Friday, November 7, 2008

5 Proven Steps to Earn Money Blogging

By Patrick G. Moore

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.

For people that haven't a clue about blogs and blogging, a free blogging service like blogger.com is advised to start up with and learn the ropes. However, if you are serious about blogging, you should look at registering your own domain and get a hosting account for your blog as soon as possible.

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 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. 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. Monitize your blog with products from Clickbank and Commission Junction. Sprinkle affiliate links in posts and banners in the sidebar. Use common sense and don?t make it look like a big advertisement blog. 1-2 Products to start with are enough but you could also do a review page with 3 top products in the niche.

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.

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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