Three Ways to Make Extra Money with Your Author Blog

You’re selling three books a day, but it’s not quite enough to pay the bills yet. Drat!

If you’ve been blogging and working at building traffic (you have been doing these things, riiiiight?), there are some ways you could earn a few extra dollars. They all relate to books, too, so don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you to start writing sponsored posts for reverse mortgage companies!

Here are three ways to make a little extra cash with your author blog:

Sign up as an Amazon/B&N/Smashwords Affiliate and Promote Books/Ebooks

Affiliate marketing is the internet version of working on commission. You sign up, create links to product pages (with your special tracking ID embedded), and post those links on your blog. You can earn anywhere from 4-8.5% of the book’s price (Amazon) to 11% and up (ebooks at Smashwords) for each product you sell.

Hint: use this to promote your own books too! As of December, Amazon pays affiliate commissions on ebooks. As an indie author, I make 70% of the sales price of Emperor’s Edge at Amazon and another 7% if the ebook is sold through one of my affiliate links. This is also a nice way to track how many people are buying your book through your sites.

The best way to make money with affiliate links is to stick text links directly into blog posts that are related to what you’re trying to sell. For example, a book review for a new Suzanne Collins novel would be a great place to add an affiliate link for said novel.

If you already review books on your blog, this is an easy and unobtrusive way to add a little income.

Keep in mind, any method for making money from your blog requires you to get traffic to your blog! If you haven’t read my link building tips, now would be a good time. Getting more visitors to your blog should bring the added bonus of selling more of your books too.

Add Your Blog to the Kindle Store

For $0.99 or $1.99 a month, people can subscribe to blogs listed in the Kindle Store. This means they can get all the posts automatically delivered to their kindles. Sure, they could read the blog for free online, but some people are willing to pay for convenience, so you might get a few subscribers if you write informative content.

If people subscribe to your blog, you’ll make 30% of the “sticker price.”

I added Ebook Endeavors last week, and it’s live in the store now. At this point, I’m more interested in having another outlet where people can find my blog than the money, but I’ll keep an eye on things and see how it goes.

One of the downsides is that Amazon chooses the price point, seemingly arbitrarily from what I’m reading in the publisher forums. Some people wish their blog was set at $1.99 while others would prefer their blog was $0.99 to attract more people. I admit I’m in that latter category. Amazon chose $1.99, and I’d prefer to list mine at $0.99.

Although Amazon is close-lipped on how prices are chosen, my guess would be it has something to do with bandwidth costs. If you post often and use a lot of pictures in posts, it may cost them more to wirelessly deliver the content to people’s kindles. I haven’t hunted around to see other people’s theories though.

If any of you decide to give this a try, let us know how it turns out. I’ll post an update myself at some point down the road.

Notes:

• If you really want to do well with this, consider adding a footer to the bottom of each of your posts, linking to your blog’s kindle page and letting people know they can sign up.
• Make sure you’re committed to your blog and post regularly–people aren’t going to be happy paying a monthly fee for an infrequently updated blog.

Sell Advertising to Other Authors

If you combine those link building tips I mentioned above with quality content that attracts a certain target audience, you could end up with a popular niche blog that other authors would like to be promoted on.

This doesn’t mean you can’t still let people guest post for you or that you can’t mention your friends’ works free of charge, but there might be authors you don’t know who’d be happy to pay $10 or $20 a month for a link/banner in your sidebar that highlights their book.

You may want to read my post, “Should You Buy Advertising on Book Review Blogs?” for some guidelines on what would make your site more appealing to authors with money to spend.