Making money online by selling stuff - your products, services and writing can make you money

Although my online blogs currently do generate income, they weren't the first thing I did online to try to make money. After a bit of a long-winded set up, I'm going to focus on one particular page (my comedy CD page) and discuss the many ways I use that page to diversify my income opportunities.

Before I launched this blog, and a few others, inluding Hooked On Droid and Joking Smoker, I launched some web sites which featured my other passion: comedy. I have been writing and performing stand-up comedy for many years and after hitting comedy clubs across the country for a long time, I found a niche in that arena by performing full stand-up comedy variety shows for private functions and corporate special events.

So, after a number of attempts, my main comedy site (promoting my act, not just funny stuff) is Click On Comedy. This site still remains my main money maker because if a visitor finds this site because he/she is looking to hire an entertainer for an upcoming function and ends up booking me, that's a direct sale from the web site.

Even if the visitor isn't interested in booking my act, they may end up watching some video clips and decide that they'd like to help a struggling comic by purchasing  the CD "As Funny As I Never Was." This affords me another opportunity to generate some income from the site.

Now, let's spend a little time on my CD page so we can examine what's going on there and how it may give you ideas as to how to incorporate your owne niche and ideas to generate traffic and revenue.

The first thing I hope that a visitor will do is order my CD. The CD is available for only $8.00 and a simple click on the Add to Cart button will get the process started. Although there are many shopping cart options out there, I opted to use PayPal, primarily because it's reliable, respected and free. So, without going into all the detail about how to set up a shopping cart on PayPal, I'll just say that if you don't have a PayPal account, get one now. If you need to set up a shopping cart to sell whatever it is you're selling, simply follow their simple instructions. If you have any problems, feel free to email or comment and I'll do my best to assist.

So, if visitors watch some video clips and decide that they want to purchase the CD, I've made a sale. But notice the other possible ways to generate revenue on that page.

That one page has ads to other products and services that I offer, Google ads and banner ads that link to many of my other sites which may then turn into sales of a different nature.

The ad at the top of the page is a link to "The Dirty Joke Show" joke book. I am currently co-producer of the hit Vegas production "The Dirty Show" and the book is a collection of jokes that appear in the really funny show which appears nightly at Hooters Casino Hotel. Again, to purchase the book you simply click on the button and you are taken to a PayPal shopping cart.

So, in addition to having a Google Adsense account which automatically places relevant, targeted ads, I also have ads that link to my own projects. In fact, almost all of the ads at the bottom of that page take you to my other sites and blogs.

The links to my other blogs and sites serve a dual purpose: 1) visitors may go to those pages and click on a product or ad there, and 2) they act as backlinks (which are very important) to some of my other pages. By having multiple web sites and blogs you ca n get a jumpstart on getting backlinks (which are links from other sites to yours, which shows search engines that your pages have interest by other sites and make it more likely for your site to get better rankings). More on backlinks later.

So, there you have it. I know this article is probably a bit different than most of the other articles you may read on how to make money with your blog or web site, but I can assure you that these methods are effective. They take some work, but if you have a passion for your interest it's worth every minute.