As bloggers there are many of us who would love to make a living from it but unfortunately most of us aren’t doing too well at it. I would say that the first thing a blogger does to monetize their blog would be sticking Adsense ads on it somewhere in the vain hope that someone will click on it. There’s nothing wrong with Adsense ads as they can generate some income but unless you have a huge amount of traffic all you’re going to get is a bit of pocket money.
The other way to blog for money would be through promoting affiliates or by selling your products online. The problem is most of us don’t have products to sell and so we have to rely on selling other peoples products either as an affiliate or by joining sites such as Amazon.
The Importance Of Honest Reviews
Where most people go wrong is the placement of links or banners on their blogs in places such as the sidebars, footer header or within the post itself. They’re hoping that if they supply good content they’ll generate enough traffic and hopefully someone will be interested enough in their ad placements to click on a link. Unfortunately this isn’t exactly what you would call targeted traffic and while some may actually click on a link or banner they rarely result in a sale and unfortunately no sale means no cash in your pocket.
The trick to making a sale is giving your customers what they want. That means while sticking something unrelated at the end of the post may make you feel good, in that you’ve done something to create income, but it’s pretty well useless. You may get lucky if its related in some way to your post but not by much.
What you should be doing is writing a review about a product that you actually use and love elaborating on the positive aspects as well as any negatives you may have come across. Having said that the problem with reviews is that they don’t always work and the reasons for that are;
- A lack of trust: People don’t know who you are and therefore don’t trust you enough to take your word for it. This is the number one reason why new bloggers find it so hard to earn any sort of income when they first start off. Those that give up say that blogging for money isn’t possible while those who persevere and who over time have built a presence slowly start to see that blogging for money can actually be a reality.
- Not Having enough products to sell: So, let’s say you’ve stuck it out and people now trust you enough to take you at your word when recommending a product or service. The problem you now have, unless you have a lot of money behind you, is the inability to physically purchase all the products you wish to review.
The Best Review Is A Customers Review
There’s also the problem that even though you have over time built a presence and a modicum of trust with your readers people will continue to hesitate when it comes to completing a sale because of the perception that your review is skewed in that you have an ulterior motive for writing it. You can’t really blame them either because there are so many reviews out there from people who have never tried the product and have written a whole lot of crap just to make the sale.
This isn’t true of reviews written by actual customers who have nothing at all to gain from writing it. When you think about it, time being what it is, there’s only two reasons why someone will take the time to write a review. They either really love a product or they really hate it. Reading the reviews on any given product gives you a feel for how good that product really is. This is one of the reasons why I purchased WP Zon Builder and wrote the post Why I Love WP Zon Builder.
Yesterday I was looking at my Sexual Aids blog and I noticed that one particular post was getting a lot of attention, as were the links on that post. The problem was it wasn’t generating much in the way of sales and it was after much thought that I come to the conclusion which resulted in this post. Naturally I decided to do something about it which was to point all the links to Amazon rather than to the site I had been using as an affiliate.
Naturally to facilitate this I used WP Zon Builder which made the transition a breeze. As you can see from the post The Ten Most Popular Vibrators, each of the vibrators in question now has a link to Amazon, an image of the product as well as a link to the customer reviews. I’ve also stipulated in the post that people should take the time to read the reviews to see whether or not it’s the one best suited to them. Whether they click on the review or the product link doesn’t matter as either way my affiliate link is embedded into both links.
The question now is am I right in making all the above assumptions? What say you, is there value in what I have portrayed above or do you see fault in it somewhere. Either way I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
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As to all those requests asking for me to do another YouTube video, don’t worry, I will be including more of those in future Fridays Funnies, as soon as I get time to film them. For today I have a great joke and a really funny video, but before we get into that I want to spend a little time talking about women.
Even though I’ve done a lot of posts that involve women, most of them making fun of them, like the one about what it would be like 
Once again I have a joke and a video that I hope will amuse you no end.
