A few weeks ago I noticed that I’d started earning regular money through affiliate links on one of my other blogs - Chocablog.

After looking into it a bit further, the reason became obvious. Easter was approaching and people were looking to buy Easter eggs online. A lot of the pages on Chocablog have good rankings for chocolate related Google searches, so people were coming in from Google and clicking through to actually buy the chocolates.

I’m very careful not to push affiliate links on Chocablog too hard because I want the site to be fun and keep the reviews we post as honest as possible. The success of the affiliate links to “buy now” on the site was something of a pleasant surprise… so I decided to try taking it a little further.

I set up a small ad campaign on Google Adwords and sent the traffic directly to my affiliate links. I know most people recommend making landing pages, but I didn’t have the time or inclination to do that for this small experiment.

To my surprise, the campaign produced results within 24 hours, so I tweaked it, refined the targeting, increased my spend and set up a campaing on Yahoo too.

By Thursday (when I switched off the campaigns), I’d spent just over $100, but made £550 (about $1100) selling Easter Eggs.

I guess the moral of this story is not to be afraid to explore opportunities when they come up. Many professional bloggers make most of their income through other related activities, rather than directly from their blogs, and this is just one example. If you’re blogging about in a parcticular niche, the chances are you know as much about that subject as anyone, so it makes sense to use that knowledge to the full.

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