Make Money Blogging

You can make money blogging. Blogging has grown to be a legitimate online business model, where smart online marketers can generate in excess of $100,000 per annum.

Check out JohnChow.com, Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse these are all bloggers with earnings in excess of $10,000 per month. There are many others who are achieving more than $5,000. So yes there is the potential to earn well if you get it right.

Make no mistake blogging is not an easy road to riches. For most its a seriously labor intensive business, especially in the early stages. It will likely take a year or two until any real rewards begin to flow.

Will Blogging Work For You

Here are a few attributes of successful bloggers:

They really enjoy the topic they write about, be it golfing, internet marketing or chinese tea.

They are reasonably bright, with an inquisitive mind and good communication skills.

They have some technical aptitude with have a good grasp of web basics, HTML, SEO, RSS etc

They are good writers. Lets face it, if writing isn’t your thing then look for something better to spend your time on.

They are self starters with a purpose and determination to succeed

They are disciplined, sticking to a posting schedule no mater what else is happening in their life.

Blogging is not an instant road to riches. It takes a lot of hard work, day after day, month after month, to build a worthwhile asset which generates good money on an ongoing basis.

Blogging Platform

For very little money ($10/month) you can run your own blogging platform on a shared hosting account. Having tried a few, I recommend WordPress, primarily because its easy to use, has good SEO out of the box (even better SEO with a few plugins on board) and a huge variety of free templates available.

Another option is Joomla which is also very popular.

Most shared hosting plans have a feature called Fantastico. Fantastico automatically installs Wordpress and Joomla for you. Better still, when there is an update Fantastico will handle that for you too.

A lot of people go for the free platforms, Blogger is a good example. These are a zero cost way to get started but they are not nearly as easy to customize as the hosted options.

Choice of Topic or Niche

The very most important criteria for the choice of topic is that you select something you are interested in. Lots of people pick a topic solely because they think it will make them money, then stop blogging way before being successful when they have lost interest. You have a lot more chance of sticking “to the program” if you blog about something you are interested in.

Make a list of all your hobbies, everything your enjoyed doing at school. Use the digital point keyword tool to see how often each topic is searched for. Eliminate anything which has less than 1000 searches a day.

Now go to the Adwords keyword tool and check your topics to make sure there is good demand from advertisers for the topic. You need to ensure that your niche is one which will be profitable. What you are looking for is a range of keywords related to your niche which have bids over $1.

Lastly check out Clickbank, just ensure that there are affiliate programs related to your niche.

If its your first blog, beware of highly competitive niches like ringtones, dating, make money, work at home. Highly competitive niches are very hard to break into.

Content

Content is one, if not the most important aspect of a blog. After all, people arriving at your blog expect to be able to read something interesting, which leaves them more knowledgeable than when they arrived.

Make sure you write articles with the purpose of helping your readers. Posts which are no more that a sales pitch generate way less income than those written to really help the reader.

Make sure that all your posts are original content. Do not copy other posts, do not place articles from article directories in your blog. Legal issues aside, duplicate content is discounted by search engines and readers get turned off by re-hashed material. Write in your own words, from your own perspective, be yourself as it is your uniqueness which will make readers return to read more.

Start by writing 10 articles which will act as the core of your blog. These should be significant articles, more than 500 words based, on key topics related to your blog’s theme.

Once the key articles are written, make a habit of writing one post per day for at least 30 days then after that, at least one post per week. This is will give sustainable but slow growth. Many professional bloggers will write 2 -3 posts per day for the whole year.

Your first target should be to get 1000 posts up as quickly as possible.

How To Get Traffic

With a new blog set yourself a target of getting 100 visitors per day, then 500, then 1,000 and so on. There will be times when you traffic plateaus, this is quite normal just keep adding content, links, submitting articles and buying advertising the traffic will begin to grow again.

One of the advantages of a blog over more traditional sites is that the blog platform usually has a number of solid ways of generating traffic already built into it. The content is regularly updated, something that search engines prefer, they have RSS feeds, they ping other sites which they have linked to etc etc.

However, just having a blog and writing great content won’t drive traffic to your site. You still need to go out and market it.

Paid advertising is an obvious starter. Either using search engine pay per click (like Google Adwords) or by buying links on websites with a similar theme. Both of these are effective. I prefer to use Google Adwords, just because it gives the flexibility of targeting keywords, banners or sites all in one package. Adwords tends to be a bit more expensive than other options but the quality of the traffic is usually pretty good.

Publishing RSS feeds is an excellent marketing tool. They are already built into the major blog platforms. I do recommend the free Feedburner service which makes a single feed available in multiple formats, allows you to add additional features to your feed and provides tracking information about the number of people who subscribe to your feed. As your feed readership grows, it will also act as another revenue stream further down the track when advertising is sold in it.

Blog carnivals are an excellent way of establishing a new blog. They not only have the potential to provide visitors, they also will generate links back to the blog, which in turn will improve search engine rankings.

Article marketing and Press releases are still effective marketing tools. With article marketing you write an article of around 300 words then publish it on an article directory. Submission is free and you are allowed to put a “Bio line” at the bottom which links back to your blog. This generates another back link and with the top article directories having high traffic, if your article is interesting you will generate some traffic back to your blog.

Press releases work similar to article marketing except the writing is usually not so long and in a press release format.

Join as many social networks as possible. For each one, make sure your RSS feed is being displayed and build up a good number of friends. This will increase the readership base of your blog.

Frequency of posting also has an effect on blog traffic. For most blog platforms, when you submit a new post, it pings a whole bunch of feed aggregators, alerts Google and updates all the RSS readers watching the site. When this happens your fresh post goes to the top of pages to be read by your audience. The more times you do this, the more readers will click back to your blog to get more information. A daily posting regime is recommended if you want any significant traffic from your posting frequency.

Making Money With Your Blog

In general, the more targeted traffic you can get to your blog the more money you will make. A blog is a bit like an advertising hoarding. The more eyes that see the advertising space each day, the more the owner can charge to rent the space.

Its a good idea to “claim” your blog at Technorati , to place an Alexa widget on your site and actively work to grow your RSS readers. All of these help increase the perceived value of your site in the eyes of advertisers. The higher you can drive each of these metrics the more you can charge for advertising.

A number of the advertising options below won’t be effective until your blog has been established. Don’t worry about that. The income will flow once you get a decent traffic volume.

Here is a list of money making options for your blog. These have all performed well for me. All of these are free to join.

Google Adsense

One of the easiest ways of making money your blog. Once your blog is older than say 3 months and has a reasonable depth of content apply to join this free program. Adsense provides a range of Ad formats all of which are very simple to implement by including a small piece of code in your HTML. Once installed the ads are served automatically.

Text Link Ads

Once your blog has a page rank of 3 or higher then apply to the Text-Link-Ads program. As the name implies they sell text-links on your site and pay you half of the sales price. This is ongoing income which is independent of the ebb and flow of traffic to your site.

Affiliate Programs

These can be quite lucrative and will potentially bring in more money than the other two options mentioned so far. There are a wide range of affiliate programs available. They work like this. You advertise a product on your site, sending an interested reader to a merchant’s site. When the reader buys the product you get a sales commission. Sales commissions are usually paid monthly.

Affiliate marketing seems to work best when the merchant’s link is included as part of a review or testimonial. Devote a whole post to the merchants product, or a range of products which are similar and have affiliate programs too. The results can be very good.

ReviewMe - Paid Per Post

With this program you are paid to write a review of a particular product or service. Paid posts will pay anything from $20 upwards. The price of the review is dependent upon the traffic and readership of the blog. Some posts are valued at $400 which is good money if you can get it !

The purpose of this post is to provide an over-view of how to make money blogging. I can highly recommend the following to any new blogger:

Read the free report “Blog Profits Blueprint” from Yaro Starak. Yaro is an super successful blogger who offers a mentoring program second to none. The report is free and presents in more depth, a step by step guide for blogging success.

My recommended host is Hostgator. We use currently use three hosts and have used others in the past. In terms of price, performance and most importantly site up-time, Hostgator has always been the best performer. If you choose Hostgator as your host and sign-up through the link provided I will set-up your blog for free.