Chris Brandrick

Last year I blogged about the numerous domains I had acquired and that I really ought to do something with them instead of just buying them, and letting them expire, going unused. One of these domains was http://www.gtafour.co.uk, which I intended to use for a blog detailing any news about the release of the upcoming game GTA IV.

My intentions didn’t flourish into anything other than mere good intentions, and up in till now the domain has been unused. The game (GTA IV) is released at the end of April, so I now think it’s somewhat late to start a blog, so in order to gain some sort of justification on purchasing the domain I have added a simple page online. The page simply shows the games boxart, a youtube video and some affiliate links to preorder the game. Hopefully the website will receive some traffic (UK based) and generate some revenue via the play.com affiliate links.

In an attempt to drive traffic to the site and hopefully gain some sales leads I have decided to give Facebook advertisements a try, and to test the water on how effective they can be I am running a campaign on Facebook tomorrow targeting 18 to 30 year old males. I will be sure to update on how effective Facebook ads are and whether I would use them again. Hopefully the results are positive!

Oh and if your feeling generous and want the game, feel free to preorder through GTAFour.co.uk.

Kontera is an advertising service which displays in-text links via a custom technology called ContentLink. Kontera Content Link (once installed) will scan your blog pages for contextually relevant keywords and then automatically turn those into links to advertisers, thus earning you the blog owner money.

I decided to give Kontera a try as not only do I plan to monetize this blog fully before the year is out, but also because an additional level of customization was available via Karol Krizka’s Kontera plugin for Wordpress. This plugin will allow you to pick and choose which blog posts you will allow Kontera ads to display on, so say for example you are publishing a paid review or an article and you do not want it to have Kontera ads on it, you simply select not to when posting. This allows great flexibility and gives you control over where ads appear.

Having Kontera installed will hopefully bring in some welcome income and all at no additional effort.

I recently outlined my plans to be making £100 ($200) per month from this blog by the end of 2008, and although this may not seem like much to some bigger bloggers, I think its a realistic goal that I have good chance of reaching.

In order to monetize my blog I decided to sign up for various review networks and try them out, and recently I got approved for Smorty. Smorty describes itself as a tool to connect various advertisers with bloggers like myself. Smorty works in a similar fashion to other advertising networks in that advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinions and thoughts in a post and link back to the advertisers site. With smorty you get paid to blog.

Upon signing up, my blog got approved rather quickly (impressive), and without little hesitation I logged into this blog for money service and was instantly greeted with four money making opportunities, some I will take others I may not, but either way you will see the results here at ChrisBrandrick.com. Whether the opportunities will continue to roll in is yet to be seen, but Smorty has a sleek interface which is easy to use, navigate, and offers you your current opportunities at a glance. Simple.

Once you have earned enough you can get paid via PayPal, and for those of you with multiple blogs Smorty supports you to.

Smorty - Get paid to blog. Check it out, what have you got to lose!