Tuesday, November 4, 2008

5 Things to Think About When Blogging to the Bank

By Patrick G. Moore

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.

If you are serious about blogging, it?s recommended to create your main blog on your own domain and hosting as oppose to the various free services available. This will give you more flexibility and options for optimization.

I will now reveal my top 5 secret steps to build a money making blog. They are research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving:

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.

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. Start driving Traffic to Your blog. Submit Articles to Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Isnare and other article directories. You can also use an article submission service to automate this. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedage, Feedagg, Feedfury and Feedsubmitter. Bookmark each post you make in sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. Socialmarker is a good service for this. Comment on other People?s blogs and make use of free services like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and Blogger to create article pages that link back to your blog.

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.

However, even if you followed the instructions and daily worked hard on the traffic tactics, your blog might for some reason not get much response. If you know about the 80/20 rule, the same principles can be applied here. 20% of your blogs will make 80% of you income. So for a blog that isn't performing well after a month or two of consistent traffic optimization put some Adsense on it and fire up another blog with the same process. Do not delete the old blog since sometimes a blog can suddenly bloom up and attract people. Make some random posts to it now and then. By having a couple of posts, you are spreading 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.

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