I slammed the door on it for a long time. Not anymore.
On the scale of “how hard is this money” this is fairly easy.
Not quite as easy as collecting an AdSense payment or an affiliate payment, but not as hard as writing the articles essentially for free and waiting for residual income to come in.
And like I mentioned, it's showing up at your door. You may just not know it.
“Would you like to share this resource?”
If you've been around the blogosphere as long as I have (my blog will be twenty this month!) you*'ll get plenty of requests to “share a resource that may be of interest to your readers.”
This request usually comes from a website owner or an SEO (search engine optimization) company hired by them.
Some requests are just a hard no (“share this payday loan link on your debt reduction post”). Others are hitting up high-value keywords to get ranking on them (“forex” was a big one at one point).
But other requests show research and targeting:
- Sharing a coupon-clipping article on a page talking about saving money on groceries
- Sharing a coin-collecting link on a currency-collecting page
- Sharing print-on-demand services on a page dedicated to writing a book
It's these kinds of reasoned, thoughtful requests that are worth checking out a bit.
Old posts on a blog are an asset!
I used to get so many of these I just began to ignore them, but that was a mistake. (I probably got burned out dealing with overly pushy requests at one point and just stopped responding. Now things are bit more manageable so I'm looking at them again.)
I recently got a request to share a resource on a post I wrote in 2012. Yeah, thirteen years ago. I didn't even use proper headings on the post!
To be fair, the person requesting gently reminded me to negotiate with them by offering a gift card or some other form of payment for including the link.
That's the easy money right there. I can counter this request with an offer for a paid link:
“Sure, I'll be glad to include your resource with a rel=”sponsored” link for $X.”
(The rel=”sponsored” piece is part of the link attributes and indicates to search engines that it's sponsored. It's the above-board way of doing paid links.)
If I simply ignore the offer, the money won't come in. Likewise, if I just put the link up as requested, the money won't come in.
The person found my post and deemed it worth their time to reach out to me. (Actually, just finding the post indicates something. If they found the post with Google or some other SEO tool, that post was ranking well enough for some keyword that it showed up on their radar. It makes me wonder what I missed!)
Regardless, it's clear that it's worth something to them to get their link up on my page.
Which means: It should be worth something to me to put it up there.
If I don't ask, that's on me for overlooking easy money and not properly valuing my posts as the assets they are.
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I’m John and I encourage people to work for themselves, and on themselves, every day to sleep better at night. I also hoard side hustles and look for ways to make them work together.
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Photo by Karine Avetisyan on Unsplash
