Retiring the blog for now

Being that this blog is the most time consuming of all four of my blogs and generates the least traffic/interest of them all, I decided for the time being to stop posting. There were really only a handful of posts left: I wanted to go through all the different gadgets and widgets you could place on the page, as well as talk about marketing the blog. So until there is a renewed interest in the very topic of blogging for $$$, this will be my last post on this blog (for now). It's possible that at some point in the future I'll be soooo bored and well-rested and willing to invest the time to do numerous screen grabs of all the different gadgets and explain what they do. But for now, since I'm not getting any comments, feedback, or even the awareness that people are reading, it seems pointless and a waste of time. Which is ironic - I'm blogging about blogging but it's not a hot blog. HA! However, the autism parenting blog is still going strong, and the JM vids is super easy to update so I update it daily. I should really pay more attention to the recipes blog but I'm very busy these days. So this blog, which I originally started to help others start blogs of their own, proved to be the least interesting of all - though I have to admit that several people did start  blogs because of my blogs. Personally, I learned and figured out various shortcuts / features / gadgetry things by checking out the help section in blogger, but also due to my good friend of www.confident-cook.com who taught me a few tricks. In any event, this is goodbye until I have more interest in writing here or until there is a demand for continued posts. Ciao. Over and out.

Building Amazon Links on your blog

By now, I'm hoping you already received your acceptance as an Amazon Affiliate. So in this post I will teach you how to build and place amazon affiliate links.

There are basically 3 types of amazon links you can have on your site: Specific item links, Widgets, and banners.

For specific item links, you put them in during your blog posts. Let's say your blog is all about cameras and accessories. So now you're writing a blog entry about SD cards. Find the item you're writing about, and you can now put it in either as a text link or a picture box.

Suppose you want to put in a link to a general search page for SD cards.

Scroll up to the top of the page where your Amazon Associates toolbar is found. Click on "Link to this page".

Making Money Part 2: Become an Amazon Affiliate

I know I've neglected this blog, and there have been... one complaint. :) Well, that is because I was busy... blogging! Running four blogs takes work. Since there doesn't seem to be an interest in this blog anyway - I don't know of one person who started blogging or fixed up their blog according to my painstaking step-by-step instructions - I let it slide. But tonight I'm going to take your blog a step further and discuss Amazon Affiliates. For that is the backbone behind Niche Marketing and Money Blogging.

Let me make it clear from the outset: Affiliate Marketing isn't for the faint of heart. I thought I have what it takes; I'm putting in endless hours in my blogs; yet I'm barely making any sales. But I know why: My blogs aren't quite what Affiliate blogs should look like. A real Amazon  Affiliate blog is about picking a topic, sticking to it, and writing about it.

For instance, you can decide to dedicate the blog entirely to printers. Or to laptop computers. Or tablet computers. Or childrens board games. Or household appliances. It doesn't have to be something you're remotely familiar with. You just have to be a good writer and researcher and have tenacity and determination.

I didn't go down that route. I chose to write about my life and link up to products that have helped me. It wasn't the wisest route money-wise; how many people do you really know who want to purchase that particular product I'm writing about? Plus, I haven't quite managed to reach out to the autism community in the way I really hoped to. That is because I'm not spending enough time reading other autism blogs and commenting on it, or cultivating a community of commentors. I actually did strike it big last week with one huge post which got people visiting in droves and commenting. But more on this topic later; I will discuss how to get your word out and get hits much later. Today we're going to talk about Amazon Affiliate.

Your first step is to actually become an Amazon Affiliate. Before you do that, choose a niche topic, a product that you think you want to promote. If you're not doing an actual niche blog, but want to write about random topics and just stick in some products here and there, like I do, just make sure your blog already has a few posts. The Amazon Associates division does check out your blog before deciding whether to accept you as an Amazon Associate, so your blog should at least look a tad presentable before you hand in your application.

Navigating Amazon's site to locate the link to sign up as an affiliate is suprisingly confusing. I surfed and searched until I found it. After that, applying was pretty much a breeze, and I had to wait a few days for an acceptance email.

Here is a link to Amazon's homepage. (If you end up making a purchase within 30 minutes of clicking that link, then yay, I'll make commission. woohoo.) Scroll down or do a Control+F for "Affiliate", and you will find a link "Become an Amazon Affiliate." Follow the steps; I won't post a bunch of screenshots of the process, as I'm already an Amazon Affiliate and don't even have access to the sign up screenshots anymore.

So sign up to become an affiliate. And in the few days it takes to get accepted, I'll give you a few tips to writing a successful affiliate blog.

So let's say you decided to focus on Small Household Appliances as your niche market. You know almost nothing about Small Appliances for real. But that's not a big deal; you'll do your research. Let's say you decide to focus on toasters. Go to amazon and do a search for toasters. Choose the one that seems to be a good seller. Read the reviews from the buyers. Rewrite their reviews in your own words. Make sure not to plagiarize, but to use your own words to rephrase what they said. Don't make the reviews to lengthy, but concise enough so people can make their decision to buy it or not. Then, you'll generate a link to that item. Once you're approved by Amazon as an affiliate, you'll be able to build links easily. I can show you how - in a few days, once I know you're approved.

Now that we have the Affiliate thing out of the way, in the next number of posts I'll concentrate on the various widgets/gadgets that blogger offers to spruce up your blog page. This includes a box where people can sign up to get your blog posts by email, a box to search your blog, an index of posts, and lots of HTML boxes to place ads on your blog. I'll show you how to put amazon ads on your page; and a whole bunch of other ads. I am a member of Linkshare, which has a whole bunch of different companies that are interested in advertising on your blog. Unfortunately I haven't made a single sale or commision from Linkshare, but I'm not giving up. And I'll show you how, in a future post.

Off Topic: Ebay

Another quick and easy way to make some spare cash is by selling your household junk on ebay.
Ebay has become extremely user friendly, making listing your ebay items so seamless and quick, you can list an entire closets's worth of useless junk in an hour.
Especially at the moment, listing fees are waived, even Buy It Now is free.
Ebay will show you how much similar items are selling for, will automatically put in the shipping options, and in general really push you through the process.
I listed five items in the past few days. One already has bids!
Here is my Ebay page, just for your viewing fun.
Things I'm selling on ebay at the moment

Making Money Part 1: Google Adsense

I've been a blogger ever since blogging became a 'thing'. From about 2002 - 2005 I was on blogspot, from 2005 - 2009 I was on Livejournal, and after 2009 I was on Facebook. Now I'm on all 3. After I left blogspot in 2005 because I wanted more control over who read my blog - and Livejournal offered many options for privacy - I didn't tinker around with blogspot for a while.

Between 2006 and 2011 I worked for What a Bargain, a brick-and-mortar local store trying to make some money on ebay. I learned a LOT about ebay during those years, and decided that one day I would love to be a Trading Assistant and put random people's things up on ebay. I shelved that idea once I became a busy mother of children, although it's still something I plan do once my children are older, IY"H.

When I was bored of just putting things up on ebay and answering inquiries, I decided to try my hand a little at marketing for What A Bargain. I opened a facebook page and placed facebook ads. It cost me a few pennies and I have no idea if it panned out. My second idea was to open a blog - Bargain Ebay - where I simply copied and pasted some of the ebay listings, figuring if someone did a google search for a certain item they might stumble across it on blogger. It turned out to be tedious and I dropped it. (One of the pluses of having a blog like that in conjunction with your ebay account is that if you put a 'linkback' at the end of the links of your items - i believe the link is "?refid=store, the storeowner makes a little commission off every sale. This was my first intro into the world of affiliate marketing.) But just when I started the blog - in 2007 - Google Ads had been launched and I knew very little about it but was curious what would happen if I would put up google ads. Back then, starting a Google Adsense account and putting the code into the blog was very clumsy and cumbersome and the earnings weren't that great either; I didn't think I would make much money from it. But I did it anyway - what did I stand to lose, really?

Step 4: Customize your template, part 2

So our basic blog is set up, and we're almost done designing the template. The last step left to designing the template is the Advanced settings on your template designer. Go to your dashboard, click on Template, then click on Customize. We're back in our Designer.

 Click "Advanced."

Here, we are going to custom design every little aspect of the template with colors, font choices, sizes, etc. The possibilities are very exciting.

Step 3: Personalize your template, part 1

(Sorry for the long time lapse in continuing this blog; things have been insane around here and I haven't had time.)

So we now have a blog name and a template. Next, we fiddle around with the template and customize it.

To refresh, this is how the blog looks now:

One extremely nifty feature of blogger is that you can fix the design of the blog anytime when you're visiting the actual blog site instead of going to the dashboard every time. You can either hover over the little fixit icon on the corners of the gadget you want to fix - see the little icon at the lower left corner of the 'blog archive' section - and if you want to tinker with the overall design, just scroll up to the top of the page where it says DESIGN. Click there. It will direct you straight to your dashboard, to the template editing area. There you can see what your blog currently looks like in the regular and mobile versions. Click on the orange CUSTOMIZE button. You're now in the Template Designer.