Blog Monetization

There are people who've made significant money from their blogging efforts.  The first criteria is that you need to have people who frequent your blog or you need to have people who really don't read your blog but do a lot of clicking and purchasing from ads presented on your blog.  It's an interesting approach.  There is no doubt that Amazon is a good place to purchase just about anything (to the detriment of local and big box purveyors) and the prices are generally good.  Amazon Prime adds free shipping for many items along with a huge video and music resource. 

So how does a blogger make money?  In the simplest form you may write about a product.  We'll use the Samsung Chromebook as an example.  If you are a member of the Amazon Affiliate marketing program and include some of their ad widgets on your blog you can specifically display an ad for the Samsung Chromebook.  One of he interesting widgets reads the context of your blog posting and pulls an appropriate item to show in the ad.  There are also widgets that you can configure to display specific categories.

Along with this blog which details my non-linear approach to re-employment or replacing income we are starting a blog to detail our four-year old cafe and market store and our personal quest to find reasonable,interesting and healthy food.  Today I wrote a short post on that blog about honey, specifically raw honey.  Generally the intent was to provide some information ( I have been a beekeeper for fifty years) and to draw a few customers into the cafe to purchase said raw honey. 

The Amazon Affiliate context sensitive widget picked up on "raw honey" and presented a couple of ads for raw honey that you can purchase on Amazon; not mine, of course.  If someone were motivated to buy I'd make a few percentage points instead of my standard profit.  Obviously I need to work on ad widget configuration and parameters.

When a user clicks on an ad a cookie is written to their computer.  That's standard practice of virtually all web sites.  It's lets the server side computer application know that you've been there before and presents information appropriate to a re-visit.  Unfortunately it allows sites to understand you interests and past activity from reading all your cookies.  It's a good practice to delete your cookies periodically.  If you don't want anyone to track you look into your browser's private browsing options which actually blocks cookies from being written to your computer.

In the case of an Amazon add click a cookie is written to your computer.  It's coded to associate any sale within a short period of time to you.  That's how the commission comes back.  Affiliate programs use a variety of durations for the cookies.  Some programs have single day cookies.  The Walmart program leaves a cookie good for three days.

A few years ago two bright coders made millions on the eBay affiliate program by writing a cookie that never disappeared.  Actually it did not appear if you reviewed or viewed your cookies (which is an interesting task) but it did appear to the eBay servers.  Commissions were paid for a long, long time and they made millions.  Apparently this was a violation of the program contract.  The perps claimed that eBay knew of their cookie effort.  Given the FBI's interest and the possibility of twenty years in the big house would indicate some misunderstanding.

My goal is simply to make a little money off the blogs.  Personally I'm pretty good at ignoring ads on the internet and certainly my intent in starting this blog was not to present annoying ads.  This is about a journey, not about ads.  Well, you can't do much in life without the advertising dollars having their influence.  I also happen to be working my way through Mad Men.