Branding your blog with merchandise

I wrote about some Adsense alternatives in a previous post and we have also looked at other ways of making money from the web.
One thing I didnt mention is that you can of course sell your own blog-branded merchandise. Now there is no point in doing this until you have gained a reasonable level of readership and I would also suggest that your blog needs to have a fairly distinctive "personality" before you can consider going down this rout - but it is an option. Branded T-Shirts, mugs, coasters and other items can be ordered via the internet with your own logo.

A site such as CafePress.com for example offers over 50 products which can be personalised with your own logo and you can price each product for sale yourself. CafePress gets back the original base price ($13.99 for T-shirts, $10.99 for mugs) and you keep any markup.

I'll be on the look out for more sites like this and will note them here so check back.

To blend or not to blend? That is the question

The choices you make about your website and AdSense colours and the positioning of your Ads are not minor matters when it comes to maximising your AdSense revenue.

The best way to approach this is to take a long cool look at your site from the point of view of the reader. Ask yourself why have come to your site and what they are likely to be looking for.

Now examine how the AdSense ads which are showing fit with this. Here are some useful questions to think about;

1) Are my AdSense Ads actually visible? If they are way down the page then a high proportion of visitors may not even see them.

2) Are the AdSense Ads too visible? The Internet is covered in Ads and Internet users are increasingly developing "ad blindness". Without even being conscious of it we all learn to mentally screen out Ads from our awareness as we browse. You have probably done that with this page!

Ad blindness can happen particularly where the colour and or positioning of an Ad makes it immediately apparent that it is an Ad. The reader unconsciously ignores the Advert.

You Ads should be positioned in visible parts of the page but you should also make sure that do not interfere with the reasonable design of your page. Some pages you will come across have been so highly "optimized" for adverts that you are hard pushed to find what you came looking for. I don't know about you but my immediate reaction is - this is just a site for Adverts and I am put off and don't hang around.

The other issue is color for your adverts. The usual advice is that you should make sure that your Adverts colours blend with the design of your site. Ideally you should use the same colours for background links and so on for your adverts that you do for your site.

I have a slight variation on this. I do like to blend the colours but I also like to tweak them slightly. That way my adverts don't blend into the background completely and they have a little more prominence. Don't however use very different or contrasting colours. What you are aiming for is that your Adverts should look like an integral part of the site, almost like part of the content.

There are also some things you should think about when using color on your site more generally and I'll cover that in a future post.

Remember your Blog basics

I thought a little mnemonic to help you remember some key points might be helpful. I am going to write a post in the near future on each of these points so it would be nice to see you back here. This should help you remember some key points as you blog.

"CONTENT IS KING"

C - Create great content
O - Optimize your site
N - Nourish your Niche
T - To write is to earn.
E - Engage your readers.
N - Never click your own links.
T - Tools tell all.

R - Regular posts pay.
U - Understand your readers.
L - Love Links.
E - Every Post shall have a Theme.
S - Shy bloggers stay poor.

Work at Home, earn income - but be focussed!

One of the perks of running an Internet website or blog and earning money from it is that you work from home and you save yourself all that travel to work time. If like me you have previously had a job that involves a lot of dead time travelling back and forward to work then you will know the frustrations of this. You think to yourself "I could be doing something much more useful with this time!".

Running a website or blogs means of course you don't have to be tied to an office. You will get tied to your computer but you'll get so involved in what you are doing that this won't seem like down time - its earning time.

I want to take a brief look at how you should organise yourself at home to help you be as efficient as you can and get the most benefit from your home working arrangement.

To get the most benefit from working at home you should be both organised and flexible in your approach. This may sound like a contradiction but its not.

You should be organised with your working environment. Try to make sure that your computer and desk are away from the main run of activity in the house. Make sure you have arrangements for paper filing of important copies of things like receipts etc. Also make sure right at the start that you set up a system whether on paper or electronically for keeping a record of your websites, blogs, hosts, passwords etc. If you are running more that one site or blog these things can quickly become very disorganised if you don't do this at the start.

You should also be flexible though. You don't need to run yourself to a rigid time schedule if you work at home. So if someone visits or something else comes up you can respond and deal with it. But don't be too flexible - set yourself some core hours and stick to them.

You may be running your Internet activities part time. If so you should still work out what time commitment you want to give to them and try to schedule this - then stick to your schedule.

This can be particularly important if you are running a blog. Readers will not return to your site if the update frequency of your Blog is too infrequent. So decide early on if you are going to have new posts every day, or every week, or monthly. ( It can be difficult to create momentum with less than a couple of posts weekly so I wouldn't recommend anything less frequent).

One tip that may help is that you should always have a few blog posts in draft form that you are working on and tightening up. This helps because there will be times when you hit a dry patch and feel you have nothing fresh to add. If you have drafts in progress then you will have quality material that you can finish of and post to get you over these blank periods.

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