We have all received bad pitch emails that are so generic you know the person never read your blog. Don’t do this to the person you are pitching for a product. Take the time to visit their site, learn what they are about, and a little bit about the product you want them to send you for review.

Here are some examples you can use. Make sure to keep it short and to the point. People are busy and don’t have time to read a long story.

Make sure to include all key points:

• Who you are
• The name of your blog
• Your blog URL
• Your email address/phone number
• What you are asking
• Your blog’s statistics

First: find a contact person for the product you want to review. Visit their website and look for Contacts either at the top or very bottom. Sometimes the contact information for individual people might be under Staff or the About Us page. If all else fails, just use their standard contact form to submit your request. If it is large company you may have to track down the PR company who represents them.

Second:  introduce yourself and your blog in the email or contact for message. Give them your name, the name of your blog, and the link to your blog. Make sure you also give your email address and phone number if you feel comfortable giving it out.

Example:

Hello, my name is Sue Smith and I am a blogger at Sue Smith’s Reviews. You can find my blog at suesmithreviews.com

Third:  tell them what you are asking of them. Give one quick personal note about their product if you have used it before. If you haven’t used it, tell them that your friend X told you about it or you stumbled across their website and think your readers would enjoy learning more about their product(s).

Examples:

I really like your product X. My child carries it everyday in his backpack to school. I would love the opportunity to work with your company and write a review to introduce your product to my readers.

I stumbled across your website and noticed you sell X. I would love the opportunity to work with your company and write a review to introduce your product to my readers.

Fourth: give them your blog’s statistics.

You can either wait to see if they write back or include some of your statistics in your initial pitch email.

Example:

Sue Smith Reviews receives 20,000 unique visitors a month, 24,000 pageviews, has 5,000 Facebook fans, 4,900 Twitter fans, 300 Google Plus fans, 150 Pinterest fans, and 5,000 email subscribers.

Being proactive can go along way in helping you grow your blog and product reviews can give you good content when you can’t think of anything to write.

And yet, not all blogs are created equal – and for every successful affiliate blogger, there have got to be a dozen or more money-making blog endeavors that never quite get off the ground. So what’s the difference- why do some bloggers find it so easy to sell products, while others crash and burn?

Well, regardless of how it looks, there is nothing easy about affiliate marketing success. It involves nothing less than positioning yourself as a blogger of authority- which is to say, a blogger readers will trust. If they don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy what you’re selling, at least not from you. Why would they?

Cultivating trust is, of course, no easy feat – but here are five battle-tested strategies that will put you in the right direction.

1. Remember that trustworthiness begins even before you start writing content. It begins with the selection of the products you’re selling. Picking high-quality products is essential, because if the products you peddle turn out to be whack, you’re going to lose credibility in a hurry – and readers may never give you the chance to build it back.
2. Another way to generate trust is to be unafraid about revealing trade secrets. Whatever your niche may be, revealing some of your own secrets to success- openly and specifically- lets people know that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re trying to help them, or provide a meaningful service.
3. Getting involved with the blogging community is another way to show that you’re respectable, and ultimately worthy of trust. Find some industry-leading blogs, in your same niche, and see if you can write a guest post or two for them. This is one of the best ways of establishing yourself as a blogger in-the-know.
4. Another way to build trust? Invest in a good domain name and a sleek, professional, and original design for your blog. These are not just frivolous extras, but are in fact vital for showing that you’re more than just an amateur blogger. You’re someone who is serious about the field, or the niche, in question.
5. Finally, allowing for a guest blog on your own site, from time to time, is probably not a bad idea. It shows a generosity of spirit, but more than that, it shows that you’re genuinely invested in your field—something that will help readers to trust you more.

Trust is something that takes a while to build, and only a moment to break. Make sure you don’t take your readership for granted; invest in providing good blogging about quality products, and you’ll be set for true blogging success!

This guest post has been written by Jason Akatiff is a well known affiliate and online marketer.  He currently owns and operates Ads4Dough, a popular affiliate network, and also frequently blogs about the industry.

his post will not tell you how to install WordPress. WordPress is installed through your host and they usually have instructions on how to do it. Installing WordPress usually only takes about 5 minutes and each web host will have a slightly different way to install it so you should check with your web host for those WordPress installation instructions.

Once you have WordPress installed there are somethings I think you should do to set it up properly, tweaks if you will. Yes, you could use WordPress AS-IS, the way it is installed but tweaking it will help you get the most out of it and also give you some SEO benefits.

Login into your WordPress blog: To log in you will go to http://NAMEOFYOURBLOG.com/wp-login.php (replacing nameofyourblog with the actual name of your blog) and type in the user name and password you setup when you installed WordPress on your web host.

Update WordPress: click on Updates from the Dashboard section on the left. If you don’t see it click on Dashboard and then you will see it. Update WordPress unless it says you have the latest version. Your web host may not have the latest version. Since you don’t have any posts installed you don’t have to worry about backing anything up so just click the Update button.

General WordPress Settings Tweaks:

Click on Settings and then General from the left menu bar.

Blog Name: This is where you will give your blog a name. It should most likely be the name you came up with but can also be a variation of it as this is what the search engines will pull from.

Tagline: The Tagline is a sentence that explains what your blog is about. It is what I use as the “15 second elevator pitch” that explains to someone in 15 seconds what your blog is about. It is also used by search engines.

URL: You should also fill in the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL). Unless your blog is on a separate directory then leave it the way it is setup. Most of the time your blog will be the only thing installed on your account so you don’t need to change this.

Email Address: Fill in the email address you want to use for this blog. It can be different than the email address you use to setup your user account if you like or just use the same one.

Membership/Users: You can click in the checkbox to allow anyone to register and then assign then the type of user they will be once they register or leave that set to default. You do not want to allow the public to register as anything other than a Subscriber or they will be able to create posts on your blog and if you make them an Admin they will have the ability to change your settings or delete your blog.

Time/Date: then change the time. If you can’t figure out what the time should be, pick the closest major city that is in your time zone from the drop-down list. You can change the time and date format or leave it at the default setting, which is what I do.

Click on this screenshot to see it larger in a new window

WordPress Writing Settings

Click on Settings and then Writing from the left menu bar.

There isn’t much to change here. The only thing I change is the size of the post box. By default it is set to 20 lines. I like mine to be 30 to 40 lines. The size of the posting area can be left the way it is but if you are writing long posts and will have to scroll up and down a lot, adding more space, or lines, will give you more of a viewable area to work with.

This changes the size of your posting box and has nothing to do with the actual post the public sees. It is just for your own benefit.

WordPress Discussion Settings

Click on Settings and then Discussion from the left menu bar.

Default Article Settings: I always remove the checkmark next to “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.” The reason I do this is that it can possibly slow your blog down. It is a service that tries to notify a blog that is linking to your article. It doesn’t stop that blog from linking to your post, it just stops your blog from letting the other blog know.

I still leave the checkmark next to “allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) “ because you want other blogs to be able to link to you.

Some of the other features are self explanatory and you can decide for yourself whether to leave them on or off. I leave on “allow people to post comments on new articles” and “comment author must fill out name and e-mail.” If at some point you don’t want anyone posting comments on a particular post you can always turn off the comment feature on that one post at the bottom. By requiring them to fill out their name and email you cut down on spam comments.

E-Mail me whenever: If you want to keep track of the comments that come in, leave the checkmark next to “Anyone posts a comment”  As your blog grows and gets more comments this could be annoying because each comment that comes into your blog will generate a email to you.

If you don’t want comments to go live without first seeing them then leave “A comment is held for moderation.” This means the person can comment but it won’t be live on your blog until you approve it.

You have two ways to see if a comment is waiting to be moderated: check your comment section or have the blog send you an email. If you want the email to be sent to you then you need to leave the checkmark next to “Anyone posts a comment” in the “E-Mail me whenever section.”

Avatars: towards the bottom of the Discussion page is a section concerning Avatars. These are the little thumbnail images that show up next to someone’s comment on your blog. You can turn them off or turn them on and use one of the standard images.

Gravatars; If you are using the Gravatar setup you should go to www.gravatar.com, setup an account and create an image for the email address you use for your user account on your blog. When you respond to a comment your image will show up next to the comment like this. You can change the image that shows there anytime but logging into your Gravatar.com account. Gravatar is used by many blogs and each time you comment on another blog that uses it that same image will show up.

WordPress Permalink Structure Tweak:

The Permalink structure is the single most important tweak you can make to WordPress. By default it will be set to ?P123 which is awful and this is why.

When you create a post and title it for example, My Favorite Summer Recipes, WordPress will make that look something like – www.yourblogname/?P123

This will never help you to get search engine traffic.

Change the permalink structure to Post Name and if that isn’t an option (you may have an older version of WordPress if you don’t see it) then type /%postname%/ in the Custom Structure text box.

Now the URL to your post (example only) would be www.yourblogname/my-favorite-summer-recipes

Much better and much more likely to get search engine traffic because now the URL to your post contains keywords from the title!

These are just some of the WordPress tweaks you can do to help your WordPress blog get off on the right start. Even if you have been blogging for a while, go through the list and see if you have WordPress customized. It will help you get more search engine traffic and be better for your WordPress blog in the long run.

Having a good logo will help your blog stand out from the crowd. Coming up with a logo can be costly and time consuming as you work with a graphic artist to come up with just the right design. Even if you don’t find the exact logo you are looking in our free logo gallery but you can use them to get ideas for creating a custom logo of your own.

To save a logo to your computer to use, position your mouse over the image, click the right mouse button and then click Save Image As or Save Image, depending on what the menu reads.

There is a FREE Word Press plugin that will make your blog Mobile ready in a flash. It’s easy to install and use and once you set it up you never have to do anything else to it.

The Free WordPress app for make your blog Mobile ready is called WPTouch.

WPTouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into app-like viewing and it only requires using the standard browser that comes installed with most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.

There is also a Pro version that costs $49 per site. The Pro version gives you other features like the ability to add your logo and make the mobile view look and have the colors like your site.

When someone visits your site with a mobile device or Smartphone they are typing in the URL in their device’s browser. That means they know exactly what site they are visiting so adding a logo or branding the plugin to make it look more like your site is just an added expense in my opinion.

How to Install the WPTouch Mobile WordPress Plugin

1. Click Add New under Plugins on the left navigation bar in the WordPress Admin area.

2. Search for WPTouch.

3. Click Install Now, click OK and click Activate Now.

How to Use the WPTouch Mobile WordPress Plugin

1. Click WPTouch from the left navigation once you installed it to view all of the settings available.

There is really nothing you have to do but install WP-Touch but you might want to change the language, landing page, site title, exclude certain pages, add a custom Footer message and more. You can even add your Google AdSense ID to support mobile advertising in WPtouch posts and embed Google Analytics stats.

If you need more help, visit the author’s page on the WordPress Plugin site.

WP-Touch is a great plugin to install that will make your WordPress blog mobile ready.

WooBox has come up with a simple, and Free, way, to add Pinterest to your Facebook timeline and it only takes about 5 minutes to set it up.

How to Add Pinterest to your Facebook Fan Page

1. visit woobox.com/pinterest

2. Click the green Install Pinterest Tab button.

3. Choose the Facebook Fan page you want to add the WooBox Pinterest app on. If you have more than one you will have to click the drop-down list to see them.

4. Click Add Page Tab.

5. Type your Pinterest user name on the box provider.

6. Choose whether you would like to link to your main board or just one board. If you want to link to one board only you will have to go to your Pinterest account and copy the URL for that one board.

7. Click in the box next to Show Facebook Like & Send button on Pins if you want readers to be able to share your pictures.

8. Choose whether the Fans need to Like your page to see the Pinterest page or leave the default settings which is what I did.

9. Click Save Settings.

10. Click View tab (top right) too see what it looks like.

How to Change the default Pinterest Button on Facebook

Make sure you are on your main Facebook fan page first and not the new Pinterest tab you just created.

1. Click the arrow that points down so you an edit the button and then click the pencil icon at the top right corner of the Pinterest app.

2. Click Edit Settings.

3. Click Change next to Custom Tab Image. A new window will open.

4. Click Change and upload the image you want to use. Remember, the image needs to be 111px x 74px in size.

You can use one of these Pinterest images if you like. These Pinterest buttons have been created to be the exact size you need.

How to Save An Image: Right-click on the image and then left-click Save As to save it to your computer.

5. Close that window once you are done uploading the image.

6. Type a Custom Tab Name (optional) and click Okay.

Click the Pinterest button and now you will see your Pinterest board shown on a new page on your Facebook fan page.

How to Schedule a Post on Facebook

1. Click in the status box and type your message. You can include a link if you like as usual.

2. Click the calendar icon on the bottom left.

If a message pops up about setting a date that your page was created, do that first.

3. Select the year, month, day, and time you want your post to do live.

Optionally, you can click on Promote if you want to pay to promote your post on Facebook.

4. Click Schedule.

Voila! Your post is ready to go live on Facebook on the scheduled date. Facebook will allow you to schedule posts to go live up to six months in advance, in 15-minute intervals.

5. Click to view the Facebook Post Activity Log.

You can change the date/time or Cancel a schedule post from the drop-down menu located at the far right of the post.

Can you imagine the possibilities? Now you can remind Facebook fans about posts you wrote during the week while you are relaxing over the weekend. You can go away on vacation and have posts going out on Facebook that drive traffic back to your site.

What you don’t want to do is take a super large photo from your camera and try to add it into a blog post and then click the corners to drag it smaller. But, you are saying, I have done that and it works. I can click and drag the photo smaller and it fits into the blog post. Yes, that will work but what you don’t know is that you aren’t changing the physical file size of your photo, you are just shrinking the photo that people see on the screen and this is two different things.

Let me explain

If you are looking for the best photo quality possible you set the quality to high on your camera. That is great if you are planning on taking a photo and printing it out on a color photo printer or taking it somewhere and having it professional printed, but for the Internet this won’t do. Online you want your photos to download as quick as possible so you need the physical file size to be as small as possible. You still want your photo to be clear and you can have it all – a small file size, clear photo, and fast loading photo.

One way to make this happen is to change the setting on your camera to make the photos Web ready but I never do this. I still want my photos to be big on the camera so that they will show as many details as possible. If the photo is super large on the camera, I can put it on my computer and zoom it in and get just the right area of the photo I want to show to the viewer. Maybe I want to show just a portion of the photo and not the whole picture. If the file size is large I can do that by cropping out what I want. So, I still suggest you keep the quality of your photos high on your camera.

The way you make them small enough to still be clear for the viewer online and small enough to load fast is to change the Resolution Pixels to 72 DPI (dots per inch). Photos should always be 72 DPI when putting them online. For printing you could have them 350 DPI but not for online viewing. You also can change the width of the photo. This is important if you are adding a photo to a blog post because you want to make sure the photo fits within the blog post area and doesn’t spill over into the sidebar.

Photo Editing Software

My favorite photo editing software is Adobe Photo Elements. It is designed for home use and is a full-featured program. It is missing some of the professional features that Adobe Photoshop has but you won’t miss them unless you are a professional. I have been using Photo Elements for years and it does everything I need it to. It is a fraction of the cost of Photoshop too, at around $100 ($66 on Amazon.com). It does take a little while to learn how to use it though. You will need to learn what layers are, how to add a layer, how to add text, how to use Levels, Contrast, where to change the image size, change the DPI, and how to change from one tool to another.

How to Change the Image Size with Adobe Photo Elements:

If you have Adobe Photo Elements or are planning on getting it so you can edit and manipulate your photos for your blog, Facebook, or Pinterest, you should learn how to do some basic things. Here is how to change the image size, DPI, and to change a photo to fit a specific size.

Change the Resolution

1. From the Image menu click on Resize and them Image Size.

2. First, change the Resolution to 72 and make sure it is set to Pixels/inch.

3. Then change the size of the image. I make mine around 500 pixels (px) wide for most of my blogs but it all depends on the width of your blog post area.

If you have a wider blog post area you can make the photo larger. There is nothing worse than reading someone’s blog post and their photo spills out of the post into the sidebar area. This is because they made the photo larger than the blog post area.

4. You don’t need to change the height because it will automatically change it when you change the width. That is, if you have Constrain Proportions checked (this is already checked by default). What that does is to keep the image in proportion.

5. Click OK and then save it by clicking on Save As or Save for Web.

Make sure you always save photos for the web as  JPEG, GIF or PNG. For photos I usually make them JPEG (saved as .jpg). I use PNG is I have a photo that has a transparent background. I rarely use GIF because it doesn’t make the photos all that colorful. GIF is great for making animated photos though.

Find Out the Blog Post Area Width:

This is just general help. Each template (Blogger) and theme (WordPress) is going to be slightly different so you might not find the width this way. If you can’t find it then open a photo in Photo Elements or PicMonkey to see the width. Add it to an existing blog post and see if it fits within the blog post area. You may have to fiddle with the size until you know what fits on your blog.

Blogger: Click on Templates from the left menu and then Edit HTML. Click Proceed. Scroll through or do a search (Ctrl+ F) to find #main-wrapper. It should show you a under like 500px or something. That tells you the width of the blog post area.

WordPress: Click Appearance and then Editor from the menus on the left. You will be taken to the Stylesheet. Scroll through or do a search (Ctrl + F) to find the #content. Whatever size it reads should be your blog post width. If it is 500px then your photo would need to be smaller to fit.

Free Online Photo Editing Software:

Pic Monkey is a free online photo editing website. There is no registration or account required to use it. If you loved the now defunct Picnik, PicMonkey is your replacement. It’s faster, more powerful, and easier to use.

How to use PicMonkey

1. Visit www.picmonkey.com

2. Click Edit a photo on the left.

3. Find the photo you want to edit from your computer, click on it and then click Open.

You can then play with the colors or use the Auto Adjust, crop, add text and more.

4. To change the size, click Resize from the bar on the left and change the width size to fit your blog post (see above). Make sure to leave the checkmark in the box next to Keep proportions.

5. When you are finished click Apply.

6. Click Save at the bottom.

7. Now you can set the file size. The smaller the file size the faster it will load on your blog. Most of the time you will want to stick with Ewan.

• Mel: Not great quality but tiny file size
• Ewan: great quality, good file size
• Russell: gorgeous, but large file size

8. Make sure you have given your photo a file name. Never, never, never, use spaces in your file name. If you want it to have keywords because search engines pick up images names, use hyphens like this.

Example: pretty-penguins-in-the-north-pole.jpg

9. Choose whether your file is a .jpg or a .png. Choose whether to save it to your computer or upload to Facebook and click Save Photo.

The faster your photos load, the more likely readers will stick around. The faster your blog loads, the more search engine traffic you will get as Google ranks blogs by popularity and speed. Making your photos fit the blog post area and load fast is something every blogger should do and now you know how!

What does it mean to Promote a post on Facebook?

When you post something on your Facebook Fan page it used to go out to everyone who Liked your Fan page. Every single person that was a fan of your page would see your posts. Overtime Facebook has done some changes to make it so that only people who interact with your page on a regular basis with Likes, Comments and Shares to a status update will see what you write on a regular basis.

To promote a Facebook post you must have at least 400 Facebook Fans on your Fan page. When you click in the status box to write an update you will now see the Promote option. Click on it and you will see how much it will cost you to promote a post. It is based on how many fans you have and there are payment levels.

One of my Facebook fans pages has around 18,000 fans as of the writing of this post so I was offered $10 to $100 campaigns to promote that post.

How much I pay depends on how much I want to spend. I notice that out of the 18,000 fans I have, about 3,000 to 4,000 see my posts on a regular basis. I know this because I can see the Insights and percentages under each post (see below). If a post is already getting 3,000 to 4,000 views I don’t even want to pay anything. If I want to reach a lot more I might consider the higher reach option they gave me.

When you click to write a Facebook status update you will see the Promote option.

You can set your Facebook budget and you can only promote updates you have made up to 3 days old. Older posts cannot be promoted but you can start a new update to promote.

Set the amount you want to pay based on how many fans you want to reach.

Facebook Reach is shown by the Insights at the bottom of a status update you already posted on Facebook.

It is quite interesting to me that out of the 18,000 fans I have only 3,310 saw this post and that includes the Viral portion.

When you click on Viral you it tells you that this number is the amount of people who saw the Facebook post from a story in someone elses timeline, very interesting.

Now, this is downright depressing when you see that the average amount of people who see your Facebook posts is 16%.

When you pay to have a post promote, it does have to be approved first so there is no guarantee you will be allowed to promote until you find that out.

Just like with regular ads and sponsored stories, promoted posts will be reviewed by our Facebook Ads Team, but generally they should start running as soon as they’re created. Just like with posts you don’t promote, your posts will show up in the news feeds of some of the people who like your Page right away. Facebook

You are probably asking, why do I want to give Facebook more money than they already make? As a blogger you have to look at it from a business point of view. Will promoting a post help me get more traffic to my site? Could it help me get more Facebook fans? Could I earn that money back with a post that has an affiliate offer in it?

If Facebook wasn’t free in the first place, a lot of us wouldn’t be getting the kind of traffic we have today. Yes, Facebook has all of the power because they have so many members now. They decide who sees what posts and they have come up with a way to have some of your fans see the posts and not all of the fans. Yes, they have come up with yet another way to make more money and if we buy into it we will be making them richer than they already are. I think you can’t really think of it like that. You have to say, that is them and this is me and my blog and I am going to use whatever tools are out there to help me grow my reach, traffic, fans, and income. If this tool works then I may use it and think of it like that, another tool in my blogging business.

Note: Whether a big brand pays to promote a post shouldn’t have any affect on your own Facebook posts because each account is separate.

Any kind of advertising is a risk. You advertise to get more fans, more traffic, sell more products, get more people to sign up for your email list, or some other reason. You may want people to see an affiliate offer you have on your blog. If you are a mom blogger and use MySavings Media, Logical Media, or Escalate Media, you may be promoting affiliate offers all of the time. They are a great way of making money with your blog. Imagine if one affiliate offer earns you $1.00 for each person who signs up and you post it on Facebook with your regular traffic and earn a certain amount of money, how much more you could make if you paid Facebook to promote the status update. It’s a gamble that could pay off or could tank, you just never know. It’s like buying keywords from Google Adwords. You could get traffic that converts to click-throughs on offers or you could just get traffic that does nothing.

I want to know…

What about fans who hide my updates? Will they see the update I paid to promote?

Why does Facebook say this:

All promoted posts will show in the news feeds of the people who like your Page and, when they interact with the post, to their friends. These posts will be labeled as “Sponsored” in the news feed. Promoted posts will not be shown in the right-hand column of Facebook.

I thought that posting something on Facebook would be seen by more fans if they Liked, Commented, and Shared anyhow. If Facebook is charging for Promotion why is it the same thing?

And this…

If you don’t promote your post, many of the people connected to your Page may still see it. However, by promoting a post, you’re increasing its potential reach so an even larger percentage of your Page audience and the friends of those interacting with your post will see it.

Does that mean that friends of fans will see it? I guess that is what the previous quote meant. Friends of current fans will also be able to see your post. I wonder if the current fan has to interact with the post though. You’re confusing me Facebook.

Facebook answers come from the Facebook Help Center.

Will promoting your Facebook status updates pay off?

There are still too many questions left unanswered and untested at this point. I guess the verdict is still out on Facebook status update Promotions. Until it is tested we will all have to wonder if it is a good thing or worth it. Have you tried Facebook Promote yet? I would love to hear about your experience with it.

If you are a mom and have found this site you are hoping that maybe, just maybe, you can blog like other moms and making money too. It is definitely possible and I will tell you just some of the ways you can make money by becoming a mommy blogger.

You should know though, that some mom bloggers don’t make money at all. Either they just want to blog because it gives them a voice and a way to talk about their daily lives, they don’t know how to monetize their blog, they don’t know how to get traffic, or the topic they choose is harder to monetize. You will find a vast range of money flowing through the mom blogging community. One mom might make $100 a month while another will make $10,000 a month. Yes, there is huge potential for making money in our community if you know how.

Comparing one mom’s blog to another mom’s blog and trying to figure out how much each one makes is a tough and frustrating task for sure. It sure would be nice if there was a simple way to compare because we all want to know if we are progressing and if we are on the right track. But, just like in a “real” job you really don’t know what the other person makes unless they tell you – and probably don’t want to know. Finding out exactly what another mom blogger makes can either make you fell really great or really depressed depending on what your idea of how much money you think will be enough to be a professional, and paid blogger.

Traffic can play a big part into how much a blogger earns. That is, if you are depending on your income coming from Adsense, affiliate networks or ad networks. If you are a mom with a blog and have 100 visits a day, you are going to make less than a mom blogger who has 5,000 visits each day if you are trying to earn money with Adsense and ad networks. The more traffic you have, the more money you can make.  That is why we are all looking for traffic and trying to figure out how to get it.

It works the same way with a traditional “brick and mortar” business who needs physical bodies coming in the door. Some shoppers will buy and others will browse. Only a percentage will help you make money for your business and only a percentage of visitors will make money for your blog so the more traffic is better.

Also, the topic that you write about has a lot to do with whether you will make a lot of money or a little bit of money using the ad networks mentioned above. It also can decide how much traffic that blog gets. If a mom blogger picks a broad topic that is highly saturated in the blogging world (Blogosphere) then the amount of traffic she gets could be diminished because of so much competition on the topic. Less traffic means less income.

If you are a mom blogger and want to make money blogging or make more than you are now with your blog you will want to focus your topic into a more narrow niche. Instead of trying to grab all of the traffic out there spend time getting all of the traffic for a smaller niche and it will help you become more successful. Work on one smaller niche and then branch out overtime. It is less overwhelming and you will be rewarded faster.

Example: If you write about coupons and grocery store savings why not focus in on several specific grocery store chains or write about deals in your state. This is how you narrow down your blog’s topic and get more targeted readers and traffic. You could still add general coupons, deals, and freebies but your main focus would be on the local deals. That local focus will help you get more traffic in a saturated topic.

Some of the ways moms make money with their blogs:

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting a product or service through an ad or link within a post and having the reader pass through your site to another and make either a purchase or fill out an offer form. You make a flat amount of money when they fill out the form – called a lead – or a percentage if the reader makes a purchase – called a sale.

Affiliate marketing can be a huge money maker. The amount of money you make is decided by the company you are promoting. A lead can go for 20 cent up to $20.00. Many leads average around $1.50. You make this amount for each and every person who fills out the offer form on the landing site you send your reader to. Sales are a paid by a percentage of the total (does not usually include shipping). You could make from 2% to 10% (or potentially more) depending on what the company promoting the product or service wants to offer you.

Google Adsense

When a person or company wants to advertise on Google to get their site to appear at the top of the search engine they will often buy keywords using Google Adwords. They bid on keywords and build ads around that keyword. Then their text ad appears at the top and sidebar of Google.com when someone types that keyword or phrase into Google.

Google allows blog and website owners to embed some HTML code to make those ads appear on their sites as well. Ads are generated by what the blog or website owner writes. This comes through the Google Adsense platform. You make money when a reader or visitor clicks on an ad – called CPA or Cost Per Acquisition (or Action).

What you are earning is a percentage of what the person or company pad to get their ad shown. No one knows for sure how much you earn but it has been mentioned that you earn 25% of the total.

So if an ad cost someone $1.50 then you would make 37 cent for that click. Some ads cost a lot more. It all depends on the topic that keyword is centered around. A keyword phrase like “how to make money” could cost the person $10.00 for one click through and then you would make $2.50 from just one click through. Not every blog topic does well with Adsense though so you have to test out whether it will work for you.

It is definitely possible to earn a living just through Adsense but your blog needs to be completely optimized or the ads won’t generate correctly. Where you place your Adsense ads on the blog makes a huge difference too.

Coupons

There are many sites you can join that will allow you to promote their coupons and when a user clicks and prints that coupon you make money. However, one click and print isn’t enough to even buy a cup of coffee. One coupon printed from your site will earn you from 2 to 4 cent. You need a lot of visitors to make money from online printable coupons.

Paid Posts

Some sites will actually pay you money if you write a post. Whenever you do accept payment for a post you would want to be sure you know who is asking you to write this post and if they want you to include a link to their site make sure it is to a good site and not a link farm or one that is on the shady side. Sending links out from your blog to sites like that can actually hurt your ranking.

If someone comes to you directly to buy a post on your site you can charge whatever you want. I have charged $150 for an article to be put on my site and I have heard that $250 isn’t too much to ask. It all depends on how much traffic your blog gets and how important your blog ranks.

There are sites you can join that will pay you $2, $5, or $10 to post articles on your mom blog but you are also in competition with other bloggers to see who is chosen. This is a viable way of getting paid posts for your site if no one is directly coming to you asking for a paid post.

In-Text Link Ads

This is another valid way mom bloggers make money. There are some reputable companies out there that you can sign up with to get started. You will embed a piece of HTML code in your site (this is why it is so important to know a little bit about HTML) that will pull the advertisements from their server. You may have seen these in-text links on other sites. Sometimes the links will have a double underline and when you hover you mouse over them an ad pops up.

You earn a flat fee for the click-throughs from these types of ads but I don’t have any figures to give you for this right now.

Working with Brands

If you build up a good reputation and have influence as a blogger you could potentially work with brands to be part of campaigns and earn money. This type of money-making effort is different than making money with ads and networks. It requires you to be more social and interact with readers on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and anywhere else there is a potential to get your blog seen.

It takes time to build up your audience and have a unique voice so the brands will find what you write about as value to them. You have to seek out brands to work with and in the beginning you will need to start small. You may have to review products and host giveaways on your site. You may not make any money at all and only get free products or get invited to an event once and awhile. Brands only pay a small percentage of bloggers to be an Ambassador for them.

Direct Advertising

Once you start to have good traffic on your blog and companies see that you have traffic that you can send to them you can start charging for ads to be placed directly on your site. It is up to you as to how much you charge for these ads. The 125 x 125 small square ads might go for $25 a month but if you start to have thousands of visits a day you could charge $100 or more for those ads. This is where you start to negotiate.

Ads near the top of the page – above the fold – will usually go for more because that is prime real estate property. Every business wants to be seen at the top of the page. as you go down the page the value goes down because companies know readers don’t always make it to the bottom of a page. So you raise the rates a bit. The potential for direct advertising can be very lucrative.

As I mentioned, you will never make money on your blog without some kind of traffic. And, the more traffic you have the better. So, your prime objective should be spending time learning how to get that traffic. Once you get people to your site the sky is the limit for making money with your mom blog.

I will get into each way of making money in depth in future articles so stick around for that. I will show you how you can sign up for Ad Networks, embed HTML code, and start making money with your mom blog from each of these avenues and others as well. You don’t have to be locked into just one way of making money when there are so many options out there to try.

Terms used in this article:

• Affiliate Marketing: promoting products or services on your blog or website to make money through sales or leads
• Brick and Mortar: a physical store you go into like Walmart, TJMaxx, etc.
• Monetizing: whatever you do to make money on your blog or website
• Blogosphere: the collective blog community
• Niche: The main topic of our blog or website.
• Leads: When you send a reader to another site through an ad and they sign up for an offer.
• CPA: Stands for Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action. When a reader does an action, usually by clicking, on ad.