Affiliates

The Secret to Blogging is in the Long Tail

In my post about this blog being the blog of the month, I mentioned that DigitalOrder made $330 dollars last month and I enticed yall to try and find the ads that made me that money. Since the only guess’ I recieved were the obvious ads, Adsense and CJ banners, that actually didn’t make money, I decided to do a post on my “secret” source of income. Hint:Its not really a secret its commonsense.

The Tail
Because of how a blog works, After only a few months of blogging you end up with a long string of posts on a variety subjects. Sadly, alot of blogs previous posts or tails go to waste never to be seen again. Though hopefully after reading this you’ll show off your tail and use it to increase conversions.

How to use your Tail?
To use your blogs tail it requires a mix of SEO, Comment links, Affiliates and redirects.

1. SEO-On the seo side you should be using a plugin like All-In-One Seo to make WP a bit more seo friendly by noindexing the archives, tags, categories. This will not only rank your homepage a bit better in the google index but will also help to index your previous posts for there keywords as well.

2.Linking- I know this is hard but for each post try to get at least one or two linkbacks to the post page for the keyword(s) it covers. Just linking to your back posts from within other posts will help with this as long as you dont ping your self and have All in one SEO installed correctly.

3. Affiliates- The key to monetizing the tail posts is with a good affiliate program. My favorite is Commision Junction because most of the name brands use them but there are other good networks like azoogle or share-a-sale and to properly monetize your tail you will probally end up using multiple affiliate programs depending on the specific content of the post i.e. if the post is about Apple Computers you would need to use cj to get the affiliate link as thats the network apple uses.

4.Redirects- Alot of blogs focus their monetization efforts primarily on the front page or sidebar, posting ads general to the blogs subject but to make money off your previous posts you will need to place the relevant affiliate links you gained in step 3 into the post itself, more so than you would with the posts on the front page. But because SEO is very important you can’t just place naked affiliate links so mask all your affiliate links with redirects.

Stats
You should of course be using an ad program like Analytics that tells you what keywords people reaching your site are searching for and which posts of yours they are lead to. If you are keeping track of those type of stats you should be able to use the above steps to monetize your tails traffic.

Conclusion:As you see, not much of a secret, but important and profitable just the same. So get to monetizing your tail.