 I'm going to talk really fast. And I do have to leave the event early. So if you have any questions, we might not have time at the end, but I'll hang out in the hallway after this session. So last night at the speaker and sponsor event, someone asked me what I'm talking on. I said, oh, four ways to monetize a WordPress site. And I think it was Chris. He's like, oh, a PayPal donate button. I'm like, oh, crap. All right, five ways. And then Ron goes, oh, obviously you could sell products. I'm like, OK, six ways. So this is not an all-inclusive list, but here's four ways that you can monetize a WordPress site. So get your cameras ready. Here's the thunder slide. This is what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about display ads, affiliate marketing content, sponsored content, and paid memberships. So if you want to take a picture or something, here it is. Waiting for Bob. Bob, good. OK, three, two, one. OK, so display ads. A lot of you know this as banner ads. And the easiest way to get into display advertising is Google AdSense. So this is actually pulled from Google AdSense's site. And they highlight here the ads. You put a little bit of JavaScript in there. And that's it. Google takes care of the rest for you. So Google's obviously, as their users are surfing the web, Google's tracking them. They know where they've been. So the ads on your site might be relevant to the content that you're writing about. So this is a muffin recipe. So the ads on here are related to cooking and such. Or the ads can be really specific to the user and are retargeted. So if I visit, oh god, Home Depot is the worst at this. If I go to Home Depot and look at a product, that product follows me on the web for the next three and a half weeks. They can do that through Google AdSense. So you don't really know what the ads are that are going to appear in your site. But it's in Google's best interest, obviously, to make them relevant so that users click and everyone makes more money. It is probably the most popular way to monetize your content, because you sign up and you add a little bit of JavaScript to your site and it's done. We call it the stepping stone, because it's like the very first thing that you're going to do. If you say, I want to make money online, is anybody making money using their WordPress site right now? Great, a few of you are. So those of you who are not, if you're going to do one thing, when you leave here, go sign up for Google AdSense. I think it's just google.com slash AdSense. And then to figure out where can you put a display ad without interfering with the overall look of your site, you can add them within content. So maybe there's only certain pieces of content you want to put ads in, you can do all that. The advertisers are going to bid for ad space. You don't have to go out there and recruit advertisers. Google takes care of that for you. You control the look, how everything, you know, the font to a certain extent, the colors and such. And then you can disapprove ads as well. So if you have a certain type of site and you don't believe in what a certain advertiser is selling, you can say, I don't want to see ads from this advertiser again. A unique thing with Google AdSense is you can also monetize your YouTube channel. So if there's any YouTube vloggers out there, once you've had a certain, I think, a subscription number or view count, you can start monetizing your content that way. So this is a screenshot, this is not mine. I honestly don't remember where I got it from. But you can make some money with Google AdSense. So the second box here, 1448, that this person made yesterday, is, you know, not a ton of money, but if they did that every day, then they're making about four to $500 a month, right, which isn't bad. And when you start making money with your, you know, start attempting to make money with your WordPress sites, what I do is I tell people, set a target, like, okay, I want to pay my cell phone bill, right? And imagine, you know, life would be pretty good if you didn't have to pay your cell phone bill. So if you set that target and then divide it, you know, your cell phone bill, mine's like 120 a month. If you take that and divide it by three, or divide it by 30, that's what your goal is per day. And just break it down that way. It's really nice when you get to that point that you could pay your mortgage, which, you know, around here, what is it, like, between $900 and $1,200 a month? So let's take 1,200 divided by 30. If you can make 40 bucks a day online, you have your mortgage paid for, which, you know, that would be really nice. And then you just kind of work your way up to being able to fully sustain your lifestyle. So if you're using Google AdSense, and it's working for you, but you want to earn 50 to 100% more on that same traffic, look to Switch to Mediavine. I have no relationship with Mediavine presently, but what Mediavine does is they optimize the ads that are being displayed on your site. It's still the same AdSense ads. They're an ad network, they're an additional layer in there. And they'll also work with you to say, okay, look, you took your site, and you stuck a 728 by 90 banner at the very top, and just shifted your whole site down. That's kind of like the lame way to do it. I see designers taking their head, like, please don't do that to my site. So they're gonna work with you to show you the best places to place ads in your site to increase your revenue. You do need 25,000 monthly sessions, and you have to be in good standing with AdSense, meaning you didn't get kicked out of AdSense for doing something wrong. If you look at this chart, look at the blue line. That's the one that's kind of most impressive here. It's the session RPM, the revenue per 1,000 visitors. And when you sign up with Mediavine, you'll get someone that will talk to you and on the phone and say, here's what you should do to increase your revenue per visitor. And you can see that this person was going from about $7 to $8 per 1,000 visitors up to 11, 10, 11 dollars. Okay, so they're in it to make money. The more money you make, the more money they make. Now, if you have a really popular site, you can look to switch to AdThrive. They require 100,000 monthly page views. So it is quite a bit of traffic you have coming in here. And then same idea, right? They're an ad network. They're gonna tell you how to optimize your site. The more money you make, the more money they make. So Mediavine, AdThrive are a couple sources there. Waiting for pictures. Okay, so when you're working in display ads, what is your focus? Your focus is page views, right? So you have to think about, and I put this slide in here because the focus is completely different when we talk about affiliate marketing. So with display ads, you want as many page views as possible, and that's either one person comes in and views four to eight pages of your site, or you get hundreds of thousands of people coming in, hitting your site one off and leaving. And to do that, you produce lots of content and you share it on social media. So that's gonna be your focus on display ads. And we're gonna talk about affiliate marketing. This is a section where I've been involved in affiliate marketing for many, many, many years. And affiliate marketing basically, you recommend a product and when you do so, you get paid commissions if someone purchases that. And some of the companies that handle these transactions for you, they're CJ, Sharersale, Rankutan, and then we'll talk about affiliate summit. Affiliate summit is like, premier affiliate marketing conference in at least in the United States, probably the world. And a little bit we'll have a drawing for a ticket there to affiliate summit if you guys are interested in going. So, all right, we're gonna spend a little bit of time on this slide. This is how affiliate marketing works. This is from sugarray.com. Sugar Ray is a very successful, well, retired now, successful affiliate and SEO. She also swears a lot, so if you're easily offended, don't go to her site. But if you search for Sugar Ray affiliate marketing infographic, you'll come up with this. And this is like the greatest explanation of how affiliate marketing works. So, me as the affiliate, I'm the blue person here and the orange person is Home Depot. And I want to recommend products from Home Depot. So Home Depot and I, we come up with this agreement that if I recommend, if I tell someone, go to Home Depot and buy this tool and they buy that, Home Depot's going to pay me 5% commission. So, what you see is the green person is the actual shopper. They're gonna go to my site and I talk about this tool. Maybe I show how to use this tool effectively. Maybe I talk about, you know, last weekend, I was like, I had to reinforce some supports in my basement, right? I had no idea what I was doing. So, what do you do? You go to YouTube, right? I watched that YouTube channel. That person could have said, go to Home Depot, buy this product. I click on that, I go and I buy it. When I click on that, there's a special link. And then, now I'm being tracked by Home Depot. Previously, this was all done with cookies, with privacy and such. A lot of times, people are just denying cookies. So, there's lots of other ways that we can track people online without using cookies. But when I buy something, Home Depot uses that big magnifying glass and they look to see, was this shopper referred by an affiliate? If so, the very last square over there, Home Depot pays me money, all right? There's two people that are not on this infographic that I wanted to bring up. One is the affiliate network. And when we talked about like CJ, Share Sale, Rakutan, those are affiliate networks. So, you say, well, Eric, you know, that square one, how do I get that handshake with Home Depot? You don't go to Home Depot, you go to an affiliate network. So, Home Depot, let's say they run on CJ. I think that's where they are. You sign up for commission junction CJ. You find Home Depot and you say, I want to work with Home Depot. The nice thing about affiliate networks is they're like the policemen of the industry. They make sure that the affiliates, like myself, are playing fairly. They also make sure that the merchants are not ripping off the affiliates. They also handle all payments, which means they handle all of your tax forms and they handle all reporting. And by doing so, they also take a cut of everything. You don't see that, the merchant paid for that. So that's someone that's missing in this and I'll show some screenshots from affiliate networks in a little bit. And then the other one, I don't wanna say they're not so important, but there was also affiliate managers. So, obviously Home Depot, their specialty is selling tools. Their specialty is not affiliate marketing, so they'll hire someone to manage the affiliate program. Sometimes that person will not be a Home Depot employee, they'll hire an agency, which is known as an OPM. And these outsourced program agencies, OPMs, they just manage a lot of programs. So, just a couple other players to throw in the mix here. Sharersale. Okay, so talking about types of affiliate websites, and I underlined websites here because the source of this is annnavigator.com. Gino is an OPM, like I mentioned, he puts out a lot of great content and he has this blog post about types of affiliates. I filtered through it and I wanna talk about the type of affiliate websites. And I'll give some examples of these. Some of these are my own sites and I'll show some success with them and failures and then other ones I'll just give some examples of, but we're just gonna jump right in. So, annnavigator.com is a content site. It's my abandoned ignored personal site. It's terrible. If you wanna know anything about WordPress, don't go there. But I used to educate people on my site. So, I wrote this post, this was seven years ago, an affiliate website anyone can build. And I gave step by step, here's how, if you wanna build an affiliate website using WordPress, here's what you need to do. And I gave step by step directions. First thing is you're gonna register a domain name and you're gonna buy or install WordPress and pick up a theme and here's the theme that I used. Well, when I said buy the domain name, that's an affiliate link to GoDaddy or Namecheap or whoever I'm partnered with at that time. So, when you say, okay, I need to buy my domain name, you click on that link, you go to Namecheap, you buy your domain name, Namecheap pays me a commission. And then I say, okay, in this example that I'm going through, I used eStore by elegant themes as the theme to my site. If you click on that and buy that theme, I get a commission. And I still randomly get emails from elegant themes. Hey, you made a sale, here's 20 bucks. This is seven years later. It's not every day, but it's still, imagine just walking down the street and finding 20 bucks. It's kinda nice, seven years later. So, super good tip, take a picture of this slide. People are lazy. They think they wanna do these things. So, if you write lengthy blog posts about, look, if you want to, I wrote a blog post about how to build a data feed website, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And I went through step by step. Here's how to connect to the APIs and download the FTP files and here's how you process the document and all this stuff. And I answer every question that comes in about it. And at the very end, I say, and if this is overwhelming, you can go buy this plugin for $39. And so many people just click on that link and buy that plugin. So, you know, and we'll get to this in a little bit, but as an affiliate, you are an expert in what you do. So, on ericnagle.com, I am an expert in, you know, kind of like the tech side of affiliate marketing. So, I can go through step by step and explain how to put out great content, you know, put out these WordPress sites, affiliate marketing WordPress sites, and in the end say, but if you're not the expert in this, go buy this plugin, go buy this service. All right, a review site. So, I have two review sites. Review sites have worked really well for me. The one, and I spoke two years ago, my topic was WordPress and wine. And I have a couple partners and myself, we run wineclubgroup.com, and our job is to receive shipments of wine and we review those shipments. That is a job. So, here's our site, it is not pretty. I'll be the first to admit that, but we have probably about 34 different wine clubs reviewed on the site. And again, when we review the site and we talk about here's the pros and cons of it and everything, we rate it, when you click on that, go to this club, that is an affiliate link. When you click on that link, and then someone goes and buys the wine club, we get paid a commission on it, all right? This is actually, the upper left is from Google Analytics. Most of our traffic comes from SEO. So, we're not paying for traffic. SEO, God, I could do a whole day on WordPress and SEO, but it's definitely a long play. If you make some modifications today to make your site rank better, you probably won't see any change for months. So, it is very frustrating, but if you're dedicated to it and you're in it for the long game, it works out really well. This funnel, I forgot to credit this, and it's from wordstream.com. But you gotta think about the types of keywords people are searching for to find your site, and then based on those keywords, you can see a certain conversion rate. So, the keywords on the right hand side, I tried to line up with the funnel. If someone's searching for a last minute Christmas gift, all they need to know is they need to buy something, they don't know what. Now, I could write a blog post about last minute Christmas gifts, and I can include wine clubs in there. They're probably not going to buy, right? My conversion rate's probably gonna be under 1%. The next keyword, best wine club? Now, at this point, this person has decided, okay, I'm beyond last minute Christmas gifts, I know I need a wine club, what's the best one? Now, they're coming to me as an expert, and I'm telling them, if you wanna buy a wine club, this is the one that you wanna buy, right? And your conversion rate goes up substantially from that point. Substantially from like less than one to like 2%. The next keyword, getting like tighter down the funnel, seller's wine club review. These keywords you're taking, so seller's wine club is an actual brand, take whatever brand that you're working with, stick the word review at the end, and write a whole post on that. The key here is the person's already made up their mind. If they're searching for seller's wine club review, they said, I'm gonna buy seller's wine club, I know this is the one I'm gonna buy, I just wanna make sure I'm not going to get ripped off. Like there's no reason for me not to buy this club. So if you brought traffic into your seller's wine club review page, you're not going to be able to tell that traffic, don't buy seller's wine club and go buy California wine club instead. They're, all they're gonna do is leave your site and go to another site to see if they can find someone that says, yeah, go ahead and buy seller's wine club. So don't try to change someone's mind unless it's an absolutely terrible club. And there are a couple that we say, don't buy this one, buy that one. And we tag that traffic, all that traffic we send to that other club and say, when we say don't buy this crappy club, go buy this other one, that traffic converts to zero percent. So if someone's coming to your site searching for merchant name review, your options are convert them and sell them or just throw away that traffic. You're not gonna really make any money on that. And then like the ultimate money keyword is a merchant name plus coupon code or discount code or promo code. And we've all done it, you're shopping online, you add the product to your cart, you go to the checkout page and you see that empty coupon code box and it's staring at you. And you're an idiot if you don't open a new tab and go search for a coupon code. Those convert at 30%. For every three people that we bring to our site under a keyword, brand name coupon code, we're gonna convert one of them. So can you make money on it? This was from last week. One sale from California Wine Club, $135 commission. So yeah, you can make some money on this. This is the actual P&L chart from our Wine Club group. Over six years, we cleared $140,000 in etym profit. Our expenses are ridiculously low. We've probably spent less than $2,000 over six years on the site. But there's also a downward trend. You can see it kind of, oh and those spikes, that's December. I was talking to someone about this this morning. December's crazy with Wine Clubs. You see it kind of like came up and then started heading a downward trend. My personal opinion is that the Wine Club industry is going down. It seems like a lot of clubs sprang up and they spent a lot of money to acquire customers and their customer acquisition cost was way too high. So don't get into Wine Clubs. And you've wanted to talk about Wine Clubs but I would recommend not looking at that industry. Another example is cloudbackupreviews.com. This is a site that I launched in 2008. Good Lord, this was boring. I reviewed online backup services. So like Carbonite, Mosey, Crash Plain, Backblaze, you heard that Carbonite advertises NPR all the time. There's only so many ways you can say backup your website. So to write about this for eight years was killer. So in this example, and I know you cannot read that review because it's ridiculously small. But it's also very detailed. All right, I knew as much about cloudbackup services as anyone in this room when I started this site and I became an expert in it. When I became an expert, Time Magazine interviewed me about cloudbackup services. So same thing with Wine Clubs. Like I didn't know anything about Wine. It's like yeah, I like that one, I don't like that one. Well, I don't review Wine, I review the Wine Club. I look at the packaging, I look at the newsletter that comes with it, their customer service. Anyone here can do that. So you don't have to be an existing professional at something, but make yourself a professional in it, yeah. Okay, so once you get into the affiliate network like CJ, Sharers, Allen, and such, you find the Wine Club in there, they have a whole merchant directory, you click the join link. Oh yeah, they're in there. Yeah, so to really get into a specific niche, you have to do a lot of research. So you wanna find who your competitors are gonna be and look at who are your competitors promoting. And then as you click on those links, you can catch the redirect to see what network they're going through. So you can kinda get an idea, oh, you know, DirectLines is running on Rakutan and California's running on Sharersale. So that's how you can, and then what's gonna happen is you're gonna apply, you're gonna get denied, and then you write back to them and say, hey, I'm starting this new Wine Club site and this is why I think I'm a good fit and then they'll say, okay, you're in. It's just this back and forth game you gotta play with them. All right, can you make money again? So I wrote this Backblaze review, the one that's shown there on the right hand side. I wrote it in 2009. They pay me 10% recurring commission for life. So in 2009, the first quarter that I had this review up, I made 150 bucks, not even. And, but it's recurring commission for life. Your online backup service is like your bank. They have their claws in you, they're never going to change that. So I built up this customer base and now I'm clearing about $600 a month. I haven't touched this site in probably four years and as long as this company stays in business, I'll be seeing this money. In 2007, I added up, it was like seven grand. So recurring commissions, if you can nail that, man, that's the greatest thing ever. It sucks in the beginning. Like I said, my first month was like $15. I made two sales, but it just, they keep adding up. I think a good place to find recurring commission payouts is Grossumo, grossumo.com. They have a lot of software as a service merchants on there. So you can take a look at them. All right, other types of affiliate sites. So there's your coupon deal or cashback site. Anyone heard of Ebates? So Ebates is an affiliate. You as a user, you go to sign up for Ebates. You shop through these certain Ebates links and let's say you buy something from, did I use an example here? Nope. So you buy something from Home Depot. Home Depot pays Ebates $3. Ebates gives you $2 cashback and they keep a dollar of it. It is extremely hard to implement in WordPress. I don't know anyone that's ever done this in WordPress because it requires so much tracking. It requires the user signups and every link has to be tracked. There is a lot of money in it and there's also a lot of competition in it. So don't go this route, but it is a method of affiliate marketing on a website that I did wanna talk about. Charity sites, this is a really lame example, but basically if you're running, if you build or run a website for a not-for-profit, you could put links in your blog role. Do blog roles still exist? Okay, so you could put links on the site, affiliate links and say to people, let's say you're running something for an animal rescue charity. You can have links in there to PetSmart and 1-800-PetMeds and such and say, hey, if you're gonna buy this stuff from PetSmart anyway, use our links and we get paid a commission. It's a great way for charities to bring in revenue without directly asking for donations and it's extremely easy to implement WordPress. It's just a link, it's a tracked link. So instead of linking to 1-800-PetMeds, you're linking to that link that the affiliate network gives you. Data feeds are another type of affiliate site. You pull in a bunch of data about products from the affiliate networks from the merchants. You just make your spin on that data unique. This is the dress spot and what they do is they bring in all this data and they say, and you can see, maybe you can see, it's kinda tiny, they're bringing data feeds from Macy's and Express and Dillard's and JC Penney and Forever 21 and then they're taking that data and saying, well, this particular dress is green and this particular dress, I don't know, is sleeveless or goes below the knee or whatever. So then on their site, you can say, I want a green sleeveless dress and they're gonna pull all the green sleeveless dresses from these merchants and display it to you. Those are all affiliate links. So if you go and click on one of those and buy it, the dress spot earns a commission. It's hard to implement in WordPress but it's doable, find plugins. There's definitely plugins that will pull the data right from the affiliate networks into your site for you. If you make a better experience, add better content, you can do well with this. In the olden days, like six years ago, you could just out SEO merchants. It's really hard to do right now but I could take a data feed and just rank those products better than the merchants themselves and earn commissions that way. So as an affiliate marketer, what is your focus? Your focus is quality content. You want to go really deep. You want to be an expert in your niche. If, like I said, if Time Magazine needs to write an article about your niche, they're calling you. To do that, go to quora.com, answer questions that people are posting about your niche. Answer hero request, helpereporter.com. Helpereporter, man, everyone should be on the Helpereporter list. They send out three emails a day and it's reporters saying, hey, I'm looking for a source that knows about this. And if that's your thing, you write back to the reporter and just say, yeah, I know about that. Here's a couple lines about it. Here's my biography and either they take your information and you get published just like that or they'll call you back and interview. It's a great way to build your own personal brand, whether you're building it as a WordPress expert, a security expert or a wine club expert. What did you guys look for? Helpereporter, used to be Helpereporter out. I think it's still out, yeah. On the website, helpereporter.com. Helpereporter.com, thank you. Yeah, and Quora is a question and answer community. All right, I'm gonna look this up. So if you're interested in learning more about affiliate marketing, I'm giving away a pass to Affiliate Summit East, which is in New York City, July 29th through 31st. You can register at type a.cc slash wcbuffase. So either take a picture of this or enter now. The WC is for WordCamp, the buffs for Buffalo and ASC is for Affiliate Summit East. And this will be up on my last slide as well. Okay, I'll get up on my last slide. All right, sponsored content. Basically, a brand comes to you and says, we want you to write about this content and you get paid one off. At that point, you're an influencer, I guess. You could be a social media influencer where they're actually paying you right a blog post but just to post something on Instagram and such. These are some influencer networks. There's Acorn, Refluence, FreshPress Media, which I used to be involved with and no longer, but they're an affiliate, I'm sorry, influencer marketplace. You could just search for influencer marketing platforms. This is from steedavies.com, but just search for this. There's so many marketplaces out there that are trying to connect influencers with brands. So I asked someone in my community, how do you get started to get sponsored content? Because you're not just gonna go run out there and have Disney pay you $750 to write a blog post about the newest park offering. So again, great content, become an expert, build your community. You wanna build a strong and engaged community and that includes on social media. So you have your blog posts that might be receiving content or comments, but also share that on Facebook and start getting some action going there. Someone's not gonna pay you if you don't have a track record, so if you wanna get paid, you can use affiliate links. There's really no reason, there's no difference really. You're writing content. If you use an affiliate link, you can get paid. Or a trick that I like to do is you can just add, you guys are familiar with UTM parameters and Google Analytics. That's how you can track your ad campaigns and everything. All the big brands do it, but there's no way for Google Analytics to say these are the ones that we're tracking and these are the ones that we're not. So you can take your own name, your own domain name and when you link to a brand directly, add your domain name as the UTM source and when the marketing department's going through Google Analytics, they're like, what the heck's this EricNagle.com campaign that we're running? Well they're not really running that campaign, that's just the traffic that I'm sending to them and that kind of gets you, you kind of like waited for the person to leave the back door open and you walked in and introduced yourself. And then you're gonna build up the product-only posts where a brand's gonna say, hey Eric, I want you to write about this new, these new running shoes. You can keep the shoes, just write about them. And you can't pay your cell phone bill with a pair of running shoes but it's a good way to start proving yourself. And then just kind of keep building up to it and then ask for 50 bucks, 100 bucks, $200 and your asking price just keeps going up. I mean it's supply and demand really. All right, 15 minutes. So you need to build a media kit. Your media kit is going to sell you and your site. I love it when media kits are one page. If they're like four pages long, I kind of get bored by the third page. But the analytics that you wanna include is like, how many people are coming to your site? What's your social following like? And then it's kept up to date. So this is a plugin and that is an affiliate link because disclosure is very important. Type a.cc slash social fans. So you install that WordPress plugin, you connect to your social media accounts and it keeps up to date what your following is and everything. So if you have a page in your site that says, work with me, here's why you wanna work with me because I get this much traffic and these are my social base. Because you wanna keep your media kit up to date, if you use this plugin, it kind of keeps it up to date for you. But it does not include a connection to Google Analytics. So kind of bummed about that. Here's an example of a screenshot from a media kit from somedayalllearn.com. And you can see they're showing off what their page views are and they know their traffic. 80% of it is from the US, 75% female, average age is 34. And then they also put down right here what they charge for posts. So this particular site's charging $2,700 to start for a brand to have a blog post written about them and then that blog post is shared on their social media accounts. I was able to go get this just by going to somedayalllearn.com and clicked on the work with us page and they were just giving this away. I'm not a big fan of that. I think your media kit should be as a PDF and it should be delivered to the advertiser through an email. So on your site, have a form that just collects the person's name and email address, any other info that you want. Just know that every field that you add is going to reduce the conversion rate of that form. And then when the advertiser clicks submit, you're going to have an auto reply, go back to them saying, thanks for your interest. Here's a link to my media kit. So they get that immediate gratification of I got the information that I want, but what you have is the name and email address to someone who's interested in advertising on your site, then you can personally follow up with them. Gravity Forms makes this super easy to implement. You can get that type a.cc slash gravity forms. That also is an affiliate link. Here's an example and this is one of the businesses that I own. Resource Onami does sponsored posts. This one was sponsored by Miriam who must make these products and they had this, I honestly don't know all the details, but they had this agreement where if you bought certain products from Walmart, they were going to take a portion of those sales and donate it back to food banks and such. So they came to us and said, we need to spread the word on this. So they paid us whatever, this was probably like a $500 payment. Plus we went out and bought all this food, took some pictures, shared it. There you go, so that's sponsored content. If you want to learn more about sponsored content, give away a ticket to type a parent, which is a conference I own. It connects bloggers and brands. The next event is in Chicago, September 27th to 29th, type a.cc slash word camp, sorry, WC buff type A. This also will be on my last slide. I have 10 minutes left, good. All right, finally paid memberships. This is finally in my list, but there's plenty of other ways to make money online. Paid memberships allow you to bring in recurring revenue from your site. I found a couple of examples. I use paid memberships pro, S2 members one. Someone mentioned like WP member or something like that last night. There's plenty of different ways to build membership sites. I think you could do a buddy press too and kind of frankenstein something together. What's nice about subscription sites is it's predictable income, which makes it less stressful. If you're monetizing your site through sponsored posts and you decide to take a month off and not write any content and travel to the US, your income that month is zero, because you're not creating content so no one's paying you to do anything. But if you have a membership site and you're bringing in $500 a month to your membership site, that month that you take off, you're still gonna have $500 coming in. You might drop a few people if you're not active in your site and such, but it is definitely more predictable. Memberships sites also are more valuable. I don't know if anyone here has sold a WordPress site that has revenue to it, but if you have recurring revenue on your WordPress site or anywhere, it makes your business more valuable. I don't think we're talking about over $5 million WordPress valuations here, but anyway, those are some numbers. You do have to understand some new math, because we'll start at the bottom, your customer acquisition cost, that's how much it costs for you to bring in a new member, and your customer acquisition cost is probably going to be more than what the customer's paying per month. But if you know your lifetime value of the customer, an average customer stays a member for 10 months, then you can start getting an idea. You need to know your lifetime value and your customer acquisition cost ratio. If you can get that to three to one, then you're doing great as a membership site. My slides are available too. I should have mentioned that in the beginning, so you don't have to take a picture of every single one of them. I'll put that, I'll share that at the end. So subscribers are more likely to buy again, and they're also more likely to buy more, or buy something else from you. So you could have a subscription site that's charging $2.95 a month, and to your subscribers, they're like, oh, that's quite a deal, I get to be part of this community and whatever you're offering. But if you're hitting them with, okay, now buy this product, and here's an affiliate link for something else, they're used to giving you money, and they're more likely to continue to give you money. It also provides free market research. So if you have, and this kind of also is true for your free sites, like I said, I'm part owner in Type A parent conference, we put out a lot of content about the business of blogging. So we talk about monetizing your site and security and SEO and whatever. We look to see what's our audience reading, what posts are they reading, and then based on what they're reading is how we formulate the agenda for our next conference, because we know this is what they're interested in. I can write a whole, I can have a series written about chatbots, and if nobody's reading it, then I'm not gonna bring a speaker in that talks about chatbots, because the audience will be not very happy about that. And then subscribers also kind of recession proof your business. If, you know, they're already used to giving you that money, I don't know, and I'm sure many of you out there have a PayPal subscription or a charge in your credit card every single month that you look at and you go, oh, I gotta get rid of that, and you never do. Kind of nice to have that recurring money come in. Membership sites are, they're the vitamins, right? And so, Adam, you were talking about a monthly maintenance plan for your WordPress customers for a security package. This is the vitamin versus painkiller, whereas that monthly maintenance plan is a vitamin. Everyone knows that they need to take vitamins, it's good for you, and if you take vitamins, then you're not gonna get sick, but when you do get sick, you need that painkiller, and it's gonna cost you a lot more upfront. So it's kind of hard to sell vitamins, right? I mean, I don't take vitamins, but if you can get someone in there, if you can convince them that this is the way to go, it's great for that recurring revenue, take a look at that entrepreneur article, it's article 230736, talks about all about vitamins, painkillers, painkillers cost a lot more money than vitamins do, but as most Americans know, we'd rather take painkillers than vitamins. It's an unfortunate truth. Five minutes, thank you. So when building a membership site, think about what do you know that nobody else does? And there's definitely things you know that maybe not nobody else does, but you know a lot more than the average person does. One of those things is WordPress. And I know, Steve and I were talking the other day about affiliate marketing. I don't think I know a lot about affiliate marketing because the people I hang out with are affiliate marketers. So we're all at that level. WordPress right now, you might be sitting here like, oh my God, these guys know so much about WordPress. Well, to business owners, you know so much more about WordPress than they do. So don't let that imposter syndrome hold you back. Consider what do you know that nobody else knows. Five minutes, I'm gonna show you how to use paid memberships pro. It is paidmembershipspro.com. They have a free version, 100% open source. The paid version gives you support and access to premium add-ons. Basically you install it, you set up your member levels. And then your content, you just wrap in short codes. So in this particular example, this is paid content. So if your membership level is zero or five, meaning you're not a member, or you're in membership level five, which is a special level for my membership site, I'm asking you to subscribe. And then if you're in membership level one, two, three, or four, then I'm embedding that YouTube video and you can go ahead and watch the content that you paid for. So in your content, which is the left-hand side, you can show different content based on different membership levels, or you can take that entire page and say this page is only accessible to these certain levels. And that's the, on the right-hand side there, showing what the meta box looks like. Pretty slick actually, how you can customize it. They have a nice dashboard. This dashboard is all put together through short codes. Here's all the different short codes. You can see at the bottom, not really, it's a little light. But you can see how it just took different sections, put it together to build that dashboard. There's lots of plugins. These are the nine that I'm using, but there's 78 additional plugins just for paid membership pro that lets you connect to MailChimp or Aweber or Zappier or whatever. There's a lot of different ones. Again, a lot of the add-ons are for paid only, but there's a free version, so it's gonna get started with it. Okay, there's that last slide I promised you. Also, these slides are all at type a.cc slash wcbuff2018. I will tweet that out as well. Yeah. First, share sale. Yep, right. So, the nice thing about Amazon is they are crazy at converting, right? That's what they do really well and they sell just about anything. So, I could link to dog food and someone ends up buying a book and I get paid commission on that, right? Because how many, I don't know about you guys, but I sit there and I'm like, oh, I need this thing, add it to cart. I need this other thing, add it to cart. And then finally, when I'm either sitting at my desk or something like, well, I guess it's time to check out. So, your affiliates can link me to a product. I add to cart and go, oh, I'm gonna check out and I already have these other three things sitting in my cart. You as the affiliate got commissioned for all those things. So, that's really nice. What sucks with Amazon is they pay so little. I think you can like work up to 8% but they start at like 4%. So, not a fan about that. And also, they're really hard to get in touch with. So, the general rule of thumb, a lot of people are like, well, what affiliate network do you go with? As an affiliate, your choice is to go to the one that you're merchant that you wanna work with is on. So, I don't know if you have an affiliate program but if I wanted to direct traffic to your site, I'm gonna sign up for the affiliate network that you're on. I'm not gonna be like, oh, Adam, can you set up a program on share or sale? It doesn't work like that. So, you follow the merchants. And then if you're gonna review an entire industry like I do with wine clubs, you're joined with all the networks just to be able to get all those different merchants. Yeah. So, what I would probably do is take some of your most popular articles and that trick I told you about, try to stick them with an affiliate offer at the end. And I don't know if it's a how-to or something like that. Man, that's a tough question. Because you can do so many different routes. You can just take your most popular ones, I get a lot of paid chews and just start by sticking AdSense on there. Maybe at the end, hit them with an affiliate offer or you can have a popular. I wanna do affiliate. Okay. Or you can, if your post is like an overview on something, you could say for more detailed explanation and videos, join that membership site and you're gonna create deeper content on that. Oh man, that's a whole nother session. We're really interested, but... So, the FTC, yeah, the FTC says you need to have clear and conspicuous verbiage as a disclaimer before any paid or potentially paid content. So, if you have a sponsored post, it has to be above the mention of the brand's name. If you have affiliate links, it has to be above the affiliate links. If it's on Instagram, you have to have hashtag ad before actually at the beginning, really. So, I actually wrote a plugin. You can look for type a FTC disclosure in the plugin directory and that handles all of it for you. All you do is you write your disclosure, you enable it and it's put on all of your posts so you don't have to worry about it. There's a paid version too. Just drop me an email like if you have access to the paid version. All right, did everyone get a picture of this? Hopefully, I'll see some of you at one of these conferences. If you have any questions, Eric at type a parent. Oh, and there's some other ways to contact me and I'm out of time. Thank you very much.