So you started a new blog, and now you want to start blogging for money? 

That’s great!…BUT…

One thing I see bloggers do, and maybe do without realizing it is “Stealing Their Own Sales”.

I know your thinking, “John, I would NEVER steal my own sale that’s silly”  and normally this is true, but what if your stealing your own sales and not even realize  your doing it?

Affiliate Products vs AdSense

Many bloggers who are blogging for money choose affiliate products to sell on their site, I do this too and it’s a great way to make money.

So is Google adsense, simple quick way to make money on a blog without much effort.

Ok John I don’t see the issue.. Well my friend here is the issue. Have you really looked at what google ads are being displayed on your blog?

Chances are they are the same or at the least in the SAME niche as your blog and of your affiliate products you sell.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather make a 20, 30 or even 50% commission on a affiliate sale then a 20, 30 cents on a Google ad click.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Adsense is a great way to make money on your blog, you just need to keep your eye on what ads are being displayed.

I stopped running Adsense on my blog, instead I run Chitika Ads

The cool thing about Chitika is the ads only show on your blog when that visitor comes from Google search, and the ad will show products that target their search.

Example: search for dog collars, when they get to your blog, the ad will show them ONLY dog collar products.

This way your regular readers won’t see the ad…Very Cool!

Selling Ad Space vs Affiliate Products

Now this is pretty much the same as affiliate products vs adsense, but the main difference is selling ad space can make you a nice monthly income.  So it’s hard to say no to selling ads on your blog. 

With this again you just need to watch for what products or services you are showing ads for and what your affiliate products are.

You don’t want to lose aff sales to your banner ads and you don’t want to lose banner ad sales to your affiliate products because then your ads will not renew month after month if they don’t see results.

How to fix this you ask? Simple, run different affiliate products that don’t directly compete with your banner ads. This isn’t hard since there are 100’s of affiliate products and services in every niche to promote.

Your OWN Products vs Affiliate Products and Ad Space

Ok, this is the BIG NO NO!

Once you have your own product or service to sell then I recommend you stop selling ad space and fill it with your own product ads.

Yes selling ad space is a nice way to make a monthly, but in the long run, selling your OWN product and filling your ad space with your OWN ads will make you a lot more money in the long run.

It will also brand you a leader in your niche, give you credibility, and over make you and your blog a place people will gravitate to.

If your serious about blogging for money, then YOU want this!

This applies to affiliate products too. The way to do this when you have a product to sell of your own, it’s ok to also promote other affiliate products just make sure they are NOT in competition with your product.

I would much rather make 100% of a product sale then a 20% commission, Wouldn’t You?

Example: If you sell your own SEO book, then you obviously do not want to have a affiliate product anywhere on your site that will compete with your own product. 

Well there are 3 ways to stop stealing your own sales and be more successful at blogging for money.

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Everyone today wants to make money blogging. Blogs are very simple to setup and anyone with a business or product should have a blog. With a blog you can talk about anything you like, share your thoughts on different topics, you can also use a blog to promote your business or products to make you extra income online.

How can you really make money blogging?

Here are simple and effective ways to make a profit from your blog.

Set Up Your Own Blog

It’s easy to set up a blog, there is a lot great info online on how to do this, you can find some here if you look up   You should go with hosting your own blog with wordpress. This gives you full control of what you want your blog to do.

Choose Your Niche For Your Blog

You need to know what you blog will focus on, if you have a blog about scuba diving, then all your content, ads, affiliate products SHOULD be all about scuba diving, makes sense right?

This way when people come to your blog and are looking for anything to do with scuba, then you want them to see a lot of info about scuba. 

This is especially true with search engine traffic, they are searching for something specific, they want info on that search so if they come to your site from Google and are looking to buy a wet suit, then you want them to know they came to the right site.

Introduce Your Blog To The Online World

Ok if you have read my blog, you know that I am a fan of social media, primarily Twitter. If you are on twitter you can find me at @JohnAguiar

Once you have a nice blog set up and you are reading to make money blogging then it is time to promote promote promote.

Social media sites like facebook, Linkdin, Twitter, and 100 others are a great way to find targeted traffic for your new blog.

You can find people with the same interests as you, and your blog have like our example earlier of a scuba diving blog. You can search these sites and find people, groups to connect with are also into scuba. Now you just need to join the conversation and slowly they will visit your blog.

Right now twitter is the best free way to get targeted traffic to your blog. I am in the process of releasing a twitter e-book on how I got over 50,000 followers and drive 100-300 targeted people to my block each day, using ONLY free services and techniques.

Now the bad news about social media.

To get the MOST out of it you will need to “be there” and WORK! 

Yes I know we are all here to work less and make more, but social media only works if you put the time into it.  I use some great FREE tools to automate “some” tasks and that is fine, makes me more efficient, but you can not automate it all!

Ex: I use one site to post one message to about 25 sites all at once, this is a huge help since now I don’t have to sign into twitter, facebook, linkdin, myspace etc..

I promise you if you try to use a fully automated twitter program you will not get the results you really want from twitter.

Once you have all this in place it really isn’t hard to make money blogging. All you need is a blog to start. 

It’s 9am do you know where your blog is?

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The old way to make money with a blog was to sell ad space, and for some bloggers like John Chow this is possible.

But for the rest of the bloggers out there this may never be the case for you. Since to sell ad space you will need A LOT of traffic, and have that traffic be consistent.

Is it possible? Of course it is, but so is me winning the Megabucks lol but the chance of that happening are slim.

How Can You Make Money With Your Blog?

•    You need good quality content, that helps people with issues they have.

•    Be personable, be trustworthy, build relationships with your readers.

•    Most important, you need to think like a Internet Marketer.

Now when I say think like a IM that doesn’t mean put out crappy products once a month or annoy people with a million emails a week,  instead do some of what a IM’r does.

Build Your Email List

This means offer something free that has value and ask for their email, that way you can control what and when you can email your reader  thru “in a nice way” new updates and offers. I recommend Aweber for this.

Sell Your Own Product

The best way to be a authoriy in your niche is to sell your own product, or service, it is also the best way to make real money with your blog.

Ask For The Sale

Ok so your not a salesman?  That’s ok the best part of having a blog is that asking for the sale is pretty painless if…

If you have been offering quality content that helps people, your building relationships with your readers and your being real and trustworthy.

By the time you ask for the sale, most of your readers will be smiling with their card out ready to buy

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money with your blog, and if you follow these few simple steps and think a little bit like a internet marketer you will have no problem succeeding.

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Today I wanted to share some browser tools to make you a better blogger. Sometimes writing a post and staying on a posting schedule can be pretty hard, I know I have a life outside of my blog, and I’m sure you do to

So here are 15 of my favorite Firefox plugins that I use everyday, and I recommend you use them to make you a better blogger.  Oh yea and for the IE, Safari and Chrome users, this list is for you to since most of these plugins are compatible.

In the list I will point out my ALL TIME favs..that I would never leave home without.

ScribeFire Blog Editor

ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

Zemanta

Content recommendations while you write. Zemanta helps you enhance you blogs with relevant images, videos, links or tags. Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and others.

TOP: Now Zemanta is a great plugin, it does everything I need right in my blog dashboard or on Windows Writer. Best part is I can add my own related posts without needing a Wordpress plugin.

Apture

Add photos and video to your blog with one click. Easily search and embed media from over 50+ sources. Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Google Street view and many more are supported.

Clipmarks

Clipmarks lets you clip and share specific parts of articles, blog posts or anything else you read on the web. With our newly integrated Amplify service, you can post clips directly to Twitter or Facebook – or share them on clipmarks.com and more

Shareaholic for Firefox

The ultimate add-on for the link sharing addict! Works with 60+ services including Twitter, Facebook, Google Gmail, Delicious, LinkedIn, etc. Shareaholic makes sharing online much better, faster & easier dramatically enhancing your ..

Screengrab

Screengrab! saves webpages as images… It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.

TOP: I use screengrab about 20 times a day, I think I’m addicted..lol  But it is one of those tools that you don’t think you need till you have it.

Tab Mix Plus

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager.

TOP: I like tab mix since I sometimes have 20-40 tabs open this helps me arrange and manage all my tabs better then Firefox’s default tabbing system.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Identify

A extension that can be used to explorer an individuals combined web identity across social network/media sites.

SEO Link Analysis

Enriches the link data in Google Webmaster Tools & Yahoo! Site Explorer by showing the PageRank of the linking page, the anchor text user and whether the link is nofollowed or not.

PDF Download

Use PDF Download to do whatever you like with PDF files on the Web. Regain control and eliminate browser problems, view PDFs directly in Firefox as HTML, and use the all-new Web-to-PDF toolbar to save and share Web pages as high-quality PDF files.

TOP: Pdf downloader makes downloading a pdf so easy and fast, instead of the pain in the ass old way. No more freezing FF just click and it’s downloaded, a great tool especially now since everyone is offering a free ebook to download.

DashBlog

DashBlog lets you quickly collect videos, images, text/quotes, songs and screen-captures from any web page and publish them to your blog (word press, blogger/blogspot, tumblr) and/or twitter.

Blog This in Windows Live Writer

Adds a button to Firefox which starts a new Windows Live Writer blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. Blog the whole page, or just selected snippets. Interacts with other registered plugins to parse and structure web content where appropriate. Blog quickly when you find something of interest on the web.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page… Firebug 1.4 requires Firefox 3.0 or higher.

OnlyWire – Social Networking Auto-Submitter

Submit content to over 30 social networking sites with one button click. Join thousands of publishers and bloggers using OnlyWire’s free tools to streamline the social networking submission process.

This is my #1 plugin hands down!…This is my little FREE secret weapon to getting ranked pretty well for my keywords against HUGE competition with my young blog.

I’m sure a few of you already know about Onlywire but havn’t put it to use.  I’m telling you now, if you are on a budget and can’t afford a stand alone bookmarking software then Onlywire has to be one of your new tools to use!

Ok that’s my list, and yes there are 100’s of FF plugins besides these, but these are my top 15, that I use on a regular basis. Now with these plugins you will be on your wat to being a better blogger, and help you be efficient and keep you on a regular posting schedule.

What you think of my list? Any plugins you would have added?

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