5 Things to Think About When Blogging to the Bank
There are multiple ways of making money online. One cheap effective way is to make use of blogs. Even if most people know what a blog is nowadays, the general view is that they are only used as a fun “diary” to share people’s opinions. If someone makes money it’s a schoolgirl that happened to have luck writing about a popular topic.
For those who know the full potential of this money making medium also know that it?s not just setting up a blog and watch the money flow into your bank account. Yes, it takes a bit of luck as well as a lot of work and effort in order to be successful but if you are consistent, determined and work for a long term strategy, you will be rewarded.
For people that haven’t a clue about blogs and blogging, a free blogging service like blogger.com is advised to start up with and learn the ropes. However, if you are serious about blogging, you should look at registering your own domain and get a hosting account for your blog as soon as possible.
I will hereby grant you 5 secret steps to build a money making blog. You need a good mix of research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving in order to make your blog successful.
1. Research – Find a niche that people are willing to spend money in and you are comfortable to work with. To come up with ideas go through popular Magazines in Amazon, Popular products in Ebay and most published/viewed articles in Ezinearticles. Choose a subniche that has at least 10-500 searches a day in Wordtracker and under 10.000 competing pages when searching for the main keyword in Google. Also check Clickbank and Commission junction to see if there are good products that match the keywords.
3. Setting up your Blog – A keyword rich domain name does wonders with Google so choose wisely. For the niche golf swings you could choose a domain name like improvemygolfswings.com. The recommended blogging platform to install is Wordpress. Optimize the blog with at least the following plugins: All-in-One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet, Feedburner, Google Analytics and Auto Social.
3. Choose 2-3 Main keyword phrases to start optimizing your blog for. They should be from the subniche phrases that you found from the research phase. Search for Content using your main keyword in Google Alert, Ezine Articles, Technorati, PRweb, Forums, magazines & books. Write posts with your own angle of the content found or add comments to it below, don?t just copy and paste. Include keywords in the title, body and header tags but don?t overdo it. Strive to make a new post every single day.
4. Monetization – Join and search both Clickbank and Commission Junction to find suitable products to promote. You could also find affiliate merchants by searching Google for [main keyword] + affiliates (or affiliate program). Sprinkle affiliate links in your posts and put some banners in the sidebar. Just don’t make it look like a big advertisement blog that will scare away the users. 1-2 products to start with are enough.
5. Generating Traffic – To boost your backlinks and pagerank, submit articles to top article directories as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Isnare.com and other article directories. For more exposure you might consider taking use of an article submission service. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedagg.com, Feedfury.com, Feedsubmitter.com and Feedage.com. After each blogpost create a social bookmark in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. To ease things up you can use a service named Socialmarker which adds bookmarks to all the sites with a push of a button. Increase your backlinks and exposure by commenting on other blogs and creating article pages on free webservices like Hubpages, Squidoo, Weebly and Blogger.
To reap the rewards you need to work with the above traffic generating tactics daily, at least for the first months. Be consistent and strive to post helpful quality content that the readers find interesting.
Unfortunately all blogs does not perform well, if you heard about the 80/20 rule, the same principles can be applied here. 20% of your blogs will make you 80% of the income. So if you blog isn’t performing after a month or two, put some Adsense on it and repeat the process on a new blog. Sometimes the old blog can be a late bloomer and suddenly attract people so keep it in hibernation mode and do some post to it now and then. By having a couple of blogs you will spread your chance of hitting a really good performing blog.
The highly successful million dollar blogger Rob Benwell teaches a lot of secret strategies in his latest e-book, Blogging to the Bank 3.0. This guide is gold worth for someone just starting up but also includes a lot of tricks for the more experienced bloggers. Another tip is Firepow, a top notch tool which helps you automate the setup of a blog with the right plugins, getting content, optimize posts and promote all your blogs within a single easy to use web interface.