Build an Audience for Your Blog

First, in order to make good money with ads, your blog needs an audience. Advertisers will be less likely to work with you if your website is brand new and has no significant traffic (which means no potential customers).

So the first step is honing your blog idea, audience, creating consistent content, and sharing it. Here are some resources to help you grow an audience from scratch:

• How to Start a Blog in a Day
• How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content for Your Blog in a Day

Building your audience is painstaking and takes a long time, but it pays off. To start off on the right foot, you should have an audience in mind, a topic that’s as specific as possible (remember it’s important to be in a niche that isn’t too saturated with other blog content), and publish regularly at the best quality you can.

The more traffic and loyalty you can muster, the better your ads will perform and the more you’ll make.

Find Advertising Options that Work with Your Content

Even if you don’t have an audience yet, there are some options such as Google AdSense that will let you start hosting ads right away. Just don’t expect them to perform very well without any users.

Regardless, there are 3 basic avenues you can go down for advertising:

• Affiliate marketing networks
• Creating relationships with individual companies
• Blog advertising platforms like AdSense

Affiliate Marketing Networks

What is affiliate marketing? It’s basically when a blogger references, reviews, or promotes a product for another company, and shares in the profits if a sale is made from their referral.

So in this scenario, you’re part of an affiliate program for a company and they provide you with ads and trackable links that you can host on your website or integrate into your content. Ideally, these products are directly related to your content and interest your audience. When one of your readers clicks the link or ad, the affiliate marketing network tracks that interaction and logs that it was a referral from your site. When the purchase is made, you get paid a commission.

The affiliate marketing network provides the technology and the interface for affiliates and companies to find each other and create advertising strategies. Many networks offer a variety of link building tools and advertising widgets.

For example, AvantLink, an affiliate marketing network, offers a custom link builder tool plus a WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate many advertising features into your website.

Each affiliate network has different requirements for publishers, and a different set of advertisers to work with. You can find out a lot by signing up and searching for products related to your content. Here are some great affiliate networks to try:

• AvantLink
• CJAffiliate
• Impact Radius
• Pepperjam

Go Directly to Companies You’d Like to Work With

Another option is to reach out to companies you’d like to work with directly. Just search the company’s name with affiliate program in Google. Here’s an example of an affiliate program page on the Cotopaxi website.

Use Blog-specific Advertising Tools

Just like Google’s AdSense, there are many blog-specific advertising tools available for serving ads or adding affiliate links to your website that are separate from the big affiliate networks.

Here’s a list of options:

• Crispad
• Blogads
• Amazon Associates

Especially if you’re starting out with product reviews on items you’ve purchased, Amazon Associates is a great starting point. You can review anything you buy on Amazon and get paid a commission on products you help sell with a referral.

Placing Advertisements On Your Website—The Technical Part

With WordPress, placing advertisements is about as easy as it gets. You can place image and text ads anywhere on your website that features widgets, such as a sidebar, header, or footer area. You can also place ads directly into your WordPress blog posts or pages pretty easily.

Placing Ads with Widgets

Just about any affiliate ad you’ll find will give you an html snippet that you can copy and paste right into your site. Here’s an example from AdSense.

Here is the AdSense code snippet you’ll copy to implement the ad. Either copy and paste it into a notepad or keep this page open and navigate to your WordPress dashboard. You can add widgets by going to Appearance > Customize.

Next, select Widgets from the sidebar menu.

From the widgets menu, you can choose the area of your website where you’d like the ad to display. Then simply scroll down until you find the Custom HTML widget. You’ll paste your code into this widget, and your ad should preview to the right. When you’re done, click Save and Publish and you’re good to go.

Placing Ads or Links in a WordPress Post or Page

Now, you can also embed most ads into your WordPress posts and pages. When in the post or page editor, you can switch the editor from visual to text to paste in raw html.

The same method works for custom links or image ads. This enables you to add in referrals to products and deals when it’s most relevant, as well as serving more generic ads in your blog’s sidebar.

If you run into issues with placing ads, our WP Live WordPress experts can help walk you through it, and teach you any WordPress tips and tricks you want to learn. Check it out here.

1. How-to Articles

The latest tech devices are always popular purchases, during the holidays and beyond. One way to capture affiliate commissions for these often expensive items, such as the iPhone X or Amazon Echo, is by providing helpful information about their use.

As a resource for new owners, a how-to guide is an opportunity to upsell accessories and related items. Your guide may also convince someone to buy a new iPhone or Amazon Echo after the holidays, providing you with an even bigger affiliate commission.

2. Popular Item Lists

Lists of popular or themed gift ideas are often successful during the holidays and can work for you as an affiliate marketer after the holidays. Shoppers will be interested to see what they may have missed during the busier shopping season, and your list can point them to the holidays’ most popular gifts. Themed product lists make discovery even easier for potential customers. You can center product lists around interests, such as music or food, age groups, or a variety of other categories.

3. Post-Holiday Contests

Consumers may be tired of all the advertisements they’ve been bombarded with during the holidays. They may also be looking to save money after the biggest spending season of the—but you can still capture their attention with a contest. A giveaway or competition on your website or social media represents the opportunity to win something for your website visitors—and provides you with the opportunity to upsell some products.

4. New Year’s Motivations

The next big sales emphasis in early 2018 will be products related to New Year’s resolutions. Many people establish goals to change their lives as the year begins, whether they want to be more healthy, advance their career or spend more time with loved ones. Thinking about the motivations your audience will have to make changes in 2018 will help you identify the right products that will lead to affiliate sales.

There are plenty of opportunities to make affiliate commissions after the holidays. With how-to guides, lists of popular items and other strategies, you can continue to make a profit as an affiliate marketer heading into the new year.