Make Money with your Blog!

A step by step guide to making money blogging

If I have been asked the question,” how on earth do you make money blogging ?” once, I have been asked it a thousand times. There is an awful lot of misinformation out there about blogging and the problem is that the failures outweigh the successes by about a million to one, so for every successful blogger out there, there are 999,999 people telling you that you cannot make money blogging. What they really mean is they cannot make money blogging.

The other problem is that a good proportion of the people who make money blogging do it by selling crappy advice to the other 999,999 failures. I am not going to do that. I am not selling a damn thing, although if you take my advice and sign up for the tools I use, I will make a couple of dollars in commissions. All I need is 999,999 people to take my advice and I will be set for life, in which case – anyone want to buy a few blogs?

I am a professional blogger and have been for several years. I do it with a combination of freelance writing, several niche blogs, article writing and, for the last 18 months This last one – if you are considering blogging for business – requires you to have already developed a reputation in a particular industry, and being able to demonstrate the necessary skills to make it work. Which includes generating traffic, building relationships and incoming links and actually being a successful blogger.

I am going to show you the steps needed to create your own money making blogs. I say blogs rather than blog because the chances are that you – like me – are going to fail in some instances and be successful in others. This will probably mean more than one domain and/or niche. The trick is to then capitalize on the successful ones. For ease of use, all the links in this article will open in a new window. This is how to go about it:

Step One – Choose a niche and domain name

A) Research a potential money making niche or subject.

As far as I am concerned, this is by far the most technically demanding part of making money with a blog. Once you have grasped the basics of keyword research, there are a number of automatic systems available that will seek and return potentially profitable niches. I DO NOT recommend using these until you understand the basics.

Step two – Buying a domain name (your website) and hosting it

Step Three – Setting up your blog and installing it

Step Four- writing something

Depending on your writing skills – you may need to farm this out, buy content and edit to suit your requirements. Either way, you will need some content for your blog and well researched, witty, informative content that does not quite answer the question your search engine traffic asked is the best type of content for contextual advertising click throughs and well researched witty informative product reviews that do fully answer the question and recommend a product you have advertised is the best type of content for affiliate sales. So – yes, you will need to do some more work here. Assuming you have followed the first three steps, you now have a well-researched domain name, search engine optimized software and good quality content. The keywords you have determined you are going to use will need to go in the content of the article, the tags on the post, and be used as anchor text to create incoming links. If you do not know what a tag or anchor text is – don’t worry – you will do by the time you have set up a blog and started. Now the next, and perhaps the most crucial step:

Step Five – promoting your site

This is another one that requires work or money. Or both. Much as I would love to say that if you write informatively, it will automatically get found and picked up by the search engines – this is not always true. Sadly, some of the best content I have ever written has never been read because I failed to research the subject properly or discovered later that the subject was so competitive I could never rank well for it.

Think of the search engines as an “online popularity contest,” and you will be thinking correctly. And the way many of them measure it is incoming links from other web sites. So – you need to get out there and find some incoming links. If your content is good, some of these will grow “organically,” but by far your best approach is to make some of that happen. I use a couple of pieces of software for some basic link building, but I also manually generate links as well.. So – you need to go pay these people for incoming links. Which sux – and I hate it – but, I am a realist also. No incoming links means no winning the popularity contest which means no money….. Link building is vital. I will say that again and in bold – no incoming links from other websites equals no traffic equals no money.

One Way Links involves you writing a blog post with links embedded in it, which will then be posted to as many other blogs as are in the network. There are several blogging and article sites that allow you to set up a free blog or account a post articles with links in to your own sites. These include WordPress.com, Blogger.com, hubpages, ezine articles and numerous others. This is a basic starting list, and if you use just these you will be getting a good start:

* Hubpages. Hubpages is an article posting site/social networking venue. It is not a blogging platform. This site has high visiblity with the search engines and I use it extensively.You can also make money here on the articles you post, as they offer a revenue sharing advertising model.
* WordPress.com. You can set up as many free blogs as you wish here. I have dozens and use them to write brief articles with links to my paying sites. The software looks very like the software you will be running your blogs on and is therefore extremely easy to use.
* Blogger. Once again – as many free blogs as you like and I have several which I use solely to generate incoming links.
* Ezine articles. This is an article directory that ranks well with the search engines also and allows you to link back to your own site. Free to join and use.

There are many other places to do this, but this is an excellent beginning. If you use all of these, combined with the automatic links, you will be well under way to making money blogging.

Other ways of generating links:

1. Write really fantastic content that people enjoy reading. They will like it so much, they will link to it. This is actually my preferred way of generating incoming links. But – you need a basis in the first place for people to find you.
2. Ask people for a link. You can email other people, tell them you have a great site and ask for links. This is less practical if you do not have great content, or are completely new with no ranking at all. But – it never hurts to ask. If you go this route – ask related sites to link to you. At places like hubpages and the keyword academy, which both have forums, you are going to bump into people who also need links and arrange exchanges.
3. Comment on other people’s blogs. Do not make stupid spammy comments like “thx for the article.” If you go this route, make respectful comments that contribute something to the discussion.
4. Buy links. I have never done this myself because when I started blogging there was so much stuff in the internet about sites being blocked or punished by google for doing so, that I was unsure whether it works or not. Try this at your own peril. I did try a link exchange program which generated link on one of my outgoing pages in exchange for a bunch of incoming links from other sites. It did not work.

Step Six – Making money from your blog

With this model of blogging (and there are plenty of others) you are going to need to have advertising – which can be of a variety of types. Contextual google ads (or some other provider), which pay based on visitors to your blog clicking on advertising, products for sale which pay a commission based on a percentage of the sale value, or banner ads that pay on the amount of impressions shown. Google adsense is probably the most widely used, and you may well end up using a comination of these.

This is a basic list, but you must open an account (if you do not already have one) with at least one of these type of advertising providers unless you are planning to sell banner advertising directly to a potential advertiser. You may,of course, choose to use a combination of these.

* Google adsense. Contextual ads based on the content of your pages using a pay per click/impression model.
* Clickbank. Affiliate sales model paying a commision based on the value of the sale. Wide range of products and a good reputation.
* DoubleClick. This is google’s affiliate program.
* Commission junction. Affiliate commissions.
* Amazon. Affiliate commisions.

Google adsense is by far the most popular advertising model, but depending on your audience, you may want to combine it with one of more of these others. Other possible options include, but are not limited to:

1. selling a product. If you are selling a product, then I have to assume that you already know the product you are going to sell. Whether you are making the product yourself or a reseller, you must then determine what search terms are being used by people interested in that product and buy a domain name that is appropriate.
2. selling advertising space using banner ads. Same story here.