Saturday, November 8, 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.

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 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. Researching your Niche - First you need to find a Niche to blog about. A good tip is to check out popular magazines in Amazon, popular products in Ebay and most viewed/published articles in Ezinearticles. Don't go to general but pick a subniche that has at least 10-500 searches a day in Wordtracker and under 10.000 competing pages in google. While doing Niche research also check Clickbank and Commision Junction for good niche specific products to promote as an affiliate.

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. 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. Generating Traffic - To boost your backlinks and pagerank, submit articles to top article directories as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Isnare.com and other article directories. For more exposure you might consider taking use of an article submission service. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedagg.com, Feedfury.com, Feedsubmitter.com and Feedage.com. After each blogpost create a social bookmark in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. To ease things up you can use a service named Socialmarker which adds bookmarks to all the sites with a push of a button. Increase your backlinks and exposure by commenting on other blogs and creating article pages on free webservices like Hubpages, Squidoo, Weebly and Blogger.

To reap the rewards you need to work with the above traffic generating tactics daily, at least for the first months. Be consistent and strive to post helpful quality content that the readers find interesting.

If your blog doesn?t perform as well after doing all of the above tactics for a month or two, you could turn down the effort and some Adsense on it instead. Repeat the process on a new blog. All blogs does not become successful and some take a long time to do, by having a couple of blogs out there you will spread your chance of hitting a gold mine.

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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