The problem that I, and a lot of people have, is that Amazon has many different sites and you need to sign up to the affiliate program for each site separately.

For example, if you are registered with the amazon.co.uk affiliate program, you cannot use that affiliate tag on a link to amazon.com.

Make money all over the world

Perhaps you think “why not just sign up to each affiliate program separately? This is not a problem. The problem comes with making sure your website visitors see a link to the correct Amazon store for them.

For example, visitors from the US should see a link to amazon.com, with your amazon.com affiliate tag. Visitors from France should see a link to amazon.fr with your amazon.fr affiliate tag.

Identifiying The User’s Country With Maxmind

Maxmind is a service that takes any IP address supplied by you and tells you the country, state (or region), city and latitude and longitude. The service is not free, but the prices are very reasonable. You can get 200,000 IP address lookups for just $20. There is nothing to download as you simply make your lookup request to the Maxmind servers. Also, the credits never expire so you don’t have to use them up within a certain time limit.

You have to supply the service with the IP address to look up first. There are many ways to detect a user’s IP address in PHP, but this is how I go about doing it:

function getRealIpAddr()
{
    if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP']))   //check ip from share internet
    {
      $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
    }
    elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']))   //to check ip is pass from proxy
    {
      $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
    }
    else
    {
      $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    }
    return $ip;
}

Once you have detected the user’s IP address you need to access the Maxmind web service. There is some sample code on the Maxmind website, but I will guide you through it now using PHP.

Maxmind offer two services, one that returns the location and the other which returns the location and ISP details. We will just use the location one as all we are looking for is the country.

The service is accessed with the following URL:

http://geoip3.maxmind.com/b

It takes 2 parameters:

• i (lowercase I) – which is the IP address you are checking
• l (lowercase L) – your own licence key

Here is an example with a dummy IP address and licence key

http://geoip3.maxmind.com/b?i=123.54.566.4&l=123abc456def

This is the PHP code that we are going to use to return our information:

$query = "http://geoip3.maxmind.com/b?l=" . $license_key . "&i=" . $ipaddress;
$url = parse_url($query);
$host = $url["host"];
$path = $url["path"] . "?" . $url["query"];
$timeout = 1;
$fp = fsockopen ($host, 80, $errno, $errstr, $timeout)
	or die('Can not open connection to server.');
if ($fp) {
  fputs ($fp, "GET $path HTTP/1.0\nHost: " . $host . "\n\n");
  while (!feof($fp)) {
    $buf .= fgets($fp, 128);
  }
  $lines = split("\n", $buf);
  $data = $lines[count($lines)-1];
  fclose($fp);
} else {
  # enter error handing code here
}
echo $data;
$geo = explode(",",$data);
$country = $geo[0];
$state = $geo[1];
$city = $geo[2];
$lat = $geo[3];
$lon = $geo[4];

After all this effort we get what we were trying to find.

Contained inside the variable $country is a two letter country code that indicates the visitor’s location.

Those that are relevant to us are:

• US – USA
• GB – Great Britain (UK)
• CA – Canada
• FR – France
• DE – Germany
• JP – Japan
• CN – China

These are all the countries that Amazon operates websites in. The ones that you choose to use depends on the target audience of your website. Most English langage sites will just focus on the US, UK and Canadian markets.

How to Display The Correct Product Links

Now we finally get to the meat of the article. We have joined our appropriate affiliate programs, detected where our visitor is, so now we need to display the correct code.

if($country == "UK")
{
     // Display our UK affiliate code here
}
elseif($country == "CA")
{
     // Display our Canadian affiliate code here
}
else
{
     // Display our US affiliate code here
}

What this code does is displays the Canadian or UK affiliate code if the user is in either one of those countries. If not, then display the US code. The US code will be displayed as a fall back if the script cannot detect the location, or the visitor is in one of those countries we are not catering for.

Geographic targetting is not 100% reliable and you should always have a fallback incase the scripts encounter any problems (like displaying affiliate code for the US site if the script is not sure where the visitor is from).

I hope this code helps you to make a lot more money from Amazon. Feel free to post any comments or questions below.

How Does It Work?

Paid blog posting works like this: you sign up to a broker who lists all the available advertisers. These advertisers pay you to review a product. There are often requirements about the topic of the website and Google PageRank. They can sometimes require the review to be of a specific tone (i.e. positive or neutral). Advertisers get to review your blog post before you are paid.

Importantly, advertisers require you to link to a specific page on their website and they can dictate the anchor text you must use. See the quote from Review Me’s quality quidelines.

What’s The Problem With It?

Reviews may not contain “no-follow” links. If they are present the review will be rejected.

The motives of the people who are buying these paid posts are, in my opinion, largely the wrong ones. But what do I mean by the wrong motives? Not wrong for the advertiser, but wrong for the blogger. It is acceptable for an advertiser to want to gain a little exposure to a relevant and interested audience. We all do that. From social bookmarking, to press releases, this is a common way to build interest in your website or product. But paid reviews are crafted and manipulated by an advertiser. They can specify if the want a neutral or a positive review. They can specifiy a minimum Google PageRank of the blog doing the review. But more significantly, they are generally able to specify a link with a specific anchor text.

The fact is that you would not be reviewing the product unless you were getting paid. Everybody tries to pretend the advertisers are trying to build buzz or attract visitors, but in reality they are trying to boost PageRank.

Paid reviews are also generally poor value for money for the blogger.

Let’s look at an example. On one of the blog review networks there is an opportunity to review “IDrive Online Backup.” It pays $35 and requires a minimum PageRank of 6. Remember this is for a permanent post on a blog, not a recurrent monthly fee. If we take a look at Text Link Ads for a link on a PR6 website, the cheapest we can buy is $24. This is a monthly fee. Remember that the paid review is a one-off fee and it will create a permanent link from your website. When you consider that it is not unusual to have up to 8 text link ads on a page, it should be clear which is better value for the blogger. At least with having text links on your website, everybody is up front about the reasons for having them – to help improve your PageRank.

So back to the original question: is paid blogging worth it? For the advertiser, yes, but for the blogger, no. If you are looking to monetise your website, text link ads represent much better value for money and you won’t be annoying your visitors by pretending you have something interesting or relevant to post.

But if you still want to look at paid posting, Dosh Dosh has a list of the most popular ones.

So your website has started to build up some significant traffic, every post gets a good number of comments and your feed subscriber count is going up and up every day? Good. It sounds like you are ready to start making some money from those visitors.

A lot of people worry too much about profiting from a blog or a website. It is usually a bad idea to start up a blog or website with the sole intention of making money from it. There seems to be a perception that making money online is easy. Unfortunately this is not true. it is important to be passionate about the subject and have something new and different to say.

Some may disagree, but it is my personal opinion that it is pointless trying to make money from a website unless you have significant traffic. Here I will outline the most popular money making programs that people use, as well as the pros and cons of each.

Google Adsense

This is listed first as it is the easiest to implement and is all over the Internet. This service from Google scans your page for keywords and displays ads that are relevant to these keywords. The service is contextual, meaning that different ads show up on different pages and even refreshing a page will often bring up a different set of ads. When Google identifies a set of relevant ads, the ones that pay the most for a click are put at the top of each ad block.

Adsense works best where you have very specialised content. They also work best on less tech-savvy audiences as they tend to not realise they are ads. Sites about celebrities, cooking, health and beauty and electronics are good topics.

One thing that is very important with Adsense is experimentation. You should play around with the number of ad blocks you use and their positions. What works well on one site will not work well on another, so experimentation is essential. Google tells stories of people literally doubling their revenue overnight by moving an ad block to the top of a page.

Resources

• Google Adsense

Affiliate Programs

This is definitely the one with the biggest potential to make money. You refer a customer to a company and when they make a sale, you are paid a commission. Affiliate programs are superb when they are presented as recommendations or product reviews, so they are great for consumer electronics, games, web hosting and many other topics. There are affiliate programs out there for practically every type of consumer product.

The most important thing about being an affiliate is to research the programs that you join. Make sure that the services you promote are relevant to your target audience and website topic.

Resources

• Commission Junction
• Trade Doubler
• Click Bank – specialists in digital products

Text Links

Text links are an increasingly popular way for publishers to make money from their websites. It involves linking back to a website with anchor text defined by the advertiser. This is mainly used for boosting PageRank but if you have a decent amount of traffic and the link is in the right place, you can attract visitors too.

Bear in mind that selling a text link that passes PageRank (ie. does not use “nofollow”) is against Google’s guidelines and you may find your site being penalised in the search rankings. Many people disagree with this stance and hiding paid links from search engines has almost become an industry in itself.

Some people sell text links themselves but there are a few brokerage services that will locate advertisers for you. Most of them take about a 50% cut. Text links tend to be priced per month and you have to be specific about where you are going to place the link. Some advertisers will pay for a permanent link, but having a monthly agreement gives you the flexability to remove the links if you aren’t happy with them.

Resources

• Text Link Ads

Paid Blogging

Paid blogging involves posting an article about a particular product or company. Essentially you are advertising them through your blog or website.

The main advantage of this is that you pick and choose which products to review. A lot of them also pay quite well and it doesn’t seem like “advertising” to your visitors.

The negative aspect is that you essentially have to sell your soul to the company you are advertising. The reviews must be positive or else they won’t be accepted by the company when they come to review it. Unless the review is of a product or company that is very specific and useful to your visitors, they are being short changed too. They come to your website to read your quality content, not to have an advertising post shoved down their throat. I also feel that advertisers are getting a good deal out of this too. A lot of the opportunities require a certain PageRank or Alexa ranking. They are essentially getting a permanent link from your website and they get to choose the anchor text. This helps them out in the search engines.

For example, on PayPerPost there is currently an opportunity that pays $125. Only blogs with a PageRank of 7 or above are eligible to apply. Considering the cheapest ad on Text Link Ads for a Page Rank 7 site is $140 for a month, the advertiser is getting a very good deal for their $125 for a paid review.

It is also essential that you add a disclaimer notifying people that a review is a paid review.

Resources

• Pay Per Post

Banner Ads

The traditional banner advertisement has been around for decades. Users are used to seeing 468×60 pixel ads everywhere on the Internet. With the recent blogging revolution, ads are still commonplace, but they have certainly come of age.

What many prefer now is the 125×125 pixel “button” ad. They can be easily accommodated down the side of a page rather than at the top as required by a traditional banner. It is also very easy to add multiple ads on a single page without interrupting the flow or layout of the page.

In the earlier days of the Internet, banner ads were often sold by a fixed number of impressions. It is now more common to see them priced per click, or, more commonly, a fixed price for a fixed period of time, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks the ad receives.

Traditionally, banner ads sales were sold directly by the website but, as with text link ads, using a broker is now quite common. You can list your site and the number of available ad slots on a marketplace for thousands of advertisers to browse. One such broker is buysellads.com. They take a quite reasonable 25% commission. Again, as with text links, prices are set per month so you can remove an advertiser if you are not happy with them.

If you are planning on selling your own ads, you should set up a dedicated ad sales page. Let the advertisers know what size ads you support and where they can be placed. Mention page views if you like but it is not necessary to quote prices. You should be honest about your statistics and be prepared to provide some proof to potential advertisers.

Resources

• BuySellAds

Summary

These are the main ways to convert your visitors into money. My advice is that making money should never be your sole reason for maintaining a website or blog. In addition, never expect to make any significant money unless you have significant traffic.

One thing I really hate to see is a relatively new blog with some good content that is totally overcrowded by Adsense adblocks. In my opinion, half and hour spent tweaking your ad blocks is better spent writing a quality article. Then, once you have built your traffic and can sustain the numbers, should you start with the advertising.