This article is guest posted by Mike Ndegwa.

When you seek advice from most Internet Marketers. They all have a common phrase: “Money is in the list”.  What this means is that you build a blog,  send traffic and capture visitors with an auto-responder and follow up with marketing emails to sell your products or other people’s products as an affiliate. This business model works but it limits your profits, read on to see how.

According to Seth Godin book   Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us he argues that leadership is the best marketing tactic for any individual, organization, school, church,  job seeker e.t.c.

By being a leader you automatically attract followers,  hence creating a tribe where you are a king.  For any group of people to trust you to lead them, they must see certain qualities in you.

One lie that has been told over the years is “you need to be an expert to be a leader”,  “you need to be of a certain age to be a leader”,  “you need to be of a certain academic background to be a leader” and the list goes on.

Here is the shocker: actually truth before your eyes:

1. President Obama is the Commander in Chief of US Forces or Marines and I doubt he had 8 years of military training and wen through the ranks.

As you can see: with leadership you can be placed in any rank irrespective of  your area of expertise or any set prequalifications.

Lets get way back on track..

There is a leader who new myspace was a successful social network but went on to create his own which has proven to be a success, commonly called Facebook.

Another leader new there was Yahoo Search and MSN search (Bing) but wen on to put a local server in a garage or campus dormitory today is popularly known as Google.

Hope now you see. The Internet  market is not saturated,  it’s  just lacking leaders.  If you don’t take your leadership positions the spammers and time wasters are.Tribes are eagerly waiting for  you to lead them.

While you are a leader,  you need tools, Business model and Monetization strategy. These are the secrets of Supreme Marketers.

Tools

To build a tribe or online community you need tools.

• A domain name
• A community builder script

Online Business Model

There are various Internet  business models that you can adopt:

1. Blogging – Carl Ocab is a leader in the blogging community, he has identified a niche and exercises his leadership on the same. For you to start a blog you need a blogging script like wordpress. which is available for auto install for most web hosting companies that support Fantastico or Simple Scripts.
2. Video Sharing Sites – Most people only know of  youtube as the only free video sharing site. but there are a 1000 others out there. you can get a Youtube clone script to start your own community targeted to region or any other demographics.  Small Is the New Big:  focus on what the consumer wants,  get local content for your college graduates,  for recently wedded and have them share their videos on the world. focus on small communities and have the rest of the world wanting to join you.
3. Membership Site – Again you can create your own membership site using free scripts like wordpress and make your posts private such that only logged in members can view your posts.
4. Forums – With a number of scripts to choose from you can create your small forum and invite users to start contributing. At start you might need to be active by creating over 100 topics that will provoke response and watch your community grow.
5. Dating Website – There are many singles out there imagine making a site  like singlesinyourcity.com and do an element of offline marketing where you orgarnize events and activities for your online communities to participate in.
6. Auction website – Again there is so much business in the local market. Don’t get angry at ebay if they have not started an auction targeting your country. You can take this as an opportunity and start one for your local community or region.
7. Social Bookmarking Site – With the increase of open source almost in every internet business category, today you can have your own bookmarking site in minutes. Every Marketer is looking for “do follow” back-links.  Standard.co.ke is such a site made with pligg – I saw it on their footer. Your community will be excited with such a site because it’s easy to make it on the front-page of your Bookmarking site easily.

The hundreds of online opportunities out there, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel,  just find a way of  doing it differently by filling the gap. You don’t have to know html or complex programming languages. All you need to understand is the online business method and then you can outsource from experts with the least possible expense.

Monetization Strategies:

There numerous monetization strategies and each work to give results depending on various demographics:

1. Google Adsense - It’s the most popular monetization strategy out there.  However, it can minimal earnings depending on the value of your community.  For example,  if you search the word “credit cards” on google.co.uk and the same keyphrase on google.sc .sc stands for Seychelles – Tiny islands in the Indian Ocean.  You’ll see that under Google Uk there lots of sponsored links – meaning there are lots of advertisers bidding for the keyphrase hence they pay more whereas on Google Sc there is only one sponsored  link meaning there is only one advertiser targeting that country with the key phrase “credit cards”. What does this mean to an internet Marketer or infopreneur?  If you own an adsense monetizing website,  you would earn more per click from UK traffic as Opposed to a click  from a visitor in Seychelles. It’s up to you to identify the value of your target market and see if Adsense is the best monetization method. Here are some illustrative screen shots. Google Uk and  Google Sc.
2. Banner Placement – Once you community website proofs to vave some good ranking on Alexa, then selling banner placements cannot be a problem. Once your advertisers start to get results they will become repeat customers and eventually their competitors will want to pay more so as to be considered for a premium placement and of course these competition wars translate to more money for you and more improvement on your community.
3. Affiliate/ CPA Marketing -  You can identify revenue sharing websites that pay you per sale or per action. If you have a technology forum then placing tech products from amazon or antivurus and antispyware offers would be relevant to your community and definitely will earn you money. This can be very lucrative business model especially if you know how to do it right e.g. by offering bonuses and extensive product reviews. You can combine other strategies to this monetization model.
4. Premium Membership or Content – Once your community is able to interact freely there are certain sections that you can limit to paid members or subscribers. This will earn you a monthly passive income that you can use a budget to keep on improving your community and your premium offerings.
5. Combination of the Above Strategies- It’s not cast with stone that you should stick to a single of the above strategies you can combine two or more. Keep on experimenting until you get the right one. Once you set up a community you can as well build another and another.

If you like this post feel free to share and bookmark – You can enjoy more by joining the Supreme Marketers Circle. To your Success Mike Ndegwa

© Make Money Online

This is a guest post by Shaun Connell.

Very few bloggers have reached their income goals. Unfortunately, most seem to think that the way to achieve their income goals is by just crushing as much traffic as they can through their blog, somehow expecting the traffic to convert into more traffic, popularity and links until the money starts to flow.

But that’s not usually the case. In this post we’ll cover the other side of increasing your revenue: focusing on making your blog’s monetization more efficient. Doing this will allow you to up your income without having to actually increase your traffic.

Traffic is Often Overrated

I have several websites that pull anywhere from a few hundred visitors per day to a few thousand. Oddly enough to some, my most trafficked blog isn’t my biggest income blog.

I can’t stress this enough: Lot’s of traffic does not equal lots of money.

Traffic is just a fuel. It doesn’t matter how much or what kind of fuel you put into your riding lawnmower, it will never beat a racecar. When you’re trying to go as fast as you can, you need to focus on your engine.

Of course, the engine of making money online is how you actually monetize your website. Increasing the efficiency of your “engine” will let you go much faster than just tinkering with the fuel. If you efficiently monetize your website, you can literally double your income without seeing a change in traffic at all.

If you’ve read any of my articles before, you know I’m a huge fan of systematic business. An online business is a business just the same. Every internet business needs a business plan, as I explained in The 1-2-3 Plan: How to Make Money With SEO.

But enough theory. Let’s look at actual ways to you can increase you monetization’s efficiency without needing to increase traffic.

How to Convert Traffic Better

Re-Research Your Niche. Research your niche to find out which keywords are the highest paying. No guess work. If you have to, get a pen and paper out and use Google’s keyword tool. Now reorganize your post titles and keywords to make sure you’re targeting the highest paying keywords. I’ve seen this increase my AdSense earnings nearly 50%

Place Advertisements Better. Where you place your ads are critical to their success. For AdSense, the ads most likely to be clicked should be at the top of the page. Don’t forget about Google’s link units. These are surprisingly good at nudging your CTR up a few notches, and are grossly underused by bloggers in general.

Diversify Your Income. Most blogs are undermonetized. Use AdSense, Chitika, Infolinks, private ad sales and affiliate programs can all be used on the same blog — without making it look spammy. The combined income from all of these should be a full time income in most niches after just a few thousand impressions. It certainly is in all of my niches. I doubled my income in 36 hours after adding Infolinks and Chitika. They work together perfectly.

Check Out Kontera or Infolinks. Kontera and Infolinks ad “contextual” advertisements posed as links throughout your content. My EPM with Infolinks is around $3, which means it’s rivaling my adsense income. It’s a professional yet high-earning way to monetize your content.

Create a Newsletter Funnel. Newsletters aren’t just for gurus. Every blog should have one. Create a valuable and profitable newsletter by sending a sales pitch, then a tip, then a sales pitch, then a tip, and so on. By “sandwhiching” your pitches and tips, you can increase your trust, and the likelyhood that your emails actually get read. This can earn you an income from a visitor who might never return to your site.

Conclusion and Last Words

The whole point of making money online is monetization. Get your monetization right, and you can shorten the time it’s taking to quit your job and make money online full-time.

Experiment all you want, but always remember: the point of your content is making money. When your content starts to function independently of earning an income, you’re wasting traffic, and are that much further from achieving your goals. Good luck!

Shaun Connell is a full-time blogger and internet marketer. He runs he aptly named blog “Make Money Online“, and spends his time testing new and off-the-wall ways to make money with his dozen or so websites and blogs.

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Lyndsay from Latest Fashion Trends from a Fashion Girl- Lyndsay Cabildo.

Tip #1-  Traffic

When you have enough traffic, you have audience that will be your potential customers when you start making money from your blog.  It is the first key.

Tip #2-  Blog Content

Your blog is your world.  Your blog is the biggest component of your money maker machine online, so you would like to write good contents for your blog as that will make readers stay longer reading and browsing more pages in your blog.

Tip #3- Related Affiliate Partners

Signing up with the Affiliates related to your sites get more potential buyers as they are already interested reading your blog content, they are more likely to browse on the related items or program affiliate you are with, gaining you possible commission when they do buy the product or service.

Tip #4- Using Product Links

As you write about the specific product, it is better to use a specific image from the Affiliate Partner and link it directly to the product page(if possible).  It increases more possible sales that way, minimizing their time to browse for the specific product.(e.g Your Fave Shoe image- Link it to the exact location)

Tip #5- Related Banners

Pick cautiously the banners that you would use on your page, as they will be present in every page the reader will browse on your blog.  Choose Very Related and high commission rate affiliates because they occupy more space on your blog.  Do not waste the opportunity, yet be smart, and anticipate possible reader reactions to your ads.

© Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Laura Abro.

I was shocked to find that in the nearly two years that Carl Ocab dot com has been online, not one single post has been written about ecommerce! Ecommerce is overlooked by most people because they feel that it’s too hard and/or too expensive, but there are a lot of good reasons to consider it.

First of all there’s the money. Obviously there are no guarantees, but most of the successful ecommerce owners I’ve met make six and seven figure incomes.

Second, there’s demand. Get your product in front of someone who wants to buy it, and they will. No 10-page salesletter required.

Third, ecommerce is surprisingly recession-resistant. With gas prices up and a very shaky economy, people are turning to online shopping to save money. Overall demand is down for sure, but online commerce is doing very well compared to offline stores.

Fourth, there are some markets you simply can’t enter unless you sell a physical product. When someone want to buy a titanium wedding ring, you can’t fill their need without selling rings. You might possibly be able to sell them an ebook on wedding planning – but they’ll still need that ring.

I know some people are probably thinking, “But there are so many problems, too!” and I will be the first to tell you that running an ecommerce site is not easy. You have to deal with suppliers,  talk to customers, and worry about sales tax. And it can be expensive, too. Most designers charge $3000+ for an ecommerce store design – and that doesn’t include plugins, which can cost you several thousand more. Then there’s the problem of products: you need to buy them, store them, and ship them. Not to mention stores like Amazon – they sell everything you do plus more, and at prices you can’t possibly match.

But these problems can also become advantages. Have you ever heard the term “barriers to entry“? All the problems I listed are barriers that prevent people from entering ecommerce. Sure, it keeps you out – but it keeps everyone else out too. If you can overcome the barriers, you’re looking at less competition than you would find in affiliate marketing or info products. Why? Barriers to entry are higher for ecommerce than for other online businesses.

But are the barriers as high as they look? Not really.

Now I’ve already told you that running an ecommerce store isn’t easy, but it’s not as hard as you think, either.

Don’t want to stock products? You don’t have to, thanks to the magic of fulfillment and dropshipping. The two options are similar: in both cases, someone else will be storing and shipping the products for you. With fulfillment, you’re buying the products and hiring someone to store and ship for you. There are many companies that do fulfillment, including Amazon.com. Dropshipping is even more convenient. In this case, you’re dealing directly with the manufacturer, and you don’t pay them for any products until after you’ve already sold them. This is great for starting on a small budget, but not all manufacturers are willing to dropship. The best way to find dropshippers is to use a reputable directory like World Wide Brands.

Don’t like to talk to customers? Most of my customers have never contacted me directly, and the ones that did have always been very nice, friendly people.

Sales tax? It’s a pain, but you need to charge it in one state at most, so you won’t need to worry about it for the majority of your orders.

Think an ecommerce cart is too expensive? There are several free carts like osCommerce and ZenCart, and paid options like Yahoo Merchant Solutions start as low as $40/month.

Worried about design and plugin costs? Yes, a designer will cost you a lot of money – so look into premade templates. They usually cost about $50-$150. Plugins are another major expense, but you don’t need to buy them all when you’re starting out. If you’re on a budget, get an SEO plugin and buy the rest from your profits after you’ve started making money.

What about Amazon or Ebay? There’s too much price competition! This is a major myth about ecommerce. Contrary to popular belief, most Internet shoppers are not hard-core bargain hunters. They’re usually more concerned about reliability, service, and convenience than they are about price.

Don’t live in the US? Even that’s not a problem! It does make some things more difficult, but I have seen people in South America, Europe, and even Asia running ecommerce stores in the US. Heck, I started my first ecommerce venture while I was still living in Pakistan!

Ecommerce is definitely not for everyone, but neither is affiliate marketing, Adsense, info products, or any other monetization strategy. There is no perfect way to make money online – but there is a perfect way for you to make money online. Ecommerce could be it.

Laura Abro is a ecommerce store owner and the author of Infinite Backlinks, a free link-building guide. She is also one of the three founders of Acorn Pad, offering online business training courses.

© Make Money Online

Imagine this…

What if you could, hire a world-class designer who would create an amazing WordPress theme that makes almost certain you have the best combination of a Google friendly site, optimized advertising income, and chic design in your blog?

All these for less than $100?

Only a dream? Before probably, but something kicks off today…

Ultimate Blogging Theme

When I first started my blog, I was prowling the web like you – searching for the “perfect” WordPres theme that would combine…

• A Google friendly design
• Optimal advertising placements
• Easy navigation
• And an eye-grabbing look

After tons of hours spent, it struck me – that perfect WordPress theme was non-existent. So what I did was I crafted my own blog theme.

I flip open my laptop and started firing Photoshop. My PHP knowledge was a bit crude though so I outsourced the coding…

That was the birth of Ultimate Blogging Theme.

The Process

I’ve been asked tons of times “Carl, can I download your theme?” I’ve refused them all due to the fact that I’ve paid for the coding myself and I don’t want this theme to be used by anyone.

But those guys kept me thinking, what could be my loss if I release my theme for public? What could be my gains? Turns out, those repeated questions convinced me.

Basically, UBT or Ultimate Blogging Theme is the CarlOcab.com WordPress theme. Improvised and modeled for every blogger (It took me quite sometime to connect the dots though so that should excuse me for the lack of posts :-P)

I won’t give it all out here…

Click here now to check out the Ultimate Blogging Theme

Limited Discounts!

Use the coupon code CARLOCAB on your purchase and you’ll instantly get $20 off!

Use it now because there’s only 7 available! Please note that the code only works on the unlimited blogs package.

Get it before it runs out…

Click here now to check out the Ultimate Blogging Theme

© Make Money Online With A 13-Year Old

© Make Money Online

This post is guest posted by  Grandstart – Hardcore Strategies to Make Money Online.

Forget about blending your ads, disregard the heat map, toss away Joel Comm’s book. Don’t bother reading those tips dished out by make money online bloggers who have never even seen a Google checque.

If you want to make money with AdSense, read closely.

Simple sites make more money with AdSense

How do these sites look? Scroll below.

These sites are pretty clear-cut. There are no clutters and they don’t confuse the visitors. They don’t offer 97 or so options.

I did post about this in “Tighten your page and get 20-30% AdSense CTR” four months back. After that article, I redesigned my sites – further stretching their simplicity. Well, the result was an even better CTR.

It was not without a model. I followed closely the sites of the real AdSense gurus. And one of them is Michael Green. Michael, an internet marketer par excellence, is also a Conservative Member of the Parliament (UK).

Michael’s site is earning six figures monthly. Well, yes the traffic is already there. But the point is you have to convert that traffic into clicks.

Michael made his site incredibly simple that his CTR went to an amazing 30-40%.

Look at his site:

Here’s another example of a website that rakes in tons of AdSense money:

Now you know what a simple site looks. Yes, it’s on the edge of being ugly!

But do YOU care if it brings in 5 to 10 times more than your current earnings?

Ha!Ha! I feel your pain if you do a complete overhaul of your beautiful site.

If you still doubt that simple sites make more AdSense money than your 3 columned blog, why not try typing www.google.com? The site is the mother of all the simple sites. It collected tons of clicks in 2006.

Look at the Google site again. Ridiculously simple. While its competitors were busy converting their sites into a doorway of all information, Google concentrated on being simple. A plain logo and no banners. Content on the left and money ads on the right. Hey! there are even ads on the left.

The Google visitor is left with only a few choices. It’s either the content on the left or the persuasive ad on the right. The visitor is always in a hurry and decides quickly which makes Google’s CTR shoot thru the roof.

Follow Google’s example. Why have we not done this before? Google is showing us how it makes tons of money.

Should I say more of the elements of a simple site? Like above the fold ads and white background? Watch out for my succeeding posts at www.grandstart.com

© Make Money Online

I know you hate to see these:

Why do browsers still call this as a 404 page?! Only geeks know what 404 page!

When you visit a site, and you have typed in the wrong folder of a domain, on most occasions 404 pages will show up. If that website haven’t customized it yet, the browser will automatically generate a 404 page like above.

Although it’s really handy to see some warnings like these, it doesn’t make you any money at all! All you have is a lost/unknown visitor that most likely won’t come back.

A lot of sites are talking about how to monetize your traffic, they mumble about ad placement, blah blah blah, but I’m pretty sure some forgot about the error pages! On my everyday surfing activity, I always land to 1 or 2 404 page everyday, that sadly has nothing in it.

Here’s a useful plugin that notifies you through email whenever a person visits a 404 page. Try it for yourself and you’ll see the potential, on the other hand you can just check your awstats in your cpanel and check how many people came by on your 404 page.

How Do You Set It Up?

If you’re on WordPress, professionally designed themes include a 404.php file. Just log-in in your admin panel, add some custom text in the 404 page template and you’re done.

If the theme you are currently on doesn’t have a 404.php file. You can create one and upload it where your current theme is located.

Add these common codes and save it as 404.php:

<?php header(“HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found”); ?>
<?php get_header(); ?>

<div class=”post”>
Custom text goes here
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

For some websites, you can add this one liner code to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.example.com/404.html

If you like you can also add 401 (which will show up if a person visits an authorized page) and 403 (if a person visits a forbidden page) Just change the domain to where you want the visitor to be redirected if they have typed the wrong extension.

Monetization Ideas

After you have set up the error page, let’s now edit the files where your visitor will go. Here are some ideas to start off:

Affiliate Links

The easiest perhaps is this, just add the banners, links, etc… of the product you’re promoting and you’re all done.

Special Offer

If you have a product that you are promoting right now, you can sell it to them in a much lower price and make them think that it’s a big steal. You can also sell PLR (Private Label Prodcuts) products in alternative if you haven’t created your own product yet.

Capture Them!

As what I said before, capturing emails really matter. It’s a big benefit. You can read the 3 part series here:

Part 1: Why Capturing emails matter
Part 2: Give It Away And Get Rich
Part 3: The Power Of Words And Colors

CPC Ads

If you’re just really lazy to sign-up for an affiliate program, then this might be the last option for you, because I bet you have an AdSense account. Just plaster the page with ads! Though, I do not recommend doing this, you’ll get lower results.

Just for some inspiration, have a look at my own 404 page ;)

© Make Money Online

And oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that I also sold feed advertisements. All this happened in just a simple tweak that took me only an hour to do. C’mon and find out how:

1. When You Have It, Flaunt It

I can say that this is the most important thing that I’ve done in my blog’s life (Well, up to now) Just when I made that “Big Sale” banner on the header, the next day I surprisingly received 1 banner advertiser and 2 review offers.

I also did it to my Text Link Ad description that sold out the ten text links that I have.

How cool is that?

2. Flaunt And Flaunt More!

And no, don’t think this as a bad idea. Well maybe some might think that you’re a too much show off, but heck, their just the “jealous” ones that don’t generate you ANY income at all!

How about if you take a look at my advertise page and look what I have to flaunt”

1. carlocab.com is in the first page of Google in the keyword “make money online”
2. carlocab.com has a pagerank of 4
3. carlocab.com averages 300+ feed readers daily.
4. carlocab.com is the top 2,000+ blog among 80 million according to technorati.com
5. carlocab.com receives laser targeted traffic from search engines daily.
6. carlocab.com is always up to date.
7. a lot of advertisers enjoyed the traffic boost when they advertised on carlocab.com

1. Rankings – That took their eye and kept them reading, so show off your best at first.

2. Pagerank – If you got the 1, 2, 3’s and most importantly 0 don’t hesitate to be quite and not talk about it, telling the predicted pagerank will most likely ruin it more.

3. Feed readers – Pretty good for sponsored reviews. I’d suggest not telling this if you’re still in the 2 figs.

4. Technorati – Probably a good show off on how popular your blog is. But then again, technorati rankings can easily be gamed.

5. What kind of traffic – I’m on first page of Google for the keyword “make money online”, so I’m pretty sure that my traffic is laser targeted.

6. Is your blog still alive and updated – Of course, no one wants to advertise on a dead blog.

7. The finishing touch – Of course, include testimonials.

You can add anything you want here that you think is worth flaunting and would not ruin the advertisers point of view on your blog. Just put your feet on the advertisers shoes.

3. Clear Out Some Ads First

People who advertise on blogs mostly just wanna join the bandwagon. If your ads are almost full and you offer prices that they can afford, chances are they’ll advertise without even giving a thorough check on your blog’s statistics, etc.

4. Assign Limited Ads

This tip comes with that one on the top. It’s easier to sell something when it’s limited (So that’s why there are limited edition ipods!) By giving limits on how many the product can be, you give value to them.

After the limited ads are all sold out, offer another “limited” ads on some part of your blog.

5. Give Discounts

Discounts can be by means of multi-month and or, discounts on some special deals.

Multi-month discounts are discounts that you can give if someone orders advertising for more than one month, let’s just say an ad on your blog costs $50 and you give the incentive to sell it $80 for 2 months. Though it may depend if your blog is strongly growing and/or you want to be secure that all your advertisements will be sold.

Special discounts are useful if you want to clear out your all your advertising spots. It’s good to do this on holidays, maybe Christmas. I call this a “gimmick”

6. Be kind, and give private bonuses

I want my customers happy, if an advertiser didn’t reach what they expected in your blog, it would be nice if you give them private bonuses, meaning you give something from your heart and “help” the advertiser reach what they expected to get from your blog.

I know this wouldn’t attract other advertisers but there’s still a chance that that person will try your advertisement again and maybe give something in return of your kindness. Just don’t expect big things.

Final Thoughts

These tips are based on my experience on what I did the last month, I currently sold 10 text link in text link ads, 1 feed advertiser, 3 private banner deals and currently 8 sponsored reviews for this month.

The change I did only took me an hour and surprisingly gave my blog another milestone in earnings. You can’t just live on Adsense alone, I believe in multiple streams of income.

Thanks frankko and wlyu2001 for the pics

© Make Money Online

Blogging can be an excellent source of income, provided you know how to do it right and which streams of income to use. These days, you no longer need to be limited to just one stream – AdSense. Everyone wants to learn more about affiliate marketing. Why Not earn while you learn?. Here are four techniques on how to increase your earnings from multiple streams of blogging income:

Mix and match ad programs.

There are a variety of advertising programs you can choose from, including Adsense, TLA or Text Link Ads and Adbrite. Not all ad programs will work with your blog, so find out which ones are a perfect fit. Provided you have the right audience, choose the correct link advertisers and write quality content, you can use ad programs to increase your blogging income from multiple streams.

Promote and sell your own products and services.

If you have products or services to sell, why not do it from your blog? You could earn a nice, regular income by simply having a service page as a supplement to your main blog page where your readers can view your products and do business with you. This is a great way to increase your blogging income because all the earnings go to you directly. However, it’s important that your products and/or services complement your blog’s theme or your selling efforts would go down the drain.

Get sponsored.

If your blog contains excellent information and quality articles on a subject that companies can benefit from, you can increase your blogging income through direct sponsorship. Say for example your blog is about digital photography. If you have all the right images, content and traffic, a digital camera manufacturer such as Nikon, Ricoh or Canon might pay you for placing their ads on your site or even joining their ad campaign.

Direct sponsorship can even occur on blog posts, where sponsor companies pay bloggers to write articles on topics related to the companies’ products and services. If you do this regularly, you can earn an excellent income.

Install paid job boards.

Think Darren Rowse’s Job boards and other popular blogs with job boards such as Lifehacker and TechCrunch. But the key to earning a decent income from this method is to build your blog’s traffic first.

Remember, no monetization effort will be successful if your blog does not have enough content and does not receive a significant amount of traffic yet. So, work on your blog posts first and market your blog before thinking of bigger things.

About the Author:

Melo Villareal is a Filipino Backpacker, PhotoJournalist, Netrepreneur and a Blogger. He authors two blogs: Manila Freelancer offers work at home tips, affiliate marketing and how to earn money online while Philippines Travel Blog offers travel tips on exploring the Philippines 7,107 islands.

© Make Money Online

Writing a niche blog can be tricky. It means designing a blog around a specific topic that only a certain group of people will appreciate and generating a following among this group. However, you can create a successful niche blog using a few tried and tested ways. Here are 3 steps you can use:

1. Know what you want and write about it.
A strong passion for a certain topic is a requirement if you want to create a successful niche blog. And don’t just stop with what you already know. Strive to become an expert about your passion – read more and learn more. That way, you will be able to create a niche blog that offers quality, reliable content and build a reputation online as the person to be trusted about your niche topic.

2. Generate traffic.
There are several ways you can generate traffic to your niche blog. Some of these methods include:

- Providing quality content. People like useful, smart and reliable articles because they want information they can use.

- Building relationships. The internet is a vast social place and the more relationships you build, the more people you will attract. Work with other websites to build links to your blog or increase awareness through social media sites.

3. Monetize your blog.
If you’re good at it, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make money with your niche blog. Sell advertisement space on your site or become an associate with large internet companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. Plenty of internet companies will appreciate the traffic (and business) you will bring to them and will pay you for it.

If you want to do it yourself, turn your niche blog into a successful company and sell directly from it. If you have a niche, the easier it is to target people to sell to. Your captured market will just be waiting for you.

About the Author

Melo Villareal is a Filipino Backpacker, PhotoJournalist, Netrepreneur and a Blogger. He authors two blogs: Manila Freelancer offers work at home tips and how to earn money online while Philippines Travel Blog offers travel tips on exploring the Philippines 7,107 islands.

© Make Money Online