5 Top Secrets to Blog Your Way to the Bank
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.
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 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. Choose 2-3 Main keyword phrases to start optimizing your blog for. They should be from the subniche phrases that you found from the research phase. Search for Content using your main keyword in Google Alert, Ezine Articles, Technorati, PRweb, Forums, magazines & books. Write posts with your own angle of the content found or add comments to it below, don?t just copy and paste. Include keywords in the title, body and header tags but don?t overdo it. Strive to make a new post every single day.
4. Monetization - Join and search both Clickbank and Commission Junction to find suitable products to promote. You could also find affiliate merchants by searching Google for [main keyword] + affiliates (or affiliate program). Sprinkle affiliate links in your posts and put some banners in the sidebar. Just don’t make it look like a big advertisement blog that will scare away the users. 1-2 products to start with are enough.
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.
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.
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.
For more detailed blog building strategies, I suggest you take a look at the highly successful blogger Rob Benwell’s latest e-book: Blogging to the Bank 3.0. This guide will show you everything you need to know in order to create your money making blog. My second suggestion is to take a look at Firepow, Andrew Hansen’s latest masterpiece, a tool which will automate most of the tasks needed to setup your blog, find content and promote it. If you want all your blogs neatly organized in one single interface, this tool is for you.
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