LifestyleDesignUnleashed

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The most common sources of revenue generation for bloggers are either by adding affiliate links or Adsense to your blog but there are a whole range of other “non-standard” monetization strategies out there that you may not be aware of.

In this article we’re going to look at four easy ways to earn extra revenue from your blog that you may not even know exist. Even better all these new monetization sources are free to use and can be used in addition to your current techniques. Therefore if you follow the steps outlined below I can virtually guarantee that you will earn extra revenue from your existing blog.

JustAnswer

JustAnswer allows you to pose questions to verified experts about a wide range of topics and get detailed responses. You can ask additional questions and when you’re satisfied that you have the answer you’re looking for the expert gets paid for their help.

JustAnswer also has an affiliate program which can make for a great way to earn some additional money from your blog. By adding a JustAnswer form to your website your visitors can pose questions they would like answering about your niche and you can earn a percentage of any revenues generated as a result.

The reason that JustAnswer can work so well is that you’re not trying to sell a product to your blog readers but instead you’re simply providing a useful service to help your visitors find the information they’re seeking. After all, the majority of your blog readers don’t visit your site just to click one of your affiliate links and buy a product. In contrast most of your readers are looking for information on a topic and becoming an affiliate of JustAnswer is a great way to make your site more useful while increasing your revenues.

As a side-note, one way that I am successfully using JustAnswer on some of my blogs is to use it on my contact page. For example I run a pet blog and get a lot of general pet care questions submitted through my contact page. I have now modified by contact page to explain that due to the volume of emails I get it can take me several days to respond to questions but for a far quicker answer – from a qualified professional to boot – visitors can simply submit their questions in the JustAnswer box I provide.

In this way my emails have gone down, my revenue has gone up and the user-experience at my site has improved which is surely a win-win situation for both me and my readers.

Find out more about JustAnswer here.

Sponsored Comments

Sponsored comments are just like standard blog comments that you receive now but with a few major differences. Firstly sponsored comments appear above all the other comments on your blog to maximize exposure for advertisers and they are typically submitted by companies looking to increase traffic and sales for a product or service that relates to the content of your blog post.

At first glance it seems that Sponsored Comments may be quite a low-quality way to monetize your blog by simply accepting spam comments on your blog but the truth is rather different.

Firstly these comments are clearly marked as sponsored entries so you will never be “duping” your valuable readers and secondly you have complete control over which comments you are going to publish on your blog so you can maintain your existing quality guidelines of what appears on your blog.

Indeed with these aspects in place using Sponsored Comments can be a great way to not only earn additional revenue from your blog but to also increase your blog comments at the same time – another win-win strategy.

The best way to get involved in the sponsored comments market is to go through TalkAhead who have designed a marketplace specially to connect bloggers with potential advertisers which will in turn help you to sign up as many commenters as possible.

Find out more about TalkAhead here.

Kindle Blogs

Did you know that if you’re based in the US or the UK you can now add your blog to the Amazon Kindle store for free? Furthermore users actually pay a small monthly fee to subscribe to a blog through their Kindle and you as the publisher can receive a percentage of that revenue.

Adding your blog to Amazon takes a matter of minutes and having tested out this monetization strategy recently I can tell you that simply by having my blogs listed on Amazon has brought in additional subscribers and revenue and that’s without doing any form of real marketing.

Find out more about adding your blog to the Kindle store here.

Viglink

Have you ever linked from a blog post to a product or service without using an affiliate link? I know I have. Viglink is a service which automatically transforms these standard links into affiliate links for you – without you having to manually adjust those links and without you having to join any other affiliate programs.

Quite simply you sign up for a free Viglink account and you’ll automatically be able to earn affiliate commissions through thousands of different affiliate programs without having to manually join a single one. You add a few basic lines of code to your blog and where you have linked to a website that has an affiliate program registered with Viglink they’ll automatically transform your standard link into a revenue-generating affiliate link.

In other words you can take all the articles that you’ve already published on your blog and add affiliate links throughout them in a matter of minutes thus increasing your revenue by doing virtually nothing.

Click here to find out more about Viglink.

Now it’s your turn. Please leave a comment below if you’re using any non-standard revenue generation models on your blog and tell us about your experiences with them…