Ways To Make Money Online

One of the fastest ways for you to understand how to start a blog and make money blogging is by using an example. We’ll take those same basic 5 steps from the previous post and repeat them here, with a real example.

Step 1. was about picking a product niche of something you want to sell to people, and two of the examples I mentioned were selling guitars, and a course in learning to play guitar, so we’ll choose those for our example.

It so happens that many people look online for guitars to buy, and for courses on how to play them. So if you put up a blog about guitars, you’ll immediately have a few items to offer. As mentioned before, if you produce your own guitars or teach your own guitar course, you can offer these. But we’ll assume you do not, so what you will offer is guitars and lessons produced by other people or companies. You’ll feature their products on your website, with a link to their own websites that includes a special code (letting them know who sent them the potential customer,) and in return for sending them a “lead,” if the customer actually purchases a product, they’ll pay you a percentage commission. You are an affiliate for them, and this is affiliate marketing.

You can affiliate with any number of sellers, from companies that offer just one specific product, to huge resellers like Amazon, eBay or Commission Junction. Each one has there own screening and application for who they will allow to be an affiliate, their own terms, and their own form and percentage of payment.

There’s a well-reviewed guitar course called Jamorama offering between 50% -75% commission on every $40-$50 sale, meaning you could get $25-$40 every time you bring them a paying customer. Do that 20 times in one month, and you just made between $500-$800! Their Jamorama course is a digital download, meaning the purchaser can download the whole course in digital-book form immediately after payment, no waiting for printed materials to arrive in the mail.

The clearinghouse for this and many other digital products is ClickBank, and anyone can be a member and offer their products.

Guitars are sold on both Amazon and eBay, and if you become an affiliate with these companies, you can actually offer real guitars, not just guitar lessons. I’ve had many guitar players buy used & new guitars on my sites that show Amazon ads and eBay auctions. Amazon pays between 6%-9% of the sale price, if sold, and eBay pays per click on their auctions.

These are just a few of the suggestions for affiliate partnerships you can form to offer different digital & physical products on your website, with each click or sale bringing you a little bit of commission. If you have several of these blogs offering several different products each, you could be making thousands every month.

For this example we’ll choose to sell the Jamorama  guitar lesson course, and a selection of used guitars on eBay.

So, now that we know our blog is going to be monetized by sales of guitars and guitar lessons, we’ll want to center our whole blog on guitars, and probably find a domain name that says “guitar” or “guitars” right in it, like www.allaboutguitars.com, because we’ll want a highly-searched guitar niche keyword in our URL (web address)…which leads up to Step 2, researching the best keywords for the “guitar” niche. To find out how we do this research, read on to the next post, How To Make Money Blogging – Step 2