The most common forms of monetizing a blog are Adsense and Clickbank.  Adsense is an easy add to a blog sidebar but if you only have a blog on marketing or blogging, or you have a niche where advertisers do not pay high for a keyword or you don’t have a lot of traffic – then you’ll be lucky to get paid every six months from Adsense. Not one of the best forms of monetization for these scenarios, although for a good niche on a blog with high traffic – it’s good.

Clickbank products are a much better form of monetization as the payout of commission from the sale of a Clickbank product can be very lucrative.

Cautionary Note Regarding Disclosure and Reviews

First let me caution the uninitiated about two important facts regarding affiliate marketing.

If you value your reputation and your business – ONLY recommend Clickbank products that you know will give value to your readers. If you have not personally bought and used the product – do some basic research and read reviews ( real ones) from people who HAVE, before you recommend them.

Be aware that in November web law changed regarding reviews and affiliate products and a disclosure off some sort is now compulsory that says that if the customer does buy the product through your affiliate link, you gain a commission from that purchase.

That said, the main problem with Clickbank products  is the time it takes to research new products, protect your link and add the product information to a blog post, especially as php folder redirects don’t work well with a php blog platform like Wordpress. ( I have a new plugin to try and solve this to try out)

A swift solution to quickly add related  Clickbank products is to use the Wordpress Affiliate Plugin.

NB. This is not a free plugin and should you purchase the plugin through a link on this page I make a commission . Thanks!

To use the carpenter analogy – you work faster and more effectively when you are using the right tools for the job. Plugins make things easier to do. Anything that automates something is saving you time.

The Wordpress Affiliate Plugin is very inexpensive, when you consider that one or two sales will pay for it. It gives you a professional looking display and you don’t have to mess around cloaking links for multiple products or tossing up between choosing products for post links or text linking in sidebar displays.

The Wordpress Affiliate Plugin is a good blog monetization tool.

It is a tool you have to be careful with -but what isn’t? Ask any carpenter about how to use a sharp chisel or a drop saw and they’ll answer “carefully”! But when you don’t use the right tools it will take you that much longer to achieve good results.

The plugin creator, Nikola Janovic, is touted as an expert for “set it and forget it” tools for WordPress blogs.  He’s also created a program that automatically uploads content to your blog. Now he has one that automatically monetizes your blog with Clickbank ads.

Nikola Janovic offers a 30 day test drive of his WordPress Affiliate Clickbank plugin. You’ll get free technical support from Nikola but there is no ongoing cost, free lifetime upgrades and you can install it on as many WordPress blogs as you’d like.

See the Wordpress affiliate plugin at work

You can see the plugin working by scrolling to the bottom of this post. You can also watch the video on his site to see how slick and professional-looking these ads are. They don’t look like Adsense ads or any other ads out there (that people are mostly blind to by now). They are simple, informative links that attract people to click on them.

It takes only a few seconds to upload and install this plugin and another minute to choose some settings. That’s it. Then each time you write a post the plugin will automatically insert relevant Clickbank ads with your affiliate ID automatically embedded in the link.

You can choose what to title these links. The default is Related Products, I have not changed this. You can choose how many links to display. You can also choose keywords related to tags on your blog.

I purchased the Wordpress Affiliate Plugin at the end of last month and I have only just installed it on this blog, so I cannot say more at this stage but I will revisit this with a review when I see how the results pan out.

I am unsure at this stage if automated “related product” links are right for this blog yet but what’s right for me and what’s right for you are two different things.  The tool is good and if it works as described it will speed up the monetization process for bloggers in many different fields.

OK – lets see what happens when I save this post! …

Hmm… I like it. It’s unobtrusive and classy and I think, it may actually add value to this blog by pointing to products people may be unaware of.

By the way, as a bonus Nikola Janovic includes 20 WordPress video tutorials that will show you step by step how to set up a WordPress blog and fully monetize it. So for not yet established bloggers, you can’t help but benefit from watching these videos.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Wordpress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.