Easily turn wordpress into an e-commerce solution. As someone who has used WP-ecommerce in the past, this was a lot easier!

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

Taken From http://www.problogger.net/

Picture by: destinetics
Here’s a collection of 115 social bookmark and news sites ranked by PageRank, number of links and value of each site.

We used dnScoop to gather the data for all these sites. This is what the dnScoop data is based on:

Page Rank- Google PageRank

Inbound Links- The total number of pages that contain links to www.sitename.com

Site Value Report - This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.

The list was based on this social bookmarking list . We added a few more sites, such as, Shoutwire.com, Plime.com and PixelGroovy.com.

The dollar value of the sites are a bit misleading (is Simpy.com really worth $302,332,960 more than Digg?), but this list should hopefully provide you with some data on social news and bookmark that you haven’t seen before. If anybody knows of any better online tools to roughly estimate the value a site then leave a link in the comments section and we’ll update this list over the next few weeks and compare the data.

Site	PR	Inbound Links	$ Value
www.slashdot.org	9	28,018,962	$25,787,200
del.icio.us	8	370,943,962	$521,172,000
www.technorati.com	8	148,233,993	$276,243,000
www.digg.com	8	137,000,000	$215,992,000
www.reddit.com	8	132,924,191	$178,934,400
www.stumbleupon.com	8	59,888,074	$39,723,400
www.connotea.org	8	3,272,642	$11,241,440
www.furl.net	7	99,028,154	$188,853,100
www.newsvine.com	7	49,881,588	$35,890,400
www.blinklist.com	7	47,039,214	N/A
www.folkd.com	7	13,766,114	N/A
www.squidoo.com	7	7,171,958	$13,336,150
www.citeulike.org	7	3,694,298	$11,226,880
www.kinja.com	7	2,593,905	$9,965,880
www.propeller.com	7	2,503,342	$13,613,600
www.spurl.net	6	34,419,253	$32,200,000
www.simpy.com	6	23,405,771	$518,324,960
www.mister-wong.com	6	9,672,510	$10,667,840
www.rawsugar.com	6	7,481,362	$14,925,880
www.diigo.com	6	6,095,828	$11,243,680
www.linkagogo.com	6	3,987,085	N/A
www.corank.com	6	1,536,589	$4,281,340
www.care2.com/news	6	808,351	$2,237,900
www.backflip.com	6	733,144	$2,463,550
www.spotback.com	6	315,219	$459,980
www.kaboodle.com	6	309,115	$3,691,950
www.shoutwire.com	6	284,654	$216,910
www.sphinn.com	6	270,738	$100,000
www.searchles.com	6	261,216	$197,160
www.bibsonomy.org	6	141,521	$2,305,350
www.clipclip.org	6	59,146	$75,210
www.sitebar.org	6	15,661	$245,204
www.taggly.com	5	998,006	N/A
www.buddymarks.com	5	890,014	$3,090,150
www.mylinkvault.com	5	559,084	N/A
www.stylehive.com	5	547,675	$1,377,760
www.hyperlinkomatic.com	5	505,338	$1,457,890
www.plime.com	5	448,091	$474,360,000
www.lilisto.com	5	363,661	$529,000
www.sk-rt.com	5	322,076	$442,900
www.markaboo.com	5	238,271	$227,900
www.xilinus.com	5	57,701	$38,160
www.startaid.com	5	49,341	N/A
www.uvouch.com	5	34,057	$424,020,140
www.thoof.com	5	30,719	$20,600
www.myhq.com	5	27,015	$29,536
www.mybookmarks.com	5	25,443	$29,468
www.hanzoweb.com	5	12,618	$17,222
www.favoor.com	5	11,756	$6,322
www.socialdanger.com	5	7,095	$1,600
www.murl.com	5	6,017	$8,236
www.mobleo.net	5	739	$1,039
www.plugim.com	4	588,860	$1,313,340
www.zurpy.com	4	192,408	$111,180
www.tagfacts.com	4	169,135	$120,772
www.oyax.com	4	112,111	$115,000
www.lifelogger.com	4	99,808	$107,744
www.complore.com	4	93,751	$74,200
www.connectedy.com	4	59,588	N/A
www.sitejot.com	4	55,414	N/A
www.pixelgroovy.com	4	41,778	$19,080
www.cloudytags.com	4	41,654	$29,664
www.blurpalicious.com	4	27,567	$12,900
www.dropjack.com	4	27,251	$13,100
www.bookmark-manager.com	4	18,872	$7,434
www.myvmarks.com	4	17,084	$6,650
www.contentpop.com	4	13,188	$16,274
www.bmaccess.net	4	11,959	$5,600
www.memfrag.com	4	10,564	$5,668
www.bookmarktracker.com	4	10,518	$8,618
www.mysitevote.com	4	9,218	$6,500
www.freelink.org	4	8,427	N/A
www.urlex.info	4	3,962	$2,507
www.rambhai.com	4	2,926	N/A
www.easybm.com	4	2,236	N/A
www.zlitt.com	4	2,236	$3,193
www.chipmark.com	4	2,196	$1,792
www.thinkpocket.com	4	1,914	$848
www.mywebdesktop.net	4	1,329	$368
www.philoi.com	4	1,097	$1,397
www.bookkit.com	4	1,049	N/A
www.bookmax.net	4	874	N/A
www.votelists.com	4	399	$339
www.whitelinks.com	4	269	N/A
www.tedigo.net	4	135	$458
www.mixx.com	3	559,683	$1,854,160
www.marktd.com	3	43,855	$56,180
www.tagza.com	3	35,627	$7,500
www.wirefan.com	3	17,204	$27,772
www.blogbookmark.com	3	11,934	$11,124
www.bukmark.net	3	8,545	$1,620
www.getboo.com	3	7,742	$42,728
www.fungow.com	3	4,553	N/A
www.syncone.net	3	4,026	$25,070
www.linksnarf.com	3	3,893	$1,120
www.ez4u.net	3	1,030	N/A
www.listerlister.com	3	633	$5,702
www.xlmark.com	2	15,012	$5,974
www.totalpad.com	2	4,693	$510
www.barksbookmarks.com	2	2,786	$11,766
www.memotoo.com	2	2,382	N/A
www.blipoo.com	2	598	$100
www.bookmarkall.com	2	371	$694
www.yattle.com	2	127	$1,081
www.wetogether.info	1	911	$515
www.vuju.com	1	284	$145
www.newsweight.com	1	67	$42
www.voteboat.com	1	41	$10
www.freezilla.co.uk	1	38	$21
www.faves.com	0	50,781	$38,720
www.socialogs.com	0	50,090	$18,500
www.i89.us	0	28,192	$11,872
www.crowdfound.com	0	1,516	$3,050
www.quickieclick.com	0	9	$650
ma.gnolia.com	N/A	N/A	N/A

If you like this article, click here to give it a Digg (Whoops!)

Anyone who has tried to get to the Digg front page knows how hard it is to do that. You need a lot of friends, influence, and need to be a top member apart from writing quality content before you can dream of meeting success on Digg.

On Digg-clones, on the other hand, it’s relatively easy to get the attention you deserve. Many niche specific Digg-style sites have emerged over the past few months where you can submit stories to be reviewed and voted by those who are interested in your content. Though, you may not get as much traffic from niche social media sites as you would from Digg, it’s worth having your content read by the like-minded people who are more likely to become your regular readers.

Below is a list of 11 most popular Digg-like sites where bloggers, designers, and web developers can submit stories (their bog posts or whatever) to promote their content.

Sphinn

Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.

PlugIM

PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page.

Blogg-Buzz

Blogg-Buzz is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting!

Design Float

Design Float is a Digg style, community driven news aggregator dedicated to the design industry. Design Float aims to collect and organize design-related content from across the web while letting the community float the best articles to the top pages of their categories and sink the most irrelevant one’s to the bottom. The ultimate goal of Design Float is to, hopefully, categorize the huge amount of design-related content available on the web into neat and easy to navigate pages of articles in order of importance/relevance as decided by the community. Basically, it’s just a niche version of the highly popular Digg.com.

Pixel Groovy

Pixel Groovy is a user controlled tutorial directory. We provide the members with the control, not editors, to decide which tutorials are worthy of being published and which tutorials aren’t. This helps filter out and set a level of quality in the tutorials seen on the frontpage.

CSS Globe

CSSG is a web standards oriented site where, basically, anyone with the right will can post updates.

DZone

• DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers
• anyone can submit new links to the incoming queue
• members vote on upcoming links to determine what gets promoted
• everyone can browse, search and comment on links

TagNe.ws

TagNe.ws, is a web 2.0 application that allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the home page. When a user submits a news article it will be placed in the “upcoming” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the home page. The original source for TagNe.ws was authored by Ricardo Galli. He was influenced by the extremely popular English technology site digg.com.

Dig a List

DigaList is a global personal lists website. We all love lists, we all have kinds of lists, about life, work, dreams etc. Have you ever wished to dig out all these treasure and share them with others? In DigaList, you can create your lists, co-create a list with others, or dig out a list you like.

SEOyak.com

SEOyak.com is a news site for the Search Engine Optimization community.

SEOyak.com allows users to submit stories that affect the SEO world and then vote on those stories to decide which submissions get the most exposure. The SEO industry has come to appreciate the power of social media recently, and SEOyak.com provides a great opportunity to get SEO news heard.

Qoolsqool

Qoolsqool is a free and open educational resource for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Qoolsqool’s mission is to take advantage of 21st century technologies to advance knowledge and education around the world and reach to people with a need or a desire to learn or teach.

A mere ebook can make you seriously rich.

Creating and selling a reasonably priced, instantly downloadable ebook is the kind of blog monetization strategy many bloggers have only just come to realize. I usually see it as the next step in blog monetization. The first one being revenue through adverts.

It’s fairly easy to write and create an ebook if you are well-versed in your niche, but the real problem arises when you think of ways to market your ebook. This seemingly daunting problem can delay, or worse, maim your plans.

Many full time bloggers have sold ebooks with such success that even they didn’t expect. It’s time to discard the thinking that people don’t buy information products online, and that bloggers should keep on churning out free high quality content.

Breaking: Those who enjoy reading your free content would not mind paying a few dollars to read your premium content.

It’s not my intention to sell you on the idea of selling ebooks. This post is for the converted who are trying to figure out ways to market their ebook.

I usually don’t go into too much detail, but this post warranted detail. So here are 11 strategies for successfully marketing your ebook.

1. Create hype and anticipation

You know it works. You must have seen the teaser ads on TV where they show a brief intro of a new product or service for weeks before revealing the full commercial. Regular TV users curiously wait for the full commercial that contains more information about the new product. And they become more likely to buy the product when it finally comes out.

To adapt this tactic for your medium, you need to blog about your upcoming ebook project and ask your readers for suggestions. This way, you’ll not only make them a part of your project, but also get their feedback and increase their anticipation.

Since your readers will already have made up half of their mind about buying the ebook, they’ll be more likely to make up the other half after the ebook launch.

2. Use word of mouth marketing

Your readers are your ebook’s first buyers. And they care about you and your efforts. Ask your readers for the following favors:

• Email their friends to urge them to buy the book.
• Tell their colleagues about the ebook.
• Mention and review the ebook on their blog if they have one.
• And promote it on social media.

If you feel shy, you don’t have to ask them directly. Create a list of recommended actions similar to the above list and urge your readers to help you out. What happens is, even if they don’t go out and start promoting your ebook right away, they’ll remember your ebook whenever their friends and colleagues have the needs that your ebook fulfills.

Don’t be surprised if you get overwhelmingly supportive response from your readers. It’s only a teaser of what to expect later in your campaign.

3. Give away free sample chapters

People love to taste the food before deciding that they want to consume it as a meal.

Also, there is a certain charm attached to Free offerings. We are instantly drawn to the things that bear the word free.

If you have a fairly lengthy ebook, it will be a good idea to give away the first few chapters for free. This will not only attract the hesitant buyers to your ebook, but also give your real buyers a taste of what to expect in the full package.

Once your prospective buyers consume the free chapters, they’ll be itching to read the whole ebook. And what other choice do they have than to buy the ebook?

4. Create a landing page for your ebook

A simple page with a photoshopped cover of your ebook, a description, and a ‘buy now’ button is not very appealing.

Spending time on creating a landing page for your ebook is worth the effort.

Create a special page on your blog that is meant to convert the prospects into buyers. A good landing page must contain:

1. A descriptive heading.
2. A hype-less description.
3. A list of chapters from the ebook.
4. An appealing list of practical benefits one can get from reading the ebook.
5. Testimonials from your satisfied readers and well respected bloggers (This is a must have).
6. And of course a buy now button.

Remember, your landing page must not look like an ad. People have grown aversion for ads. Keep your description as friendly and realistic-looking as possible.

5. Keep the price reasonable

Keeping in mind that people are attracted to free offers, they are also more likely to buy cheap products.

Internet is the ultimate treasure chest of free content and information. We expect the information on the internet to be free. If it isn’t free, we expect it to be the closest thing to free. We expect it to be cheap.

An ebook is an information product, so we naturally don’t want to empty our wallet for an ebook.

Keeping your value-packed ebook reasonably priced (or very cheap) is going to make you more money than if you put a high price tag on it. Why? Simply because the number of people buying a cheap ebook will far exceed the number of people who even think of buying an exorbitantly priced ebook.

6. Get other bloggers to review your ebook

Every bloggers has a unique group of readers who trust the blogger’s recommendations and follow his advice.

You can tap into the audience of other bloggers in your niche by getting them to review and recommend your ebook. Leo Babauta, the author of Zen To Done ebook, has successfully used this strategy.

Send the bloggers with large audience personalized emails, and offer them a free copy of your ebook. Ask them to kindly recommend the ebook to their readers. Some might ignore your email, but many will respond positively, and a few will review your ebook on their blog too.

7. Buy reviews from related blogs

Don’t worry if the above strategy does not work as expected. There is still hope for you. You can buy reviews from related blogs through services such as PayPerPost and ReviewMe.

These reviews will cost you money, but if you spend the money wisely, the return on investment will be huge.

If your pocket and conscience allows you (which they should) to pay the bloggers for reviewing your ebook, do it. Otherwise, stick to free and less devious strategies.

8. Share profits with referrers

Sharing is caring. If I refer a buyer to you and make you money, I’ll be more likely to keep sending you new buyers if, as a result of sending buyers to you, I make some money too.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book has made thousands, if not millions, with this strategy. Almost every guy related to SEO and internet marketing is a passionate promoter of SEO Book, simply because he can pocket some cash on referring buyers to Aaron Wall.

By giving your affiliates a share of the profits, you’ll make sure that the stream of buyers never stop, and you make constant profits in the long run.

9. Grab testimonials from the A-list bloggers

I’ve mentioned this strategy before, but I am going to emphasize it again.

People don’t buy on the internet unless they trust you. Internet is a playground of scammers and fraudsters. So it’s only wise to use one’s money with caution.

To get people to trust you and your ebook, you have to get your customers AND the trusted and respected bloggers to recommend your ebook.

If you email the bloggers politely with a free copy of your ebook, and ask for a review, some might think you are demanding too much from them. So if they ever reply back, ask them to give you a short paragraph of feedback. Chances are they won’t disappoint you.

If a kind blogger reviews your ebook, copy a few lines from the review and slap it on your landing page as a testimonial.

Getting testimonials from the customers is slightly easier. Grab their emails before finalizing the purchase, and email them a week later to ask them if they liked the ebook and if they would like to give their feedback. You can automate the whole process, but I’ll leave the details for another post.

If you don’t feel comfortable with the above process, simply put a line on your landing page urging the buyers to give their feedback about the ebook. Many will get back to you with positive reviews.

10. Advertise on online communities

Online communities are great free advertising places. Throngs of people frequent niche specific forums to get help and advice. All you have to do is find the right forums to tap into the forum–loads of prospective buyers.

Some forums such as Authority Blogger Forum and BlogCatalog allow you to announce your unique content in a separate thread. You can take such opportunities to advertise your ebook.

But remember, don’t come across as spammy, and don’t bother creating such a thread if you haven’t been active on the forum before.

You can also place a link to your ebook landing page in your forum signature, and post on the forum often in a hope that people will notice you and trace you back to your blog.

11. Write follow-up posts and talk about your ebook’s success

Your marketing efforts don’t stop with the launch of the ebook. You still have some readers who want more proof that your ebook is worth reading before giving you cash.

What they want to see is a proof that others have bought the ebook. So how are you going to convince them?

You’ll have to write follow-up posts and boast about the huge success you have seen with the ebook sales so far, giving them all kinds of stats and quoting positive reviews from other bloggers. Tell them how surprised you are at the enormous response you have received about your ebook.

To revive the buzz, release ebook updates, and make special offers such as discounted ebook price for a limited period.

Just keep things alive. Don’t let your ebook die in the flood of regular posts.

——————

Making money with an ebook is a hot trend in the blogosphere, so cash in on the opportunity, and make some regular, steady income. The kind you have only dreamed of so far.