an Ad in the post content, the next day it’s in the top of the sidebar. So it looks fresh and people don’t get used to ignoring it. Makin sense?

- Their relevance: People landing on different pages of your site are very likely going to be more responsive to different offers. You need to try to get on every page, the offer/link/ad that is most relevant to the people who are landing on that page. Yes, this is more effort than hard coding a banner into your sidebar that shows to all visitors but… do you want to make money or not? Don’t be a nerd, make your monetization as relevant to each page of your site as possible.

b) Then you need to convince them to take the action. Bloggers and friendly content writers too often fear being the big bad sales person. But it’s the same deal, if you’re promoting products/ads/links that will help people and that you believe in, why be scared to put your sales hat on?

You need to include calls to action, tell your readers what you want them to do:

“So dog training doesn’t have to be such a pain, CLICK HERE to learn how you can get a truly obedient dog in just a few minutes a day”

“If you found this valuable, check out the banner at the top of the screen to get XYZ benefit that is really attractive”

etc

And make the call to action stand out too. Put it in bold, a different colour, put >>> towards it, test whatever you like to make sure that whatever happens, they SEE IT!

ALSO, HOT TIP: Include links/calls to action in the middle of your post as well as the end. Some people aren’t going to read all the way to the end of the post and are going to leave your site anyway, so why not have them leave on a link that could make you some money?

3. What you don’t measure, you can’t improve. It’s no good doing any of this stuff if you’re not testing to see what difference it makes. Get your metrics first, so you know how many clicks/opt ins/sales you’re getting per visitor, then start testing your changes. Make a change, leave it for a few hundred (thousand, depending on your traffic) visitors and note the difference.

Stick with what works, and keep testing different variations of what doesn’t.

The reality is that it’s going to take alot of experimentation to be able to maximize your blog revenue but if you’re committed to testing, trying new things, and doing more to truly understand your visitors, anyone can make more money from their existing blog.

If you found this helpful, let me know

Here’s something you might not have thought about before.

So you want to increase your traffic…

You create more content, do more article marketing, buy more ads, and on it goes.

All great things, all helpful.

But have you considered getting extra traffic by…

Maximizing the number of pages each person who gets to your site actually views?

It raises an interesting question…

If a visitor comes to your site and lands on a page, and doesn’t click one of your ads or one of your affiliate offers, but a link to another page on your site, does that mean your site is good or bad? Effective or ineffective?

On the one hand, your first page didn’t generate much interest in whatever monetization was on offer, but on the other hand, you had a good relevant post or page title nearby that did get their attention that made them stay for an extra read AND check out another page that also has types of monetization which the reader may or may not find more enticing…

I think that a visitor clicking to another page on your site is neither, it’s neutral, but if it’s a choice between them clicking to another page on your site, or them clicking BACK on the browser, and leaving… I know which I’d prefer.

This sets the scene for my tip of the day.

I know a lot of times, I get stuck in the mindset of producing as much of my own content as possible, so it’s unique, so it can target the keywords I want, get ranked for the phrases I want, and be used however I want. When I’m in that frame of mind, if someone said to me “hey why don’t you add some good articles to your site, from an article directory for example”, I’d be like umm no – why would I? How is that going to rank in the search engines when competing against all the article directories and other websites that publish it.

What this post is about, is how that thinking misses a vital point… yes, you guessed it… adding value for the reader… NOT just the search engine.

If I add 5 articles to my site today, from Ezinearticles.com let’s say… I know those aren’t going to get ranked well in the SE’s without some serious link building on my behalf… but if those articles are high quality, having them in my “recent posts” could certainly draw some attention and have someone click them rather than leaving my site upon finishing one of my own unique posts.

Why is that important?

Well, besides the obvious fact that keeping the visitor on your site for one page longer means an extra opportunity to convert them into someone who makes you money… the number of page views per user is something seen by Google Analytics and by logic, noted by them as an indication of the quality of a site. As by the way is time spent on your site per user, all things that are becoming increasingly believed to influence your search rankings.

It shouldn’t take much convincing that a little of other people’s content can provide value to your readers and hence be a good idea.

The important part is monetization.

If I slap the other person’s article straight up and do nothing else, sure, I’m racking up another page view, but I’m also not doing more than giving this other person’s link in their author bio a bit of extra exposure, and killing any opportunity to make money from this extra piece of content myself.

Here’s some measures I like to take to ensure that doesn’t happen.

1. Never Add An Article Straight Up, As Is.

I like to add articles to a site but with an introduction from me. So I’ll start out like:

“Surfing around the web this week I was thinking a lot about XYZ (some issue in my niche) and I found an interesting article that talked about ABC. It was rather informative and made me realize how LMNOP is in fact important and worthy of attention. I’ve pasted this article below for you to check out yourself. Just make sure when you’re done, you come back up and check out this link”

ARTICLE PASTED HERE

————

This way, I get the full benefit of the other person’s content and idea but I make it a unique post, that I can call whatever I want, make it target whatever keyword I want, and so on. I’m also doing what I can to make sure that if they do read all the way through, they still come up to check out my link rather than the author’s link.

2. Beef Up The Monetization

Since you can’t go editing another person’s article if you’re republishing it, you’ve gotta do what you can to make sure if people are leaving that page, it’s going to make you money.

You can’t edit an article, but there’s nothing wrong with sticking an advertisement in the piece of content. Whether it means wrapping the text around an Adsense block or a banner for something, you’re putting another piece of “bait” out there (if you can excuse the sleazy marketing analogy) that may get taken rather than the author bio link AND without committing the unscrupulous act of changing around the author’s content and inserting your own links.

3. Be Picky With The Articles You Choose

You want to pick from the cream of the crop of the articles at whatever directory it is. While so much article directory content resembles a regurgitated dog’s breakfast, some of it is in fact profoundly informative. You want to pick both quality content, and content that is light on the author bio links.

You’ll see certain articles with author bio’s that you know have been written by a marketer and others that you know have been written by a real “expert”, who does it for the passion and enjoyment. The latter is likely to be better quality and have one humble link in the author biography rather than 3 links with a super enticing offer of some kind. You know which ones to pick

All making sense?

So the point of the post?

Don’t discount the benefits of other people’s content.

No it’s not duplicate content. No it’s not spammy. No it’s probably not going to bring any search traffic. Yes it can provide value to your readers. Yes it can increase your page views per reader. Yes it can give you more opportunities to maximize your monetary value per visitor and have yourself a more profitable site!

Try it out and let me know the results.

The hardcore “bloggers” will roll their eyes with a “duh!” on this one, but for all you niche marketers using blogs as your platform, you might find this helpful.

We’re talking about Feedburner, why I don’t really like it, and why you might, perhaps even SHOULD opt not to use it on your niche blogs…

What I’m talking about here, is putting the little “subscribe to my feed” button on your site, getting the user to enter their email to receive your RSS Feed, updates on your blog, to their email inbox.

What this does, unbeknownst to blogging newbies, is it makes your reader read your content, from an email that gets sent to them, rather than reading it by actually coming to your site.

That means you get less physical traffic, it means there’s less people to see your ads, or whatever form of monetization you have on your blog, and generally, that it’s harder to make money from your blog viewers. In other words, RSS Subscribers are harder to monetize than normal readers who are coming to your blog to read.

If you DO want to use feedburner but don’t want to lose as much traffic, here’s some tips:

1. Take advantage of your MORE Tag – if you use the MORE tag for your posts, the people who read by email will have to click the link to your BLOG to read the full post. That means they will visit your site instead of reading solely by the email.

2. Use Affiliate links in your posts – If you don’t want to use the more tag, make sure there’s some way that you could make money if the reader reads only through email. The obvious way is slotting a relevant affiliate link into your post.

3. Link to old blog posts: This gives reader another reason to click from what they’re reading in their email, on to your site. This is good for internal linking too, so something you should do when you can.

4.  Embed a video: Since the RSS Feed won’t load embedded video content, putting a video in a post will force the reader to click through to see it.

5. Courtesy of John Chow – Remind your readers in your posts that RSS Feed Updates that they receive by email aren’t REAL time, and to keep checking back to your blog for the fastest updates on your new content.

At the end of the day, you should be asking WHY you’re using feedburner anyway – what are you trying to achieve from it?

The other thing you need to ask if you’re niche marketing is, why are you sending people to your Feed Subcription when you could be pointing them to an Email subscription form where you can not only tell them about updates to your blog by a mass mail if you want – but you also have the flexibility to be able to mail them any time you want, about ANYTHING you want…

Anyhow, I hope this has provided something to think about