“What else can be done on my website or blog to make income besides selling my amazing services?” I get asked this all the time. All the time. Do you wonder how and why so many people are hip to the blogosphere, pumping out blog after blog? Towards what end? There are many ways to monetize your blog so that you are “making money in your sleep” as they say…, which honestly, sounds like a whole lot better than getting up and down 3 times to let the cat on and out, which is what I did last night. Grr….

Here’s the thing though, and this is what all those affiliate marketing guru’s neglect to tell you: it doesn’t just happen overnight. Monetizing a blog takes time, and a faithful following, as you can have the best possible info/products/services EVER posted on your blog, but if you don’t have traffic to your site you ain’t gonna sell the goods; I’m sorry to say.

So before you just slap up a website with the sole purpose of selling “stuff” off of it, remember this: it’s imperative to build traffic first to that site and hold ‘em, and this takes time. See this blog:

So lets assume you’ve done this already.

• Build traffic to site. ✔

Now lets get down to ways to one of the best ways to monetize your website:

Affiliate Marketing: an excellent way to market other companies’ products or services and make money while you’re at it. You place a link or a company icon with a link to their service on your site, and every time someone clicks into it and purchases that product through that link you get a piece of the action. It’s that simple. 3 things you need to look out for, however:

• make sure whatever company(ies) you have decided to partner with is within your target market niche- you don’t want to be selling tires on your pest control website. It makes no sense and no one will purchase tires from you, the bug guy. What would make sense is if you were selling, say, a special mouse trap, or a green ant spray for small jobs, or a special fly bait .
• make sure you can stand behind the product or service. I don’t believe in being an affiliate for any product or service I don’t personally use myself or at the very least know others who use, trust and know for a fact that these are quality services/products, because it WILL come back to you, good or bad. You are in essence, endorsing these products, by believing in them enough to have them up on your website . You must be able to back them
• and finally, make sure that you are partnering with a company that has a decent payout. Payouts vary, and you don’t want to e wasting precious real estate on your blog partnering with a company where you make .05% on every $200 sold. It must be worth your while.
• A great product affiliate blogger and coach is Matt Carter at http://mattsmarketingblog.com

Matt’s got great instructional video’s and blogs and his coaching programs are supposed to be top notch. The best site that I’ve found for finding affiliate partners is http://clickbank.com. This site can be confusing if you haven’t done your homework in affiliate marketing first so I highly recommend checking Matt Carter, or reading a book, or a few articles on affiliate marketing first prior to jumping onto clickbank.

A great book on the subject is Evgenii “Geno” Prusakov’s Affiliate Program Management: An Hour A Day.

Good luck with this. Affiliate marketing, if done well, can, with time bring your website more value and resources for folks interested in your products and services. Plus it’s kind of fun!

*Quick note for CT small businesses: As of this blog post, Amazon.com is still NOT an affiliate within CT because of a sales tax dispute, but I believe that is coming to an end by the end of 2013.