It’s day four of Armchair BEA! Here’s today’s topic:

Today we’d love you to share your top tips for getting beyond your blog! Have you done any freelance writing? Are you monetizing your blog and how so? How do you make connections outside the book blog community on the internet?

How I Monetize my Blog:

The first thing my family and friends asked me when I told them I wrote a blog was if I made any money.  The answer was a big fat “no,” so I looked into it.  I found three ways to make money on your blog:

• Google Ads
• Affiliate Links
• Blog Ads

The only one of these that I do is affiliate links.

I tried Google Ads, but it was confusing and I never got the ads to actually show up on my site so I gave up.  A few months later, I forgot that I had already made an account so I made another.  Since that’s a big no-no, both my accounts are in a weird limbo and I don’t know how to fix it.  Whatever.  I’m A Reader Not A Writer did a feature on advertising and said Google Ads was the hardest to make money from anyway.

I signed up to do affiliate links with Amazon.  It’s easy to do and you basically create links through Amazon and put them on your site.  I put affiliate links in all my book review posts or any post that mentions a book title.  If someone clicks that link and then buys something from Amazon (even if it’s not what your link went to) you get a percentage of that sale.  The post that gets the most people buying things from my site are my eBook deals posts.

You can create Affiliate accounts with The Book Depository and Barnes and Noble as well.  I have an affiliate account with The Book Depository, but I haven’t made anything from them yet.  The Barnes and Noble account was just too dang hard to set up, so I haven’t bothered.

Blog ads is a good way to make money, too.  People pay a certain amount of money to have their ad run on your blog for a certain amount of time.  I applied to do this on my blog a few months ago and haven’t heard back from them yet.

So long story short – yes, I make money from my blog (so far I’ve made $4).  If my blog ever makes enough money to support all the expenses I have, then great! If it doesn’t, I will still keep blogging because I love it.

How I connect with others on the Internet:

The number one way that I’ve made friends in the blogging community is by having conversations in blog comments.  I love to read people’s posts and leave a comment telling them what I thought.

I also have met tons of bloggers and authors on Twitter.  I felt a little overwhelmed at the lingo on there at first, but I soon figured it out and I love it!

I’ve also had great discussions with people about books in Goodreads Groups.

How do you monetize you blog and connect with other bloggers?