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.
In order to make your blog successful you need to have several aspects in place like research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving. Here are my 5 top secrets to build a money making blog:
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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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