Archive for July 26th, 2004
2004.07.26
Referal Programs
A while back there was a discussion on the Blosxom List on referal programs and how to make some money -or at least defray the costs- from your blog. I put this article together from my own cursory investigations and from one initial recommendation (thanks Bill!). Invariably this article will grow as other people make their own recommendations.
There are many programs out there for making money off your blog. If you are interested in mostly paying for the hosting and domain name fees these can be quite successful for some people. If you are interested in making tons of cash you might have better luck soliciting sponsors.
If you’re interested in selling books and more, you can sign up for an Associates ID. The process is pretty simple. Once approved to the program you can start creating links to various items in the Amazon Stores. If someone clicks on the item and then purchases it, your account will get a certain small, but helpful, proceed from the sale.
Adsense requires you to put some code on your site once you’ve been approved to the system. The code creates adstrips which can be in many different forms and you can customize the color schemes. It works by click throughs, so you don’t get a penny unless someone clicks on the banner ads. Income is small unless you have large amounts of traffic, but can still be useful when every cent counts.
(recommended by Bill Ward). It appears to work very similarly to Amazon’s program, except that it only works with books. The great thing is you would be supporting independent book sellers.
Your Webhost
It’s likely that whoever your host provider is has some sort of referal program. Check their website or contact them to check. Usually it just involves a banner and some code on your site. Contact your ISP’s sales department and check!
Donation Systems
There are many donation systems around such as Paypal and the Amazon Honor System offer systems that allow others to leave donations for your site. This relies on the kindness of strangers which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
An anonymous reader in the comments also mentions Blogads, a service similar to Google’s AdSense but with ads more targetted towards the content and topic of your blog. It appears that with your membership advertisers can choose your blog to advertise upon, too. I assume you get final approval.
Another service like Google’s AdSense. One of the interesting things about this service is that you can approve or reject certain ads from displaying on your site, and (it appears) you can choose which ads appear. Not bad if you want to customize what products your visitors see.
An interesting service that matches advertisers to bloggers. Advertisers then ask the blogger to comment on their product or service. Supposedly the blogger chooses to accept or reject the proposal and is not obligated to speak positively about the product. It’s an interesting idea. More information can be found here.
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