As most of you know, I’ve spent years working on various strategies for making money online with your blog. Why keep it all at an International level, let’s bring it to South Africa and learn how to make money online in South Africa.
Justin gave a presentation at a seminar yesterday, one which I regretfully didn’t attend, and in his presentation he presents several ways to make money online, or at least, gives you an idea where to go:
I’m not going to go into too much detail, because I’ll probably do another post about the seminar and in that post I’ll try break things down a little more for all of you :)
It was a good seminar – your name even cropped up once or twice!
Ok I lie – I think it crept up in all the afternoon sessions.
What I quite enjoyed it was that nobody left there with the unreasonable expectation that their blogging activities would make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Nick in particular shot down their expectations ;-)
You need a country of entrepreneurs and if people can exchange ideas and talk about ideas and opporotunities then I am all for it!
Ye mate, I hear that it was a really good seminar and was told that my name got some great airplay, bummed that I couldn’t attend!
The problem with making money online is that the obvious ways never work – My secrets to making money online are so far from what any conference or seminar ever talk about; it’s one of those things, when you have a secret recipe you aren’t going to share all of it, unfortunately that’s how it has to go I guess. I was talking to some people today about how I actually make money with my blog and they were quite amazed; I guess I’ll have to do a few posts about some more secrets ;)
Don’t get a big head or anything now Chris ;-)
Won’t happen bro! :)
Go on – gooi us a tip man Chris!
What sort of tip would you like mate?
If you know of any 50/1 outsiders that are likely to win at Turffontein this week, that would be a good start…
… otherwise maybe some thoughts on where publishers go wrong in terms of using Affiliate programs.
As mentioned in my other thread, I think it’s the niche topic as well as traffic targetting.
A thing that works really well is this:
With a niche such as “insurance”, filling out a form isn’t the biggest deal, getting a lead is a lot easier than many other options. Now, because it’s fairly quick to fill out a form, all you need to do is create a little incentive, such as a competition. For example, you could offer a cash prize of R2000 to anyone who fills in a form to receive an insurance quote, thus filling the gap between a person wondering once they’ve arrived at the form. An important thing here is naturally determining how much to offer and the legalities around it. Finally, you need to ensure that the form doesn’t look like a badly branded affiliate form, but rather position it on your website inside your branding and don’t let the user feel lost at all.
Give it a try, it works :)
hhhmm but that would then suggest that simply bashing up text links and banners is not going to work as an affiliate marketing strategy?
If I read the above correctly you’re effectively suggesting that you negotiate directly with the merchant, set up your own forms within your site (i.e. not re-directing to the merchants site) and then negotiating for the right to incentivise your lead / sales?
Not always Marc, there are certain niches that will work for that, but when it comes to affiliate marketing you always get higher conversions rates when you drive traffic to a landing page, I’ve tried and tested so many strategies and landing pages are the best. Besides, linking text links and banners to a landing page will result in that page ranking higher in Google, which then attracts organic traffic and therefore you can lower your costs in the advertising area :)
You don’t need to negotiate directly, a lot of campaigns offer an HTML embed, which is a form and if it doesn’t, you can use PHP to parse the variables from your own custom form to their PHP processor. However, dealing with a merchant directly will always get you a better deal, cutting out the middle man story. You will have to prove yourself to the merchant though, so go planned :)
Aaahh now that’s given me some food for thought. Thank you kindly.
It’s my pleasure, I got the brain ticking didn’t I – I can smell the smoke from here ;)
Howsit Chris. You got me quite interested. Please take a look at my blog and share some of your secrets with me! Please, please, please…
First thing is to not have an aim of making money, if you can get paste that and don’t crave to put adverts on your blog, then you’ll go far. Run the blog for at least 6 months with no adverts, write fresh content that’s carefullly thought out and try to establish a readerbase, when you get to that position, that’s when you should start exploring advertising :)
I would like to start my own blog.i write poems and articles.im also up to date with everything so can you help me create my blog.im a very creative writer.
Im a young nd open minded writer who is not afraid to raise my opinion.i’d be glad if you could help me create a blog.
Why is 24th June 2010 your last response?
@Vongani – I would suggest exploring WordPress as an option and then getting yourself a theme from somewhere like http://www.efrogthemes.com. Spend some time on WordPress.com reading about getting your own website and what’s entailed, it’s set out in an easy to understand manner..
@Natalie – What would you like to know?
It is hard but is getting there!