Amazon Changes

There have been some change to Amazon Associates terms and conditions - you have to register separate accounts if you make direct links to Amazon from a blog. However, I believe it is ok to link to an existing Amazon store from a blog. So.... I have removed the direct links to the Amazon site, but you can still buy Amazon products from the links to my stores (on the right) and click through to the whole Amazon site from the logo at the top right of my stores.

Posterous - Another Social Media Toy to Play with ....

I've just found posterous

So I am writing this post by emailing it to my posterous account!

It's all very easy:

Type the email,
click send ....

and look at that, it appears on your posterous blog :-)

Not only that, it can appear as a Tweet with a link to posterous, or on any other blog -like this one. There's integration with Facebook too....
This is going to take a lot of investigating, but I see great potential here and the tone of the site is lovely ....

Go and give it a go :)

PS I am adding a gratuitous picture - just because I can ....

Networking on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking site for business professionals - a bit like Facebook but without the fun. I have been signed up there for quite a while without seeing any real benefits, though my LinkedIn profile does come up pretty high in a Google search for my name. Also, I have linked up with some real world acquaintances and received and sent recommendations, but no new business has come my way from LinkedIn.

However, I recently started following @problogger, Darren Rowse on Twitter. Among other things he has written a 'Six-Figure Income' blogging book which you can order here through Amazon in the USA or UK and a newer downloadable one you can get here.

Darren has started up a new LinkedIn group for professional bloggers and this looks like being a very useful source of information for would-be professional bloggers everywhere. The first thing I learned from it was that there is such a thing as a professional blogger - you can actually get paid to work as a blogger! There are jobs and everything .... I am sure I will learn much more...

So... if you are hoping to make money blogging, it is worth a look at LinkedIn and the Professional Bloggers Group.

Pay Per Clicking

I am very grateful to all those who have followed up the Google Ads (top) or used the Google search and clicked on the ads that provides. I am slowly inching up to $10 for clicks and searches, at which point I will be able to nominate a bank account into which I can pay my 'income'.

I am wondering under what circumstances one might ever earn any sort of living in this way, and failing to come up with an adequate answer ...

However, I have found some new leads to explore and some more experiments to try .... nil desperandum eh?

Using AdSense

Well business in my bookselling world is a bit slow at the moment and I have had a bit of bother with Amazon (of which possibly more later ....) so I have been looking into Google Adsense.

To join this scheme, you register here or, if you have a 'Bogger' blog, just follow the Monetise link from your dashboard. You can start up a 'Blogger' blog from here.

You need a blog or website - I chose this 'Blogger' blog for mine - and you need to wait some days for Google to check it out before they accept you onto the scheme.

The idea is that you give a section of your blog over to Google Ads - you can chose where this goes and how big it is and whether you want text or text and images. Google chose adverts that fit in with the kind of content you are blogging (or putting on your website) and display them in this space. You are not allowed to click on these adverts yourself, but you attract commission per click for anyone else clicking on these adverts.

So....

Ideally

... you would have a really interesting blog

... you would attract lots of interested readers

... Google would provide ads matching the interests of your readers

... they would follow up the interesting ads

... you would get commission

... everybody happy :))))

Well, you can see my Google Ads area at the top of my right sidebar. Does the advert interest you? (It changes periodically so I don't know what you will see.) If so, please do go ahead and click it :)

There is also a Google search box set up on the right of this blog. You can use that like any normal Google search and you will get the normal Google results along with some sponsored links. Again, if you click on a sponsored link, I will get comission.

So far, not too many clicks have come my way, but I think that this is because I need to work harder on items 1 and 2, the really interesting blog with lots of interested readers ... (thinks: 'I'll go off and Tweet about this post to try to bring some in'). Lots to learn still - very grateful for any advice :)

Digging Deeper into Twitter

Well now, Twitter obviously has strong marketing potential in that you can contact an amazing number of people quickly .... though actually, unless you make a real effort, most of them are going to ignore you.

Also, you are going to be following people so that you know what is going on, but if you are going to follow them effectively, you need some helpful software to let you view incoming tweets in a close to coherent way.

I started out using TweetDeck: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/

This is great actually. You can have a column for replies, one for direct messages, one (or more) for groups of friends, one for search results, you can even get a word cloud for the most popular words being used on Twitter. It also lets you see what is happening on Facebook.

But .... it doesn't let you view multiple accounts (or didn't at the time of writing this). So, I switched to http://desktop.seesmic.com/, yes that is Seesmic desktop, however differently you want to spell it! This lets you do more or less everything Tweetdeck did but it also allows multiple account handling - great! By the way, if you hover over the avatar / logo of another tweeter, you can reply, direct message, retweet them etc. It took me days to notice that!

So now I have the technology to monitor incoming tweets and build twitter relationship - just need a bit of practice at interacting and getting the balance between interesting and potentially lucrative tweets right. If I keep tweeting links to my sites, followers will soon get bored. I am starting to learn a lot by following some interesting tweeters though...

First sale via amazon.com

Just after I made my last post, I found I had actually made my first ever sale at amazon.com, through My Favourites (USA) store. This is what it was: first USA sale.
Was this after a Twitter tweet?
Was it driven through a blog or website?
Well actually, I don't know as Amazon don't tell you who the buyer is (data protection and all that). However, I would bet quite a lot of money that this sale came from a personal recommendation I made to an American Facebook friend. So.... I am beginning to realise it is best to start with your friends. They know you. Hopefully they trust your judgement better than a stranger will. It's hard to ask friends to go out of their way to help, but I hope I would do it for them :)
By the way, you can't buy from your own amazon stores, so, if any friends reading this have a store, send me a link and I will return the compliment :)

Being an Associate

There are plenty of Associate / Affiliate schemes on the web, but I spend a lot of money on Amazon so I thought I would try to get some of my investment back by sharing their profits. You can sign up here: Amazon Associates UK or Amazon Associates USA. You get a percentage of the sales made after going to Amazon through your stores or links, whether what is eventually bought was in your store or not, though the comission is higher if a customer purchases the same product that led them into Amazon. You can a list of my stores and some examples of search links on the right of this blog.

I had to have a website already (of which more later) and I had to give them some idea of the market I would be targetting. I said Classical Studies at the time, though I have since widened that to include Leonard Cohen and the Just So Stories, among others, so I don't think they mind much. I started by putting links to individual products in my Classical Latin website, but soon realised it would be much more efficient to make an Amazon store. This is reasonably easy to do but I would recommend turning on the 'associate stripe' option (in your Amazon associate account settings) as this makes it very easy to add things to your stores or sites. This store-building escalated as I targeted different niche markets and now I have the following stores:

My Favourites (UK)

My Favourites (USA)

Classical Studies Favourites

Plato's Symposium

I have the Classical Studies Favourites embedded in my Latin website and I also have a link into my Plato's Symposium Store from my Plato's Symposium Blog.

So far, the Classical Studies Favourites has made one sale to someone who came in via my Latin website reading recommendations. I have also made quite a few sales through my My Favourites (UK) thanks to a couple of good friends who always buy their Amazon purchases there. However, I have no sales at all in the USA yet - you need a separate affiliate agreement to sell there, by the way - and I think I may need to pay them an administration fee if I don't sell something within the year! It is pretty difficult to drive traffic through your stores or links unless you have lots of good friends who don't mind remembering to go in through you, or a steady niche market who want what you recommend. So.... now I am working on building up that stream of willing purchasers, and in later posts I will tell you what I try and what, if anything, succeeds.

Making an online living...

So, I am starting out in trying to make a living online.... I have been selling as an Amazon associate for the last couple of weeks and have made about £26 for about 40 hours work (including setting up a Twitter account and tweeting). This is not a great hourly rate :) so today I started looking at Adsense - Google put relevant ads on your blog or site and you get paid for clicks... we'll see how it goes ....

Meanwhile I am going to post links and articles about things I have found useful to my business ....