I spent about an hour this morning at another blog spot ranting about gas prices. Here is the site: http://www.squidoo.com/the-rising-cost-of-gasoline-and-high-school-economics. Squidoo is a site for people who would like to begin blogging. I was looking at it, as a place to create income. This was suggested at the first site I started using, the link to this site will be coming soon. Squidoo provides a really fun platform to start blogging. Lots of tools and motivators. I haven't done much creative writing, it has been mostly technical and training type papers. Here is were I write the technical stuff, the stuff at Squidoo is just for fun. Although Squidoo also has affiliate programs and pays you to have advertising ( of their choice ) at your blog. This site is free of charge.
Since then I have been exploring affiliate opportunities within this blogspot. One option is to be an Amazon Associate. An affiliate program promoting products and services through Amazon and their associate companies. To start off, I am a huge fan of PayPal and Amazon. I love the security of online purchases using PayPal. And I have come across some pretty good deals from Amazon's website. I really like the fact they give you more than one option (if available) for place of purchase, yet it still runs through the Amazon check-out, and they take PayPal. Win-win for me.
Ok, this is apparently all linked together. Which is cool, because it makes things pretty easy. Here is where I think people start to lose interest and give up. You have to read a lot of text from the website. Some is redundant, some is confusing, some seems to make no sense at all and very little of it relates to anything else you have ever done. And this is only the beginning, you still have to drive traffic to the site. This is the point I turn off the television, sit-up straight and start taking notes. Now this is starting to seem more like work.
Basically, you search through Amazon's millions of products and post links to those products on your blogspot. Of course, you want products or services that relate to your blog or to your readers. If someone reading your blog clicks on and purchases the product you receive an advertising fee. Fees can be up to 10% of your monthly sales. Whoo-hoo, now we are talking. Ads making money for you instead of vice-versa. Fees are paid to your Amazon account or direct deposited. If you choose direct deposit they will send you a 1099 if you make more than $600 per year. Wow, this is starting to sound like a real business. I posted three ads for Affiliate marketing. One is a book, one is software and the other a DVD. All available at the Amazon store. I choose them at random, just to see if I could get them on my blog. At first I thought it was no big deal, twenty minutes later I downloaded a widget, that does the work for you. So, read and maybe re-read the section you need. One ad had text only, one has text and desc. and one has a picture and description. I will be able to track the effectiveness of each one using their website. So, take a look around the whole page. You will see the ads i placed and ads placed on the site by AdSense. They also will pay for clicks at their links. Tomorrow more detail on Amazon Associates.
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