Successful Tips From The Honest Business Report
My blog is located at http://www.TheHonestBusinessman.com.
When I first thought about submitting this post, I was a little intimidated about what to share because there’s so many aspects to blogging. A lot depends upon your goals for having a blog. Are you blogging to:
- Make money or
- Share your ideas or
- Just to rant and rave about some topic or
- All the above or
- Maybe something else?
My goals for The Honest Business Report was to help home-based business seekers find legitimate products and services by reviewing, testing and explaining what I found. It goes without saying (eventhough I’m going to say it here again 
) that there are a lot of scammer and spammers on the internet who’s only purpose is to steal your hard-earned money by offering things that do not work.
So I made myself a self-appointed guardian of the ‘net to try to help people avoid wasting money on products, services and businesses that aren’t legitimate. For the most part I have done pretty good in reaching this goal. This can be verified by some of the comments I have received on my blog and in email from my readers.
One of my secondary goals was to make some money through the blog, too. I believed if I gave good, honest information about the bad stuff, hopefully I would be rewarded by showing people the good stuff. With that being said, let’s talk about monetization or making money with your blog.
Monetization -
Basically I have three monetization models or avenues. They are Adsense, Affiliate Products and Pay-Per-Post. I will try to briefly explain all three.
- Adsense – This is a monetization method owned by Google that allows a person to get paid a percentage for clicks that people make on their Adsense ads. Typicaly the ads advertise products or services that are related to the information that’s on the web page. For example, if your web page is talking about blogging, then the Adsense ads most likely will advertise some blogging-related product or service. This has not been a lucrative avenue for me but it does give me some money every few months.
- Affiliate Products – This has been a good source of income because as I review products and services, I write about my experiences with the product or service. I write about the good, the bad and the ugly. If I think the product is good, then I tell my readers and I include an affiliate link on my posts. Because I have developed and earned a level of trust with my readers, people typically buy products I recommend (if they have the money.)
- Pay Per Post – I just in the last 6 months learned about this monetization model and so far it has been good. Basically pay-per-post is a method to get paid for posting on your blog. There are a number of companies out there who will gladly pay $10,$20, $50 or even a $100 or more for writing a post relating to the guidelines of their company. For example, one company has advertisers hire them to have posts written about their products or something closely related to their product. Usually they only require that a link to their website be somewhere in the post. And that’s it.
Necessary Plugins -
There are some plugins I use on all my blogs that I believe are completely necessary for bloggers to use. The first one high on my list is Akismet. You can download it for free from WordPress.org.
This is a plugin that stops (or at least slows down) spam comments on your blog. You would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) how many spammers there are out there spending countless hours generating sexually-explicit and downright vulgar comments and trying to post them on unsuspecting blogs. If your blog doesn’t have this “door” closed, you are in for a big surprise!
I know I truly was.
Here is the “1-2″ punch to keep the spammers out.
- Go inside your Dashboard for your blog and click on Settings. Then go to the Discussion setting and you will find a check box next to this statement: “An administrator must always approve the comment.” Make sure you check this box. This allows you to read a comment BEFORE it is posted live on your blog. This will save you some embarrassment later.
- Install and activate the Akismet plugin. One this is activated it will catch suspected spam comments that are trying to be posted on your site.
So far Akismet has caught 953 spam comments since I have been using the plugin. I just scan through the comments on a weekly basis and make sure they are spam, then I delete them. It’s important that you visually scan your comments because every once in a while Akismet may mark a legitimate comment as spam. You don’t want to delete legitimate comments because these comments show positive activity on your blog.
Another plugin I am highly impressed with is StatPress. Statpress gives you excellent statistics and insight into the activity on your blog such as:
- Last Hits – this shows the date, time, IP address and the page the visitor went to on your blog.
- Last Search Terms – this shows the keyword the person used to find your site AND what search engine they used to find you.
- And there other statistics, too, but the two above are the main ones I use to optimize my blog.
How To Get Visitors To Your Blog -
Last, but not least I want to talk about how to get visitors coming back to your blog. I believe every website owner needs to have a means to capture the contact information of his visitors. This is whether you have a static website or a blog. I have an email capture box on all my most-visited pages and I offer some highly valuabe information to those who decide to sign up.
Whenever I write a new post that I believe would be of particular interest to my readers, I send them an email announcing this new post. This helps produce readership loyalty and it helps my bottom line, too. I have repeat customers buy from me time and time again simply because I have developed a trustful relationship with them through email marketing and my blog. This couldn’t happen unless I had a means to collect their contact information.
I hope these tips help you because these few areas have helped make my blog a growing success.
Bryan Jones
The Honest Business Report
Hi Byran, A wonderful post, I’m sure lots of others out there will be reading this and leaving their thoughts. Thanks for the valuable tips.
nice post, even so I missed a few links.
I agree with you, adsense is not a big revenue stream. It can be, as I know of some people who earn several hundred Dollar with it. But it is not easy, rather hard work.
On the other hand, adsense can be a great extra income. It even does not have to be in the way and can be placed on the same page on which a product recommendation with an affiliate link is on.
Yes, your post must be good in the first place and if people don’t want to have the product, they do not click your affiliate link one way or the other, but they might click an adsense ad instead before they leave your site.
Pay per Post sounds interesting and I would like to try it, but you have left no link…
August “Entrepreneur Ideas“
Sorry guys for not leaving a link for Pay Per Post opportunities.
Click Here and use this excellent resource. This is what I have used to make money doing Pay Per Post activities.
This is the very odd thing about this new blog of mine. I am doing quite well with adsense (surprisingly!), but I’m doing lousy with comments. I am continually getting people signing up to the RSS feed, but still – no comments.
I don’t even have the adsense ads placed where they strategically should be.
I haven’t yet added a sign up /opt-in form as I’ve just been too busy with some of my niche markets to write an auto responder series. I do plan to get to that. I just wanted to respond to this post because of the adsense comment.
Great post Bryan,
I wish i could still use Adsense but I cant
as Google banned me wrongfully and accused
me back in 2005 of clicking my own links.
(Idiots).
I love the part you spoke of called Pay per Post.
A few links pointing to your sources would be
cool.
Thanks again for the info. Greatly appreciated
Lyndon,
Click Here and use this excellent resource. This is what I have used to make money doing Pay Per Post activities.
Very useful post, consider it Stumbled. First time I heard of pay-per-post, one for the future.
BB
One more thing, Bryan – sorry- I just checked out
Statpress and there are several forks to this plugin:
statpress-reloaded
statpress-seolution
Any suggestions as to which one would actually be the better plugin to use?
Do you think it is better to stick with the basic or perhaps the seo version may be the better one to use?
Any comments on this would be most appreciated.
Great post! I did have a few questions regarding pay per post:
When you mentioned the pay per post method to monetize you blog, were you referring to payperpost.com? Are there other companies that offer a pay per post program? When I did a Google search on pay per post the first listing that came up was for pay per post scam. Are there legit pay per post companies out there and ones that scam bloggers for links?
Could you please provide a list of legit companies (if you can differentiate between the two)? Or at least let us know which one(s) you use.
Thanks,
Marcus
Marcus,
Look at my response above to the others that asked the same question. This resource gave me all the legit companies that offer pay per post services.
Here’s the link again => Get Paid to Blog
Hope this helps! It has helped me.
Bryan
Also, click my name above and it will take you to another resource where I am making significant residual income every month by following a proven system.
Or you can just click here => By Invitation Only Classes.
I love the Internet!
Bryan
Great post and info. I especially liked the Pay Per Post.
Thanks as always,
Jon
Hi ,
Thanks much
useful post , Grate Methods
Actually adsense is the best converting monetize program..but so much to learn to have outstandings income..not easy to have site visitor to click on ads..because each ads will promote something where we have to paid for it..no one promote FREE products in adsense..
the pay per post is something i said easy money..but your writing skill must be good enough to have some appraisal for the thing you write..
but anyway..its a nice articles
ebay automated CD/DVD selling
My wife was just scammed a so called work at home program. I wish we would have found you blog first