By William M Terrell:
Affiliate program blogging is blogging to generate passive income by having ads for other peoples' products or services on your blog. For people to want to advertise on your blog, however, you will have to generate sufficient traffic to give the advertiser a satisfactory return on his investment. This will require a) blogging on a subject about which you are knowledgeable to begin with, and which you want to keep learning about, and b) getting traffic to your blog.
First of all, blog about something that interests you and for which there is an audience large enough to generate advertisers willing to accept you into an affiliate program. While your blog focus may not have to be an absolute passion for you, you should at least have an ongoing interest in the topic. That way, your blogging should be satisfying in and for itself, and that's the way you will be able to maintain interest in keeping it up. After all, a well=kept up blog will require at least two to three postings a week, and to do that you will have to be knowledgeable about your topic to begin with, and interested enough in it to keep learning about it, so that you can pass this knowledge on to your readers.
However, one danger of a blog is that you are not only the writer of your blog posts, but also the editor and publisher of the blog. This denies you one advantage of "being published" by a newspaper or magazine, which is that acceptance of your writing by an outside editor gives you some assurance that what you have submitted for publication is "good," at least in the eyes of that editor.
A blog, however, does not give you that assurance, since you are not only the writer of the blog, but the editor and the publisher. This makes it important to realize that, if you are going to get an audience-or traffic-to your blog, you must be honest enough in evaluating your work not to let yourself post blog entries that readers will find boring or unoriginal. Posts that don't interest readers will result in few return visits to your blog, and so it will be hard or impossible to build a steady stream of traffic that will attract advertisers. If you don't get the traffic, affiliate programs may drop you.
The second part is to make certain you have a sufficient pool of potential visitors, and to do that you will need to do some research. One way to discover the amount of interest in your topic is to do keyword research, either with a free tool like Google keywords or some of the paid services. But even the paid services will give you a certain number of free days to use the service, to find out if you want to pay for their upgrade. Another way is to just check out a few local magazine racks. Is your topic represented among the magazines displayed. If so, there's surely an audience for your blog topic. If not, not so much.
On the other hand, remember, in a blog your audience is potentially as large as the planet itself. The web, after all, is a world wide web. This means that even if your blog subject is highly specialized, there may still be enough potential visitors to your blog to make advertising on it worthwhile. Your task will be to find the visitors and attract them to your blog. One way to do that is to locate other sites that cater to your interest and make comments in response to their own blog entries. Writing articles (or having them written) that deal with your specialized subject, and submitting them to article directories, is another way to make your site known and attract traffic. And, if you would rather spend money than time, there are also the paid advertising methods.
The satisfaction we can get from a blog is that it allows us to share our interests with others without worrying about the difficulties and uncertainties of getting published in traditional media. An additional benefit is that we can also use our blog to generate passive income-either supplemental or full-time.
William Terrell is a writer and internet marketer. To learn more about ecommerce and internet marketing, see his blog - ebusinesstipsblog.com
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