Thoughts on a dirty word.... Monetizing
From Wink Lorch
I'm looking into various ways of monetizing www.winetravelguides.com and one of the many things I'm studying are Affiliate Schemes. I'm hoping that maybe we could use this forum to share experiences and help all of us interested in monetizing. I do realize that the success of affiliate schemes is inextricably linked to traffic on a website/blog and that's a whole other discussion. Here are the two sides I'm looking at....
1) Affliliate Schemes that I can put on my website to earn me some cash if visitors click on them. I'm looking at individual, highly relevant schemes like Steve de Long's map and poster products and I'm also looking at much bigger schemes that don't compete with my own recommendations on the website, like Skyscanner and others for flight bookings/car rental etc. If anyone has any experience and can share it, that would be much appreciated.
With this in mind, I'm attending an event next Tuesday 22nd November evening in London, and have been asked to spread the word around wine/food bloggers in or near London. This is a Travel Bloggers tweetup event and is sponsored by Affiliate Window with a programme as follows:
Attitude Travel: "The Best Job in the World: How to run a Travel Writing Business out of a
Backpack."
Expedia: "Why bloggers and travel writers are valuable"
Digital Window: "How to use the Affiliate Window interface"
Ad Net Media Network: "How to monetize the content on your website"
If you want to go, just sign up through your Twitter Account at http://twtvite.com/dwtravelevent but they need to know very soon if you are coming!
2) Affiliate Schemes that I can use to sell my guides on other peoples' websites and blogs - this is what Steve does obviously and there are various ways of doing it. I'd be interested if anyone has any success stories with selling products this way and how you did it. But, I'd also be interested to know who thinks they might want to sell my PDF guides (and/or the annual membership) on their blogs and websites and whether you think there would be any uptake given your own visitor numbers and profiles. I'd probably offer 30-50% commission on sales depending on how much it costs me to set up and/or what commission I'd have to pay someone like e-junkies if I used themto manage the scheme. Hoping that this is an appropriate way to use this new forum!
