Most bloggers wouldn’t think of adding an online shopping cart to their blogs. I am not most bloggers. As someone who makes a living work full-time on a blog, I find it necessary to exploit every possible opportunity for maximizing my blog income. An online shopping cart may be untraditional on a blog site but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea.

I do admit that I was intimidated about adding this feature at first. Most ecommerce software is designed to set up complete online stores which wasn’t what I needed. I didn’t want to invest a lot of research into different shopping carts. (Really, I couldn’t care less what a C# object based cart and things like that are). So I found software that was wizard-based and designed with the simple site in mind.

After adding the shopping cart, I was able to garner new money from the sales of several things on my site. Working with local artists and musicians, I was able to advertise their work and then offer it for sale on my blog for a percentage of the price. I was able to create ebooks that were available for digital download after payment through the shopping cart. And I was even able to sell some of my old books on writing that I didn’t want anymore. The shopping cart isn’t the major focus of my blog but it sure does help make it a financial success.

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