The blogging trend has only just begun, millions of bloggers express them self daily using this medium. However, not many people know how to properly setup a blog in order to make money from it.
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 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. Blog Setup – In order to get some extra Google love, chose your domain name wisely by including your main keyword. For the dog training niche you could choose a name like mydogtrainingguides.com. Install the recommended Wordpress platform and optimize your blog with essential plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Feedburner, 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.
Keep working with these traffic driving tactics and you shall soon see results. Keep in mind to regularly add quality content to the blog and do not over optimize the posts. Think about the user experience and ask yourself what impression you would get as a customer ending up on your own blog.
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.
