RE: Do you need some form of product or service to sell to gain revenue from blogging, or are CPM ads enough?



By Wendy C Allen


  • Do you need some form of product or service to sell to gain revenue from blogging, or are CPM ads enough?

Pre-Panda, you could make huge amounts of money, from just Adsense ads slapped up on your site. But since 2012 (Post-Panda), income from ads alone is close to impossible for MOST blogs and sites, with only the super big, very old ones (think the ones 10 to 20 years old) being the only ones today still living off ad views/clicks aone.

The bulk of my income is of course sales of my books and art. I'm an author of Epic Fantasy (main character is an Elf wizard with his unicorn; 130+ novels and 2,000+ short stories in the series which first started in 1978 - next year will be it's 40th anniversary), am an artist (watercolour, acrylics), art car builder, costume designer, CosPlayer, YouTuber (vlogger and gamer) and doll maker.

Income from my blog is as follows (in order from top/most to bottom/least income):

  • my art on Zazzle products
  • AdSense from my YouTube vlog videos embedded on my site
  • my books for sale (both paperbacks and ebooks)(Novels, non-fiction books, and short stories)
  • my crafts/dolls/etc for sale on eTsy (often made with my Spoonflower fabrics)
  • designing fabric for Spoonflower
  • my art on CafePress products
  • Share-a-Sale Affiliate Program
  • LinkShare Affiliate Program
  • Commision Junction Affiliate Program
  • AdSense ads on my site
  • Amazon affiliates

Having a product, especially a none-affiliate, original unique to you product that you created yourself, is definatly the way to go.

  • What type of articles/content should be made to be successful at affiliate marketing? Does it have to be product reviews?

No. I don't do product reviews. I've done a few over the years (maybe 10 at most since 1997) but review writing just wasn't my thing.

My advice is to find something you are passionate about in your everyday life: Fishing? Doll making? Collecting coins? Playing Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons? Cooking? Auto detailing? Painting watercolor? Road trips in an RV? Listening to music?

Answer this question:

What do you do for fun?

What are you happiest doing?

If you had endless cash and was free to do anything, what would you do?"

It doesn't matter what you do in your spare time, whatever it is, THAT is the topic you should write about on your site/blog.

I have a friend who's income is 100% from Amazon Affiliates. Do you know what he does? He enjoys restoring antique camper trailers. So he writes a blog about restoring antique camper trailers.

The blog post that brings in the bulk of his income, is a how-to article, on how to coat your RV's roof with rubberized coating. The article has lots of photos (taken by his wife) of him repairing the RV roof.

At the bottom of the page, he links to the products he used: the liquid rubber, the roller brush, the seam sealing tape, etc. via Amazon.

The liquid rubber he uses is $300 a gallon and it takes about 5 to 10 gallons per roof. He earned 20% from Amazon on those sales, meaning he makes at minimum $300 and up to $600 or more every time someone buys that liquid rubber (300x5=$1,500x20%=$300)

I know another guy who is a plumber and writes a how-to blog for unclogging toilets. He monetizes with links to plungers and drain cleaners.

Me?

I'm an author. I write articles on the following topics:

  • how to write Dark Fantasy
  • how to write Yaoi
  • how to write Bizarro
  • how to create characters for your novels
  • world building for authors
  • creating magic systems
  • writing Elves and wizards
  • how to publish your novel
  • how to win NaNoWriMo from an 11 time winner
  • SEO for authors
  • web building for authors
  • successful blogging tips for authors
  • Cosplaying your own characters at conventions
  • the history of my town (Old Orchard Beach, Maine)
  • the history of my family, The Scottish Gypsies (owners of the World's Most Haunted Car and featured in multiple Stephen King movies including Christine and The Thinner which was filmed on my farm)

And so, at the bottom of each page, you find links to my own novels on Amazon, in addition to various how to write books by other authors.

The point is, it doesn't matter what the topic is, as long as it is something that YOU enjoy doing and can share your knowledge of with others. And no matter what it is, you can always find affiliate programs to match it.

So don't go looking for a "top" affiliate and try to write for them... no!

Instead, look deep inside yourself, to find out what things you do every day, that you love doing, and write about those things, then seek out the affiliates that match it.

  • Can you share more of your experience and knowledge? How do you do that if your articles are not product reviews?
  • if you promote affiliate products related to your niche; Can you share tips on how to do that, particularly if you blog is not about product reviews?

Yes I can.

If you pay attention to each of those articles, you notice affiliate banner image links in various places on the page, some in the sidebar and others in the body of the text

Hope that helps. Good luck!


Here are some additional articles I thought you might find helpful:






While there are around 20k pages on this website, most of them are blocked from search engines, with only around 800 of them available for appearing in Google/Bing/etc search results. The remainder can only be accessed via the various links found throughout this site. This was done deliberately on my part, and I did it because the bulk of the pages on this website are chapters from 138 novels and 423 novellas, so only the first page of each novel and novella indexed by search engines, and the remainder are linked in order, one page at a time, via clicking "next page" at the end of each. So if you are looking for a specific page from a specific novel, Google can't help you.



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Wendy Christine Allen 🌸💖🦄 aka EelKat 🧿💛🔮👻

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