You have probably heard about people making a living off blogging or through their websites. You might have heard this is easy and that all you have to do is read such and such a book and do this or that and you’ll be making money within a week or sooner. I am here to tell you that this will most likely not happen, and if you seek a handout your income will be temporary at best.
Fist things first, lay your foundation.
To make money blogging you must first think about your own interests. If you’re going to be a blogger then you’re going to be spending hours writing and reading about various topics. So, what do you know? What do you want to know? What do you love most in your life? For me, I started my first money making website about construction because this is what I knew about. I made some money but after a while I realized that while I was trying to get out of construction, I ended up making more of my life revolve around construction. Because of this I stopped and reconsidered what I wanted to do and relaunched another website/blog about topics that I loved and wanted to learn more about. What are you most knowledgeable about? Does it align with what you love? If not consider pursuing what you love irregardless of what you know most about, it will be worth it when the ball begins to roll.
Now you’ve considered what topics you’re going to be blogging about, try to consolidate them into a niche. To do this, use google’s keyword tool. Go to google.com and type in the search box “keyword tool”, then click on google’s keyword tool, it should be the top result. Research your topics of interest and find the keywords with the highest search volume and the highest relative competition. High competition believe it or not is good. Google’s competition rating is a measure of how much people and businesses are willing to bid for clicks for that particular keyword. If people and businesses are paying a lot in general for those clicks, then that means people are in the mindset of spending money when they include those keywords in their searches. If you plan on making money with your blog then you have to approach the people who are looking to spend some money versus the people who are just ‘looking’ for information. Also, if you plan on earning money with Google AdSense then the highest competition will earn you the most per ad click. Some clicks will pay you as much as 4 dollars, but if you don’t go for the highest competition keywords then your ad clicks will earn you as low as $0.01 per click, which is just sad. So go for the competition, don’t avoid it. That ‘secret niche’ that has minimal competition but highly profitable visitors is most likely one of those too good to be true things.
After you have a list of keywords that people are actually using in their searches keep it handy. When you start writing for your blog you want to use those words rather than whatever comes to mind. If you don’t use the words that other people are using then most likely you won’t get a lot of organic (unpaid) visitors.
Next, find a blog host.
When you are ready to actually start writing your blog you want to consider how much you want to spend to get it up and running initially. You can start a blog for free at a multitude of places in the web, here is a list of many free blog hosts. Set up your blog and remember the ultimate rule of success, the K.I.S.S. rule. It stands for keep it simple stupid. When you are not very web design savvy the key is to keep everything simple because the focus of the blog is your writing, not the background image or the color scheme. I would recommend a simple colors scheme, even just plain white and one other color, that way the focus is drawn to your blogging and doesn’t distract of make it difficult to stay focused reading.
Start developing valuable content.
The next step: start writing about your topics! There is a wide range of blog post types ranging from how-to’s, to lists, to news articles. For some great ideas try reading this guy’s blog post for posting ideas: http://www.ihelpyoublog.com/20070316-101-great-posting-ideas-that-will-make-your-blog-sizzle.
Begin developing a collection of creative and valuable blog posts that will help entertain and inform people. Do not think about making people click on your ads yet, this comes a bit later. The main idea right now is create ‘content’. Without content, your blog is trash. If your blog is trash, you won’t earn any money. People will just click the back button if they ever even make it there in the first place. So spend a couple months or even a year if you work slow to develop a collection of blog posts and protect them like gold. Every time you publish new content make a backup of your blog because if you lose your blog, you’ve lost all the time you put into it. All that creative energy will be lost and so will your potential earnings.
Since the search engines are not so easily persuaded into visiting sites based on keyword density I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing traditional SEO tactics, because meta keywords and meta descriptions are not as critical as they used to be. SEO is a subject that takes up entire books and if you don’t know what meta information is then take a moment to look it up. When writing your meta description, make it about 160 characters at most since this is what is generally displayed on the search results pages of the major search engines. Don’t freak out about the number of times you’ve written a keyword and if it is at the beginning or end, just write a legitimate brief description that will draw the visitor in. SEO these days is simply about developing pages that help people find what they are looking for, not about tricking the search engines. As long as you keep your keyword list handy while you write and you use those words in your writing, and you write to help people then you will automatically be optimized for the search engines. When you ‘tag’ your posts use at most 5 tags, even so try to stay under 3 tags for any given post/page. Keep your tags general, all they are used for is to cross reference the other posts in your blog that include the same type of content so if you overload on tags it will not only penalize you on the search engines but it will also make your blog appear garbled. Keep it simple.
Develop incoming links.
A necessity in developing the reputation of your blog to both humans and search engines is to create content for other websites. Keep all the content you write for others as valuable as you would for your own blog and make sure you link back to your site periodically by hyper-linking your targeted keywords and relevant phrases. Doing this will increase your sites PR (PageRank) which will make your blogs pages rise in the search engine results pages. It will also send a fair amount of traffic just by clicks through the links. If you spend as much time developing content for others’ sites and blogs as you do your own you will easily develop a slurry of traffic. Be patient and develop a routine of writing for your own site and rotating around writing for others’ sites which target the same or similar niche as you. A good start would be article directories, I have written a list of reputable article directories for whom it would be highly beneficial to write articles.
Finally, earning money blogging.
After you have developed a collection of blog posts and you have noticed that you are developing some traffic, now is the time to consider earning money with your blog. There are lots of ways to do this and it depends on the type of blog you are developing. For the purpose of this article I will try to keep it general. You can earn money with Google AdSense and other similar ad serving services. You can earn money with product reviews. You can earn money selling your own products and you can earn money as a reseller of others’ products. Affiliate marketing is really popular because it transfers the work load of actually delivering and ‘selling’ the products away from you. Meaning all you have to do is ‘presell’ the product or service then send the visitor on over. A good method of preselling is just to be yourself and express your personal experiences, then gently refer the visitor to the relevant sales page.
For example to presell a book on amazon.com (it is easy to become an amazon.com affiliate) all you have to do is write a review explaining what you liked about the book, what it was lacking, and then offer several opportunities for the visitor to click through to the book page on amazon.com. Once traffic is driven to your book review, you will earn the commissions of people who buy the book based on the benefits you described before you sent them over.
To earn using AdSense and other ad serving services, you must tastefully, strategically and un-intrusively place their ad modules in your blog. Each given ad serving company offeres plenty of knowledge to help you do this properly. As visitors come to your site and see the relevant ads displayed throughout your page they will click on ads that interest them. When they click you will earn the bid paid by the person or company who created that ad. Given you have substantial traffic, this is a solid method of earning a regular income.
In conclusion.
Once you have developed a substantial amount of valuable content you will have plenty of ideas on how to earn money with your blog. It happens almost naturally. So keep developing your helpful content and even consider having others contribute to your blog. Make sure you moderate all content though to filter the trash out. As long as your site is dymanic, helpful, and growing your traffic and earnings will continue to grow.
Earning money blogging is not a magical carpet ride as some people across the web have made it seem. It is a long and difficult process by which only the most patient people will be successful. The main thing is patience and perseverance. This is the true path to success in any endeaver.
Handyman, young entrepreneur, blogger. Writes about issues related to blogging, entrepreneurship, alternative health practices, internet marketing, and personal development.
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