Internet Business Tips and Notes

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.

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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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