Being a blog that focuses on personal finance, we talk a lot about money here. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that this blogger wants to make some money off of this blog. I’ve tried a few things before with very limited success (I’ve probably made enough to cover the costs of maintaining the site). Which leads to the obvious question: “Why?” Low traffic levels and poor ad placement probably have a bit to do with the limited success. The lack of selling of services and products as part of my content is probably another cause.
After thinking of what I’m doing wrong, I started thinking about the one thing that has been moderately successful: ING referral links. What makes this different? A few things:
- The referral offer provides a benefit to the reader ($25) and to me as the blogger ($10).
- I’ve talked about online savings accounts in other posts on the site and it fits well with the overall theme.
- I am actually a user of the service I am promoting, have first-hand knowledge of the service, and lend some level of credibility to the offering by posting customer referral links rather than banner ads or other forms of affiliate advertising.
That third point I think is the most important, and will shape my money-making efforts on this blog going forward. I maintain a small section on the right hand side of the page with rotating ads, and in that space I will only promote products and services that I use and would honestly recommend to others. To further emphasize that I use and believe in the product or service, I will post customer referral links to these services when available. Hopefully by doing this I can provide information on products that are more relevant to my users.
At this point I have two services I am promoting. The first is the aforementioned ING Direct Orange Savings and Electric Orange Checking accounts. I have been an ING customer for years and believe that they provide a great product in the Orange Savings account, although I would like to see their interest rate a little higher. The other service I am promoting is Coupons.com, which I use quite often to print coupons to sweeten the grocery and drugstore deals I c0me across. As expensive as Sunday newspapers are becoming and the hassle of keeping up with the inserts, this is becoming my primary source for coupons. I’ll probably add more in the future as I find referral or affiliate programs for services and products I use.
Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered about the promotional links I put on here or were curious how you can support the site, hopefully this post helps answer your questions. I don’t ever expect to make enough here to quit my day job, but I would be very appreciative of your support through checking out these services nonetheless.
I will note that unless this strategy becomes very successful, I will likely keep the Google Adsense bars on the site for the time being. This doesn’t bring in a lot of money (I finally receached the $100 payout level about a month ago after about 18 months of using the service), but every little bit helps.