This guest post by my friend Murray Newlands is a must-read for bloggers!

Does Content Monetization Work and Does it Really Matter?

In short, content monetization is the process of earning money through written content.

There are a many ways to achieve this. You can earn money by either selling the actual content or by using internet-based writing tools. In the first method, potential buyers of your content can be anyone from news editors to artists to entertainment blogs. In the second method, you can use one of the hundreds of possibilities available through the internet that enables you to make money from something aside from the actual content. Examples of some of these opportunities are the use of AdSense, sales of consultation or advertising for a small business.

It’s important to know these different techniques if you want to enhance your writing and reach your readers’ expectations. In order to grab the attention of your readers, you need to deliver the content while keeping your specific audience’s specific interests in mind. You need to convey to your readers the main reason you are writing the piece.

There are several ways that you are able to monetize your content. When writing for a newspaper, for examples, you need to write articles in a manner that can attract the reader’s attention. You earn money though writing a compelling piece that editors of the specific paper want to pay you for one time. You also need to make it an interesting, engaging article for those who want to advertise in the paper, so that the paper can earn from business relations, readers, advertisers, etc.

If you are acting as an advertiser, you need to design the content according to the market—you need to make potential customers of your product or services know the qualities of your product. Your goal is to convince them to purchase your product or services.

If you want to sell your business ideas, you need to focus the content of the ideas. This enables your customers to see your ideas over and over and to get accustomed to them. And If you own a website, you can significantly raise your website’s income by advertising with the help of marketing tools such as Google’s AdSense, paid posts and link insertion.

But maybe you are a blogger that doesn’t make much money from your website. Who says you shouldn’t earn money from your labor? Wouldn’t it be great if you could make money while working on your hobby? If you want to boost your blogging income, you can use link insertion as a simple tool for content monetization of your blog. All you have to do is to insert some java script code in your site and this can monetize your site automatically. The software will use words and phrases from blogs and use them to link it to relevant advertisers.

An excellent tool for advertising is INTENTclick , which provides an alternative basis for your content monetization. This tool is especially useful for content, which are for advertisement of products or services in origin. You can find more details about these helpful internet advertisement techniques in the book “Content Monetization.”

So all said and done, content monetization really does matter, as it can be a great source of revenue for your website. Using the correct tools can help you reach optimization and make the most amount of money without upsetting your readers.

Disclosure: I am working for the company INTENTclick.

Next week I will be giving a free webinar for bloggers who would like to learn more about how affiliate marketing can benefit their sites. It’s always amazing to me how many great bloggers there are out there with major misconceptions about what affiliate marketing is. I can tell you for sure what is it NOT: it’s not MLM and it is not get rich quick. It’s a completely legitimate way to make money selling products that you would recommend anyway.

If you have any interest at all in hearing more, I encourage you to sign up for the webinar. It’s only an hour and you can mult-task the whole time if you want. I’m going to talk not only about how you can make money through affiliate marketing links on your blog but also things like how to get products to give away or do review of and how to build backlinks to your site through contests. I’m not trying to sell anything at all. It’s simply a presentation that I gave at Blog Indiana a couple of weeks ago and truly feel like more people need to hear it.

You can sign up through the Blogging ABCs website. The webinar will be held Thursday, September 8 from 1-2pm Eastern.

5 Affiliate Marketing Benefits for Bloggers

Although I do not do too many paid posts, every now and again I like to check out SocialSpark for some opportunities. They have some great name brand blogging opportunities that you will not find anywhere else (including through affiliate marketing).

The one thing that I hear most about SocialSpark is that they make the agreements between the advertiser, blogger, and consumer clear. There isn’t any attempt to “hide” that the posts are sponsored to defraud consumers. Instead, it’s a genuine opportunity for bloggers to make a little bit of extra money writing an honest review about a product or service.

If you are a blogger and haven’t signed up for SocialSpark, you should at least create an account and see what it is all about. Then you can decide if any of their opportunities are for you or not. (Yes! That’s my referral link!)

By the way, they are giving away a trip to Hawaii as a part of their new referral challenge. The person who gets the most valid referrals between now and March 16 wins. I would love to have you sign up under me if you are so inclined. And if I don’t win, I hope that you do!

I stumbled upon an interesting new site the other day called MyLikes. It’s essentially a way to make money through referring sites that you like. You can be paid for posting the “likes” on your Twitter, blog, or other places. For most of the campaigns, you get paid per the number of people who click on your links. What’s nice is that you can choose from a wide variety of sites to refer, including some nice contests. You don’t have to refer anything that you do not truly like. I’ve only done a couple so far (mainly for contests) but have made a few extra bucks through it.

There are a few things that I am still unsure about and working through. It looks like you get paid for referrals, but only if those referrals have over 500 Twitter followers (which most people do not). You put in a PayPal account to get paid (and I have seen other people report getting paid), but I do not know what the minimum is to get paid. As I figure more of this out, I will definitely post about it! (Edited: I found out that you get paid automatically every Friday that your balance is at least $2)

Sign up for MyLikes today and see what you think. Leave a comment if you are already a member.

I know a lot of people who make money online. Legitimately. From the people who make a little extra spending money through survey sites to the big players who earn their income through affiiate marketing, there is a lot of money to be made. Part of the problem is that if you get into a site too late, you may not have the chance to earn as much as people who got in early.

I heard of a new site today called All Voices that is looking for contributors. From what I can tell, you basically write articles on their site and get paid based on the number of people who read your articles. That’s a simple version. The real details involve the number of articles you write, how many people become a “fan” of your work, etc.

It’s an interesting concept. If you are the least bit interested and have any desire to write for money, you should try it out. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up, so you have nothing to lose. If you do sign up and write anything, come back here and leave a comment so that we can go check you out!

I’ve just returned from Affiliate Summit and am already making plans for Affiliate Summit East 2009 in New York! It will take place August 9-11 at the New York Hilton. If you are a mom who is trying to make money blogging or through internet marketing, attending Affiliate Summit is a MUST. Not only will you connect with merchants but you will learn so much. By biggest take-aways from Affiliate Summit West were new contacts, search engine optimization help, and fabulous ideas about how to drive more traffic to my sites.

Do you need a platinum pass for Affiliate Summit? Maybe not if you just want to hit the exhibit hall to get information. But if you are looking to network, meeting up with people at breakfast and lunch is HUGE! I had an opportunity to have meals with some very important people in the industry, and I just know that I will see results from it.

If you have never been to an Affiliate Summit, you should absolutely investigate the possibility of attending. Affiliate Summit turned my websites from a hobby into a small business. If you book now, you will even get an early bird discount!