How Does Riskology.co Make Money?
I’ve gotten a lot of emails and messages recently from readers curious about how to make money blogging. Maybe they’ve heard me mention that I make my money online or that I intend to turn Riskology.co into a business that fully supports me.
It’s a good question, and the answer is actually pretty straightforward, but takes a bit of explanation to understand.
Now, before I get started, I want to make sure you know that I am not the expert in the “make money blogging” sphere. This is Riskology.co and I’m much better at climbing mountains and doing scary stuff than I am at explaining how to make money online.
I prefer to defer to the masters of that niche like Darren Rowse at Problogger.net or Chris Garrett at Chrisg.com. Those guys have perfected the art and if you want to really understand all the nitty gritty details of how a blog can function as a business, you should definitely check them out.
I thought long and hard about whether or not this would be a good topic to discuss at Riskology.co and decided that since so many people have written in to ask about it, I ought to address it so that everyone here has at least a basic understanding of how I make money with this website.
The hardest thing I have to explain, though, when someone asks me about making money from a blog is that I don’t actually make any money by writing it – meaning, no one sends me a paycheck for publishing AR.
As a reader, you don’t have to pay anything to come here and read my articles twice a week. That will never change. This site will always be free to anyone that wants to lead a more interesting life by taking bigger risks.
Truth be told, I actually haven’t gone to much effort yet to monetize Riskology.co. Instead, I’ve been more interested in carefully building a community of people (that’s you!) that I can be helpful to. That’s much more important to me.
While I’m constantly working on ways to turn the site into a sustainable business, I don’t have to go hunting for money at every corner because of the large amount of savings I built when I decided to pursue writing as a new career.
I’ll be talking about that in great detail when Take This Job & Shove It, my first completely free digital guide on what it takes to jump ship without worrying about money comes out next week on Tuesday, August, 17. If you want more information on that, we’ll get you covered next week.
For now, though, let me give you a brief explanation about how I do make money with Riskology.co.
The number one way that I earn money on this site at the moment is by finding really great resources that have helped me do something valuable and then telling you about it. Then, if you decide that what I found is a good fit for you and you buy it, I make a little bit of money.
It’s called affiliate marketing and it’s actually a really simple concept that can be a great source of revenue for a website, but it has to be done carefully (and ethically) in order to be effective.
Now, affiliate marketing can work in a number of different ways, but let’s take a look at how it works here at Riskology.co.
By reading all the emails and messages I get from readers about what they want to learn, I find, from time to time, that patterns emerge.
When this website was just starting out, I got a number of emails from people asking how they could start their own small business online and wondered if I knew of any good resources since I’d just launched mine.
Well, it just so happened that I’d spent a bunch of time learning about running a small online business from Chris Guillebeau in the resources that he publishes at Unconventional Guides.
So, at the end of my next article, I made it a point to let everyone know that, yes, I do know of some good resources, and included my affiliate link (just like that one above) to Chris’s guides and let everyone know they could support Riskology.co by buying a copy.
This works great for everyone because if you were someone that was interested in that and ended up purchasing something, you don’t pay anything extra, but Chris sends me a little bit of money. Chris makes more sales, I earn a little bit, and you get a great product that fits what you were looking for.
Of course, this also introduces a few potential “conflicts of interest” that I have to be careful to avoid otherwise I could damage our relationship here. Since money can make things tricky, this is where the ethics of affiliate marketing come into play.
If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one and are interested in using affiliate marketing as an income source, here are a few extremely important rules that I’ve made for myself and follow any time I decide to tell you about a product for sale:
Only promote products that you’ve actually used.
Never become an affiliate for something that you don’t know intimately. When I tell you about a product I think you’d be interested in, I know that you place a lot of trust in my recommendation and I never want to take that for granted.
So, I never promote something that 1) I don’t already have an intimate knowledge of, and 2) isn’t amazing and worth every dollar that you’d pay for it. I know if that’s the case because I’ve always used whatever it is myself.
If you abuse that and promote substandard products to your audience, they will not forgive you and that is trust that you will never get back.
Don’t over-promote.
Once you get into affiliate marketing, you’ll find that there are all kinds of people out there creating products to sell. If you offer up every single one of them, your audience will get tired of all the promotion and you’ll end up looking like you’re more interested in making money than helping people.
Making money is fine, in fact it’s critically important if you want to run a business, but you need to be extremely selective about what you offer to your audience.
I keep promotion pretty quiet and sporadic around here. I want to make sure that when you guys see me promote something, you can feel confident that it’s the best of the best.
I probably get pitched by people to promote their work here at least once a week but I usually don’t mention an affiliate product more than once a month or so. If there isn’t something that knocks my socks off, you won’t hear a peep from me at all.
Always let people know that you’re affiliated with the product.
Not only is this just the honest way to operate, it’s actually the law now. People have a right to know that you stand to make money when you recommend something to them.
The law shouldn’t really make a difference if you’re honest anyway because letting your audience know that you’re affiliated with something you promote is just good business.
If you want to be in this for the long-haul and actually help people, then it’s your duty to make sure they know when a recommendation comes with a benefit to you.
Some people will never buy anything that they know you’re affiliated with. Some people will be happy to know they’re supporting you.
In the end, it’s a wash, so honesty is always the best policy.
Always offer some sort of value added benefit.
Most people don’t do this and it’s not a hard and fast rule, but I always feel better about promoting something to you guys when I can offer something additional myself. Why should I get paid for providing nothing but a link?
I prefer to know that I’m adding real value to the equation so I always try to come up with my own free offer to sweeten the deal.
For instance, when I first promoted the Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself, I offered anyone who bought it a month of personal email help in setting up their business.
A few people took me up on it and we had a blast getting things started.
Here’s another great tip for making affiliate marketing work for you if it’s something you decide you want to use:
Tell a good, relatable story that fits the theme of whatever you’re promoting.
I don’t always do this because I try to keep the promotion really minimal around here, but today is my first attempt at it. You don’t know it yet, but I’ve been working behind the scenes with a guy named Corbett Barr evaluating a new program that he just created called Affiliate Marketing for Beginners.
When I started going through this course and counted up all the emails I’d gotten asking about how to make money blogging, it just made perfect sense to put the two together by telling you about how I make money supporting other people’s great products and then introducing you to an actual great product that goes into a lot of detail about how to do just that.
It’s a five part course that’s completely online and takes you through all the steps that someone brand new needs to go through in order to start building an income stream around affiliate marketing.
The whole point is that you go at your own pace and only move onto the next part once you’ve finished the one before. Really linear and easy to follow.
The best part is that the course addresses a number of different ways to start using affiliate marketing. The way I use it on Riskology.co is just one example. There are numerous others and Corbett focuses on how to build little websites that will quickly start earning money.
Basically, if you have a blog, that’s a bonus, but you don’t need one to start using affiliate marketing.
Corbett’s a sharp dude and has used this strategy in a number of different, creative ways to make a living online and on his blogs, Free Pursuits and Think Traffic (two sites I’ve been reading for a long time.
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners is $47 and it’s available for purchase starting tomorrow morning, Tuesday, August 10th. However, that price is only good for 48 hours, and after that it goes up to $87.
I won’t hammer on and on about buying now because that’s just not my style, but obviously if you buy it before Thursday, you’ll get a better price.
Also, just like I explained in my rules above, I like to add my own value to the pot, so if you decide that Affiliate Marketing for Beginners is a good fit for you and pick it up through my link, I’ll throw in a free website evaluation.
That means that once you finish the course and start implementing affiliate marketing into your own blog or website, I’ll take a look at what you’re doing and offer any tips I might have about how to improve your strategy. You don’t have to take me up on it, but it’s there if you want it. Just forward your email receipt to me at tyler.tervooren[at]gmail[dot]com.
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So now you have a pretty good idea of how affiliate marketing works and hopefully I’ve given you a little glimpse into the way that Riskology.co currently makes money.
Of course, there’s much more to come on that front as the site develops, and none of it will cost you a dime, but this a pretty good intro. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have about affiliate marketing in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.
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Image by: Great Beyond