About the author: George is a freelance copywriter and SEO marketer with over 2 years of experience. He is also the editor for http://www.seohint.com
While most bloggers would agree that contextual advertising conducted through services like AdSense or YPN is the easiest to set up, it is just as easy to observe that especially for start up blogs, with a low amount of traffic, they bring a very small income.
The alternatives described in this article tend to provide a higher income for new blogs and best of all they can be used in parallel with the ads I previously mentioned.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing presents the highest potential revenue of any known method. The problems though associated with it, tend to make it not very popular among bloggers. To be able to solve these issues, we must first identify them:
- The difficulty of finding the adequate offers to match your blog
- The perceived reticence that your readers have to click affiliate links
- The erratic income pattern associated with affiliate marketing
- Untrustworthy reputation of some of the merchants dealing in the affiliate world
- The hurdle of transforming your visitors into buyers
Finding the adequate deals to match your blog's content is actually easier than you think. Simply make a list of all the websites you frequent and which also have a revenue model based on direct purchases. You will find out that most of them have an affiliate program. I strongly recommend against using networks such as ClickBank or Commission Junction, as most of the products there will end up disappointing your readers and thus give your blog a negative image.
The reticence of the average web surfer to click affiliate links and using a simple anchor text to hide the link is not enough nowadays, when phishing schemes are an everyday reality. To bypass this issue, you have 3 alternatives:
- Be straightforward about it. Put the affiliate link without any anchor text and make sure to mention that you are part of the affiliate network. A text sounding like:
Quote:
And oh yeah, if you click this link, you'll make me 5 bucks richer 
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is a good example. This works especially well if your reader base is tech savvy and if they are involved in the affiliate market themselves and thus have a more accurate view of what affiliate links mean.
- Slight deception. A rather nasty trick to pull, but effective nonetheless, especially if your reader base is not particularly tech savvy. Let me give you an example. Let's say that your affiliate link comes as it follows: Now if you use the following code:
Quote:
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<a href="http://www.example.com/?12345">http://www.example.com</a>
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the reader will be less likely to look at the bottom of the page as the anchor text looks like a genuine link.
- Complete deception. This works well for all categories of readers, but keep in mind that it might be considered as a serious break of the netiquette. Complete deception can be achieved by URL obfuscation. The technique involves the usage of a script language and there are tons of examples you can find on the web, simply do a Google search "URL obfuscation". The text appearing on the bottom of the web browser must be the exact URL of the page you are promoting and on which the reader will land when clicking, without the affiliate ID. In our case it should be:
The erratic income pattern that comes with the affiliate market is something you must live with. To better cope with it, it is recommendable that you diversify your streams of income or run multiple blogs in different niches.
This leaves the most important hurdle: the difficulty of transforming your readers into buyers. The best way to bypass this issue is to carefully choose affiliate programs that pay when a reader makes an action like registering or subscribing to a newsletter, instead of purchasing.
Link Sales
Selling links is a valid strategy to diversify your income streams, especially since it tends to bring a consistent monthly income, which is relatively unaffected by erratic behavior. There are though some downsides associated with this field too:
- This method can only bring a low income for starting blogs. The most major of the hurdles. It is important though to realize that quite often the income brought this way is higher than that supplied by contextual advertising and that this technique is considered to be a source of supplemental income, rather than the main one.
- The difficulty of finding customers.
- The inherent instability and time consumption that comes when dealing directly with people.
The last two points are easier to solve than you imagine. You will find that most webmaster forums have a very active market dealing with link sales. Keep in mind though, that if you are selling links within posts, the custom is to make these links permanent. If you sell site wide links, it is acceptable to sell them on a monthly basis. Also it is extremely important that once a deal is made you stick to it. Even if you sell your site afterwards, make the obligations you have clear to the buyer so he or she can respect them.
If this doesn't seem appealing enough to you, you can use an intermediary to take care of this issue.
Text Link Ads is a good example of such a service (and yes this is an affiliate link). They take quite a consistent fee on the income made (50%), but the links they offer are automatically inserted via copy/paste code and they take care of the entire marketing process. As an example, for the blog I have which has about 400 backlinks and an Alexa rating in the 800.000-900.000 range, they offer 14$ for posting 4 links in a single post (not site wide) for a single month. After your blog gets an established Page Rank of 4 or 5, the sum jumps consistently to around 70$.
As an overall strategy though, I recommend using multiple sources to obtain link sales as that is the safest method to guarantee a stable income.
Conclusion
As you see each method has its unique strengths and weaknesses. The two alternatives I described sit on the opposite sides of the spectrum of monetization options and both have their place in any commercial blog.
Bottom line is that you should never rely on a single income stream and even better would be to never rely on a single website. A network of blogs, each earning income through various methods is the best way to reduce the risk of an online venture.
