When you think of monetizing your blog, and you do not have any products to sell, affiliate marketing may become your main source of income. If you are not familiar with it yet, read the article below, and start implementing it today! 

Affiliate marketing is a way of making money online in a form of a reward for promoting some products and services. For example, if you own a blog about WordPress themes and plugins, you may join SoloStream’s affiliate program and advertise its premium WordPress themes to your audience. You get paid every time when your readers buy anything on the SoloStream’s website. For example, when one of your referrals purchases a lifetime membership for $299, you earn over $100 at once!

It is even more profitable to promote subscriptions. While you get paid only once for a one-time purchase, for recurring subscriptions you will be receiving money every time your referrals pay. For example, when your reader subscribes for the SoloStream’s Silver planfor $99/quarter, you will be receiving $14.95 every quarter, for as long as your referral pays.

The numbers look really great, and it may seem that you can earn pretty much with no effort. It is really easy to make some extra money, but only if you are doing it right. You need to follow some basic rules to make the best of your affiliate partnership.

• The advertised product should be relevant to your start a blog content. If your blog is about car tuning, it is useless to promote tableware or a website hosting. If you write about WordPress, your perfect products would be WordPress themes and plugins. Every time you advice any products to your readers, check if the company providing it offers an affiliate program.
• You must be an expert in your area. Your audience should trust your opinion, otherwise they are unlikely to click on your links.
• You need good traffic on your blog. Obviously your chances to earn are higher, when your blog is visited by a thousand people a day rather than ten people. Think of topics that are interesting to wide audience, and remember about SEO and promotion.
• Try various promotion ways to find what works better for you. You can add a link to your blog post, or write a dedicated article, describing your products, use banners and widgets. Find the balance between imperceptible ads and annoying ads to create an efficient promotion.

Follow the above rules to start earning on your blog, and check out SoloStream’s affiliate program.

Nothing can be more exciting that readying your blog for the New Year! With less than a month left in 2014, there really is a lot of action going on in the world that can help businesses, bloggers, and designers get prepped for the year ahead.

According to ancient Chinese legends, 2015 is the year of the Sheep. The Sheep is known for its great eyesight and playfulness. Other creative elements to consider for the New Year are some of the growth plans of your business, as well as what you accomplished in 2014. December is always such a dynamic month because bloggers, business, and pretty much everyone on Earth is trying to recap 2014 and make plans for 2015, so its pays to make plans early.

Start Readying Your Blog Now

Readying your blog for the new year can include making small format changes to deadlines and other items that say 2014 on them. This can be as simple as buying a new Day-Timer or Calendar that has 2015 written on them. Businesses will also want to ensure their servers are set to move onto 2015 correctly, which is also a good indicator when readying your blog for 2015.

Can you think of any other ways that you can prepare for 2015?

Make A List that has 2014 on one side of the page and then draw a line down the middle of the page and write 2015 in the other column. Jot down little notes about projects and milestones that came through in 2014 and where you would like to see them go in 2015. By coordinating your long-term goals early, you will be able to provide a good starting point for choosing your messaging for your audience. If you started a new business or service, then that is one area that you might want to highlight. Another neat option for readying your blog for 2015 is to provide tied selling features. Much like how we offer you a deal on both hosting your website with us, which also gives you free access to all our themes, which is a total win for everyone.

So take advantage of our hosting and get all the themes so you have a perfect toolkit for a broad range of theme development, blogging, business, and that will also put you at the top of the class for readying your blog for 2015.