Use your talent and creativity to make money
Have you ever see people selling their painting at the street? Do you know how much can they sell? Actually, those people are great and very talented, but the way they promote their paintings is somehow not effective. If they can offer their artworks to all people in the world with reasonable prices, I am pretty sure that they will make more money because the target group is bigger and the medium to communicate is almost boundless.
Yesterday, I have came across this great video in YouTube of a guy drawing Mona Lisa using just MS Paint.
Being curious to see other videos from him, I checked out his profile and saw that he is actually a great artist. At the end of his videos, he puts his web address, which will lead to an eBay page. There he sells his portrait drawings and you can also buy a custom made portrait. Looking at his feedback score, I assumed that he had made about 48 sales in his store. Making money doing something we love to do is the best way in earning money.
The way he promote his business is a great idea. Using the phenomenon of youtube to attract the customers to your store is just brilliant. Look how much hits the video got, 454636 views with outstanding 2698 comments.
Now, it is time to turn your hobby into money making machine.
What do we need actually from a hosting account
Nowadays, you can see that many hosting companies are screaming about their super fat hosting packages with gigabytes of spaces and bandwidths. And that is only to attract more customers to use their service. But, as a blogger, what do you really need to host your blog (or blogs).
Now lets talk about webspace. You can get gigabytes of disk space just for a small amount of money. For example, my hosting (not this blog) offers 3GB webspace for just only RM80 (USD22.80) per year. But do you really need that much space? If your blog is still fresh and new, 3GB is too much for you. For most blog (except photo blogs), 50 MB is already enough. This blog begins its first 6 months with just 50MB. After that it begged for more due to increase in the number of posts and images.
Actually, it is not that hard to find hosting providers, which offer small amount of webspace. One of the example is Sempoihosting.com. You have the option to choose how many disk space you want for one year and you can upgrade your package anytime.
Another example is NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which offer you ultra low price, USD0.01 per megabyte-month, USD1.00 per gigabyte for data transfers and USD3.65 per year for one MySQL databse. At first, I think this is a great and cheap solution for me. Besides, Bugmenot.com is also hosted by this company. But after calculating the amount that I must pay for a year, it is clear that the hosting package from my current hosting is more favourable.
This is the details of the calculations
My monthly data transfers : 2.5GB
Cost per year: 2.5×1.00×12= USD 30.00
My webspace : 115.68 MB
Cost per year: 115.68×0.01×12= USD 13.88
MySQL Database: USD 0.01 per day
Cost per year: USD3.65
The total amount: USD 47.53, more that double the cost of my current webhosting. Hmm, I have read all over the internet about bloggers do not really need big space. But if I can get more spaces, bandwiths, and addon domains (NearlyFreeSpeech offers unlimited addon domains, but not Sempoihosting). If you have more spaces, you can experiment a lot. For example, I am now building my photo gallery and photo blog under the same hosting account. If you plan to have multiple blogs, do not hesitate to buy the big-sized hosting package. It worths a while.
How to make your affiliate links more user-friendly
The most effective way to refer your visitor to your affiliate product is by reviewing your personal experience with that product. It is no point to review something you haven't used before. In your review, you will absolutely put your affiliate link so that you can have commission if your reader buy that product.
What I don't like with affiliate link is, it is very long and it shows my referrer ID. I dont want that because it gives the impression to the readers that I am just trying to earn some money and the review just to lure you to buy the product.
And my solution is to change the URL to a friendly one. Below are some methods that you can use.
TinyURL (not so friendly)
With this free service, you can turn the long URL into short URL such as http://tinyurl.com/2b5mau. But the letters and numbers have no meaning.
Simple PHP redirect (more friendly)
Make a PHP file. Make sure that the file will give the users a little idea, where will it take the users to. For example, if you make a link to your Webhosting affiliate, you can name the PHP file like "recommended-webhosting.php".
After that, paste the code below in your PHP files. Replace the http://www.new-url.com with your affiliate link. Upload the files to your root server. After that you can point to the file http://yourblog.com/recommended-webhosting.php in your review post. Is it simple?
Give this trick a try and share your comments and thoughts using the comment form below.
