Wednesday, November 5, 2008

5 Proven Steps to Earn Money Blogging

By Patrick G. Moore

Are 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.

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.

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. Populate your Blog - Choose 2-3 main keyword phrases to start optimizing your blog for. Use phrases that you gathered from the research phase to find content for your blog by searching Ezinearticles, technorati, PRweb, forums, magazines and books. You can also use Google Alerts to receive daily keyword specific articles. Make daily posts by rewriting the content you gathered in your own style or just adding your comments under the article. Don't just copy other peoples work. Include keywords in the title, body and header tags but don't over optimize the posts.

4. Blog Monetization - Clickbank and Commision Junction are excellent affiliate networks to find all kind of products to promote. Another way is to search Google for [main keyword] + affiliates (or affiliate program). Sprinkle your affiliate links throughout the blog and put a few nice looking banners in the sidebar. It's important not to have too many banners, since lots of people are allergic to advertisement banners.

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.

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. - 15478

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