Make Money Blogging: Tips and Techniques - [2020] Part 5 of 5

Make Money Blogging: Tips and Techniques - [2020] Part 5 of 5

Make Money Blogging: Tips and Techniques - [2020]

Part 5

Part 4

Useful Add-ons & Miscellaneous

Donations.

Last but not the least, you can use a donation form on your blog. Surely it depends on how popular your blog is and whether it is written for humans or purely for making money. Readers feel manipulation and dishonesty as keenly as they feel the sincerity, and the success of this monetization method will ultimately depend on which approach you use.

Some bloggers say they collect as much as tens of thousands of dollars per month just using a donation form. These are of course unique, extremely popular and highly attended blogs, but even if you can collect only a few bucks a month - why not try it?!

You can call your donation form as you like - Readers Tips, Buy me a beer or whatever name appeals to you most. What you shouldn’t do, however, is to beg or thrust the request on your readers in a pushy way; people don’t like this. Just make it look funny and informal, and, who knows, perhaps some of your readers will turn out to be rather generous and occasionally donate a few bucks to support you.

There are a great many free donation-plugins available. Some of them are listed in the next section.

Useful Monetisation plugins.

Amazon SmartLinks Widget by AdaptiveBlue

This plugin automatically ads your amazon Wish List to the sidebar of your blog. The Wish List may include best-selling books, CDs, DVDs, electronics or any other of your favorite Amazon products. For a  Blogger or Typepad accounts, there is a 1-click installation option. For all other blog platforms, you just need to copy and paste a single line of code into your blog widget.

The Business Directory plugin

This is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to easily create and host a Free Directory page for your readers, advertisers, affiliates and all other types of visitors to your blog. The plugin invites your visitors to submit an advertisement listing for themselves to appear on your blog. Listings may include such data as a company name, business description, contact information, and a website URL.

This is a nice way to express gratitude to your readership for their activity and constant feedback, in addition to Dofollow and CommentLuv plugins, that I also strongly recommend installing to enhance your blog popularity.

SmartLinks Widget by AdaptiveBlue

This one is a purely WP plugin, that allows you to link words within your posts to your Amazon, eBay and Linkshare affiliate accounts. For example, you have a movie or a book title in your post. Then, by activating The smart links plugin you can make those titles lead to the movie and book reviews or sell pages, and if the reader thus redirected will buy it, you earn commissions.

WP-Donators Plugin

This is another donation plugin, however, it’s quite different in function from that described above. This plugin uses incentives to stimulate donations and makes those mutually beneficial!

How? Very simply. It displays the latest donor information in a Cloud (like a Tag cloud, remember?), and the higher the reader donation, the larger their link in the cloud. Therefore, not only they acquire a home-page link, but they may also enjoy direct traffic from your blog;  the bigger the link, the higher the traffic they may get.

In addition, WP-Donators Plugin enables you to place contextual links and text advertisements from sponsors/donators. The more a donator pays, the longer ad text he/she is allowed to place.
If you don’t have many visitors or there are not active,  you can advertise your donation policy on topical forums by inviting forum members to get inexpensive backlinks in a blogroll. This will work perfectly!

All in all, this is a great plugin and definitely worth installing.

Making Money Blogging Dos and Don’ts:

1. Content and your readers should be the priorities

Never compromise your content for making money. Quality content is the main reason why readers visit and keep coming back to your blog, so don’t play with their feelings causing them to feel annoyed and lose interest. It’s not by placing more adds or trying to foist off products and services on your readers that you get richer.

It is by providing quality content with interesting, informative and exciting information that you make your blog more popular, your readers happier and yourself better off. To put it simply, don’t get obsessed with making money, just have fun, enjoy your writing and interaction with your readership, and this is sure to pay off soon.

2. Display mostly contextual ads

People don’t like ads, especially stand-alone banner-type ads. Therefore, give preference to contextual text ads, that are basically just text links within your posts. These look natural, especially if they expand on the information in your post and add value to it. With contextual ads, you have bigger chances to succeed and make income.

3. Minimum Ads, maximum relevancy

Even with contextual ads try to be sensible and do not overload posts with links. Something like 10 links per 400-500 word article is more than enough. Besides, do not try to monetize words that are not related to the topic of your article, rather make a stronger emphasis on choosing relevant words and phrases. Those will increase interaction between your readers and the contextual links, thus increasing ads conversion and your revenue, while keeping your readers happy.