When traffic begins to increase to your site you have to start to plan your monetization so that you are not doing a lot of work for nothing.

Traffic is work…

You aren’t writing great content for nothing.  You do the research to make your link bait posts, you get hundreds of incoming links and lots of visitors…

So what do you do to monetize a great blog? 

First of all get people on your list, and get them to subscribe to your RSS feed, so that you can easily bring people back.

By using the popover code from your aweber account, you can get folks on your list… and it is easy to set up.  You just open your blog admin panel, click on design, and select the footer.php file to edit and paste the javascript code from your aweber account.

You want the popover, and you want it to only show up intermittently, so as not to bother regular visitors.  You should also place the HTML code for your opt-in box in the sidebar above the fold to get someone who decides to sign up after they dismissed the popover.

The other thing you should be doing to help increase your return traffic is to get as many of your readers to follow you on Twitter!  The more people you get on twitter, the more you will get return traffic to your blog when you tell people about your posts.

Getting A Piece Of The Twitter Pie!

If you are prolific on Twitter, you can bank with a new service called Magpie!  It is a service that pays you in Euros for an opportunity for them to send an ad to your followers after every few tweets.  I am testing it out with 1 ad every 5 tweets to see how that affects my follower count and the quality of the conversations I have!

If nothing else, give Magpie a try! You stand a chance to bring more income from something you are using time on.  After all, you should be getting paid from as many sources as possible to prevent your income from being hit when a company folds or something changes in the market.

Plug This In To Your Blog

I just added a plugin to my blog that gives me access to CJ products and allows them to be displayed so that I can make commissions on purchases from some of the products displayed.  That makes it really exciting, because you can get your commissions up in another place.  Getting checks from Commission Junction is always a nice addition to your bankroll!

You can download the WP-Affiliate here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-affiliate/

Another plugin you will want is called the Affiliate Cookie Plugin. This one drives massive traffic to your blog while building a huge affiliate army at the same time!  Who doesn’t want to have everyone who promotes your blog to be an affiliate!

Stay tuned as I test out some more monetization models for your blogs and websites.

Have an amazing day!

Micheal Savoie
http://twitter.com/michealsavoie

PS – You can also download a manual on how to Fix The Fantastico Security Flaw on your Wordpress Installation if you used Fantastico to install it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, traffic, commission, commission junction, getting paid, income streams