5 Top Secrets to Blog Your Way to the Bank
Sunday, November 16th, 2008Are you seeking for a way to make some extra income online then blogs can be a very good way to get started. To the majority of people, a blog is just a fun thing you could have to write your opinions in and making money with blogs is only for a few lucky students that stumbled on a popular topic.
Those unfortunate people that have tried blogging for money and failed know that it’s not just a matter of quickly putting up a blog and wait for the money to come rolling. You have to have patience and do daily efforts in order not to drown in the millions of other blogs out there. Focusing on daily traffic generating strategies and working for long term will almost always be rewarding.
While you can use free blogging platforms, a blog on your own blog is highly recommended since it will give you a lot more flexibility and you are not dependent on a service that could shut you down any second.
In order to make your blog successful you need to have several aspects in place like research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving. Here are my 5 top secrets to build a money making blog:
1. Research a Niche - To find a niche that you are comfortable blogging about, you can for instance take a look at popular magazines in Amazon, popular products in Ebay and most published/view articles in Ezinearticles. Write down your niche ideas and choose a subniche from each that has at least 10-500 searches per day in Wordtracker. Also search google for the main niche keyphrase and favor phrases that have under 10.000 competing pages in Google. Also check Clickbank and Commission Junction to see if there are good products that match the keywords.
2. Setup - Create a domain name with the main keyword included to maximize SEO efforts. For the niche golf swings you might choose improvemygolfswings.com. Setup Wordpress as it?s the most recommended blogging platform and optimize your blog with plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack, Feedburner, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet, Google Analytics and Auto Social.
3. Finding Blog content - Pick out 2-3 main keyword phrases from the research phase to start optimizing your blog for. Search these phrases for content in Ezinearticles, technorati, PRwebs, forums, magazines and books. It’s also a good idea to setup Google Alerts in order to receive daily keyword specific articles. Strive to make daily quality posts by rewriting the content in your own style or just adding your comments under the article. Don’t just copy other peoples work. Make sure you include keyword phrases in the post title, body and header tags, but don’t overdo it. It’s more important that it’s readable to the user.
4. Monitize your blog with products from Clickbank and Commission Junction. Sprinkle affiliate links in posts and banners in the sidebar. Use common sense and don?t make it look like a big advertisement blog. 1-2 Products to start with are enough but you could also do a review page with 3 top products in the niche.
5. Traffic Generation - Start submitting articles to Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Isnare.com and other article directories. If you want more exposure, consider using an article submission service. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedsubmitter.com, Feedagg.com, Feedage.com and Feedfury.com. Make a bookmark of each post in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. Socialmarker is a resource that automatically posts to all these sites with a click on the mouse. For more backlinks comment on other people’s blogs and create article pages on free webservices like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and Blogger.
If you are persistent and keep doing the traffic generation tactics mentioned above you will soon see a boost in visitors and hopefully a good amount of revenue stream. Always strive for good quality content that enriches the users experience and update your blog regularly.
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.
You can learn more about blogging strategies in Rob Benwells latest e-book: Blogging to the Bank 3 and most of the techniques mentioned in this article can be automated or simplified by using the most powerful blogging tool in market called Firepow. If you are at least a little serious about blogging, it would be a sin not to take a look at what you can do with Andrew Hansen’s Firepow.
