The primary purpose of this Blog is to introduce you to the world of blogging and provide you with tips and trick you can apply to make you become a top notch blogger overnight.
As we all know, before a house can be built a foundation must be laid because it’s almost impracticable to start the building of a house from the roof. For you to have a solid edifice, you must have laid a solid foundation, no less.
So this Blogsite would invariably provide you with the foundation you need to get started at blogging and at the same time lead you in the right direction. It will also help you solidify your foundation if you have already laid one.
Even if you are just getting started or you have some little experience in Blogging ,you are about to discover the trips and tricks that will skyrocket you to the top list of notable bloggers and give your blog a success.
So let me outline the key areas I would be talking on blogging.
• What is a Blog?
• Why blogging?
• Blog vs website?
• Hot niche you can blog about
• Tips for generating ideas and research for your blog contents
• Setting up your blogsite
• Reaching out to your customers
• How to monetize your blog.
• Conclusion.
What is a Blog?
Blogging has become an essential phenomenon in the internet world that I can’t but write about it. I have noticed that as popular as as Blog or Blogging is, quite a lot of people out there are still having problems with it and I’m very much sure that your curiosity would definitely have increased a hundred times because you also heard that this thing called a BLOG can bring you enough money to live a lifestyle of luxury. So I hear you ask: what is a Blog and how can I earn from it?
A Blog (short form for weblog) is a type of website maintained by an individual or organization with regular entries of commentaries, description of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
A typical Blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.
Now let’s proceed to the next step which is:
Why Blogging?
Well, different people blog for different reasons. Some use blogging to keep in touch with friend and families ,others blog about their own opinions, interests, life experiences etc. Recently, blogs have also been use as a source of income and personal branding just like said above earlier on.
If your main interest is social blogging: just to connect with friends and family or share your personal life experiences. hats’ is not intended for money making ,you would do pretty well by hosting your blog with some top social networking sites out there such as www.myspace.com, www.facebook.com,www.twitter.com etc virtually all these sites have now integrate blogs with their sites for the benefits of their members.
More so these sites are high traffic sites with lots of page views daily ,so you don’t have to do much work promoting your blog .
On the other hand, if your intention is create a source of income with your blog, you have to put the following tips into consideration.
• The first principle for it is your passion
Blogging for money is not something anyway as easy as you might have think. It really requires a lot of hard work, that is the bigger you get the harder the work gets , for you to stay on top of your game a lot of hard work, research and input needs to be done otherwise you will wake up one day and discover everything about you has become obsolete and can’t even make you a single dollar anymore.
I’m sure that is not what you wanted to hear but that is just the reality and nothing else can substitute it because passion breeds success.
Blog vs website?
You might be wondering what the heck is the difference between a website and a blogsite.
• The difference between the two is probably the content and how it's presented, as an example when covering the same topic like news or reviews, a website will be mostly informative and detailed providing you all the facts. While the blog will usually provide you with unique personal touch or expressing a particular point of view rather than giving you the facts
• Blogs does not require a dime to set up and run, while a website requires some fees and for set up and even running it.
• Blogs are easy to set up, easy to update and easy to manage .Blogs helps you to build an online personality by branding yourself with your blog. This is something you can hardly do with a website.
I suggest you could start with blogs and thereafter, you will know when getting a website becomes outrightly necessary,But like I said earlier on it all depends on your intention.
But I can hear you say, you prefer starting with a blog. If that be the case lets’ proceed to the next step which is…
Hot niche you can blog about
You might be wondering what a niche is, well a Niche is a material or product you can write on or promote, that is also capable of generating some cash for you.
I’m very much sure that you have heard many times that you need to have quality content about your niche if you want to stand out as a successful blogger. If you aren’t writing material that is new, different and offers an interesting perspective , it will be quite hard to get readers to your blog. The best way is to find a topic “Niche” that you are passionate about and that isn’t too saturated yet, and if you are passionate about a niche that is highly competitive, then you might have to be very creative and make your information unique, spice up that will keep readers opting to get your particular version of any information even if they have already ready it somewhere else.
Tips for generating ideas and research for your blog contents
This is a stage that requires a great deal of your time and concentration because it is one of the key areas your readers and customers will be looking forward to and you need to really give it all takes.
However, I will outline few steps that will easy everything for you.
1. Scan through the comments posted by others on the online articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, Pros and Cons of an issue and leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
2. Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After the articles, tag them using your own classification system.
3. Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.
4. Use a variety of online tools like Technocratic, Digg, Delicious , etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and new stories are posted in these sites.
5. Check Yahoo’s buzz log to find out what people are talking about and searching for. You quickly scan them hit a few gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.
6. Ask yourself few questions on an issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources and create new ideas generated from existing materials.
7. To generate ideas and research for your blog content you can also use overture keyword selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture , you will se more keywords based on the search popularity, copy a few selected keywords to a notepad. Then take each keyword and do a search in online sites like Digg, Technocratic etc. You will see a number of articles read them to generate ideas.
Setting up your blogsite
Setting up your blogsite is not really a big deal as it is free and easy. It requires you to have a Google account and for you to have that just visit www.gmail.com and sign up for one. If you already have a Gmail account, you can equally use it, but it is advisable to go get a new one, after all it’s free of charge and it doesn’t take more than 2mins to create one.
Now head over to www.blogger.com and sign in with your username and password then follow up on all instructions to create your blogsite, then you are a proud owner of a blogsite.
Nevertheless, when naming your blog (title) and URL (subdomain).
Ensure you carefully select your TITLE and URL to match with what you are writing on or promoting.
After the researching and the designing it is time to reach out to your customers or readers. Which move us to the next step.
Reaching out to your customers
This step is going to be volatile as it is one of the most important step in blogging. But I will only comment on few and the most important part of it.
Reaching out to your customers include the following: using the article directories, submitting your blog to blog directories, commenting on other blogs, internal linking, joining forums and link exchange.
But I will take them one after the other briefly..
1.Using the article directories
It is one of the best and interesting ways of submitting your articles to the article directories which makes you air your view to your customers. For you to effect this method properly you can use this MAD and INCREDIBLE software called “MASS ARTICLE CONTROL”.
Mass Article Control is a software that helps you create hundreds of different articles from your original article within a short time and have them submitted to the article directories automatically within a very short time.
2. Submitting your blogs to article directories
This is a very straightforward idea and I will explain this in a simple way by comparing it to the local phone directory. We know that a phone directory is a gallery of individual and corporate phone numbers and addresses subscribed with the local telephone company. The idea is to provide an easy way for people to find companies and individual’s phone numbers by searching through the phone directory. Now, the same applies to the blog directories . When you submit your blog to blog directory and it is approved, your blog will be added to the directory list with a link back to your blog.
3. Internal linking
This is also one very important aspect of linking strategy that bloggers take for granted. The entire internet is joined together through links and this is what makes it easy for search engines to easily locate web pages .When you create a post and and add a link to one of your previous post, you have automatically generated and internal back link for the post you have linked to. Even though, internal links are less effective than external links , it’s still very necessary for a better back link strategy .
4. Joining forums
Ensure you join forums and provide answers to people questions and when contributing, do include your signature below your post or contribution this way you are also reaching out to your customers and driving traffic to your blog site too.
5. Link exchange
Exchanging links is a great way of getting back links for your blog. Link exchange is a process where bloggers trade links with each other. Here ‘s how : I put a link to your blog on my own blog with the “anchor text” of your choice and you do the same for me, that is link exchange in it’s simples form. You can easily get bloggers to exchange links with in forums, social networks or by sending a direct request to bloggers through email or comment on their blog.
And that is all about reaching out to your customers; now let’s proceed to one of the key points and interesting part.
How to monetize your blog.
Here i will outline and explain 10 different ways of monetizing your blog...
1.Contextual (related) Advertising
Advertising comes in many forms, and contextual advertising is the most popular especially through Google AdSense.
2. Display Advertising
In some cases there aren’t enough advertisers in niche topics, and in others the users just isn’t likely to click. In this case, you want to be working with ad networks that provide CPM display advertising. CPM means cost per thousand impressions; An impression is a single instance of an ad appearing on a Web site (Blog). This means you get paid something for every ad viewed/shown, opposed to only getting paid per click.
3. Targeted Advertising
The most desirable form of advertising is having companies that wish to pay good rates to advertise on your Blog directly whether it’s text or image ads. Many bloggers feel that this is a pipe dream, but I know that you can make solid income from targeted advertising without having insane amounts of traffic. The key word here would be TARGETTED advertising.
4. Text Link Advertising
Another somewhat unobtrusive form of advertising is using services like Text Link Ads to sell text ads directly to companies. It should be noted though that you need significant traffic for it to be a big source of income.
5. Affiliate Links
If you’ve got a Blog in a specific area, there’s a very large chance that there are companies out there that sell products or services your users are interested in. You can earn some nice income recommending or linking to those products.
6. Selling Your Content (E-books, Videos, DVDs)
If you’ve got great content, another option is to package it and sell it. There are many bloggers who have created e-books and even real books based on the content of their Blog and made great income selling them. You can also expand to info-products like videos, DVDs, audio CDs, and printed books on demand. (for more on info products watch out for lesson 5)
7. Consulting
Depending on your topic and your level of expertise, you can sell consulting services. If you’re a web analytics expert, you could offer web analytics consulting services on your Blog for an hourly fee.
8. Donations
This is not very common as it once was. It used to be fairly common for bloggers to ask for donations on their Blog through PayPal or some other service. This only works if you have a dedicated user base, and a large enough number of users that their donations add up. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re also putting a lot of advertising and other monetization methods on your Blog hence you are seen as too greedy.
9. Selling Products
Besides info-products, you can sell real products like t-shirts, bumper stickers, clothing, or whatever other kind of merchandise makes sense for your topic.
10. Selling Your Blog
This is maybe the most extreme of the Blog monetization systems, but it can be very profitable! If you aren’t attached to your Blog and are willing to part with it, you can usually find a buyer for it. Your Blog must be pretty good, and have a level of traffic worth buying, and it really helps if you already have some income streams going for it. Blogs usually sell for 12-24 times monthly revenues, and there are numerous places you can sell them like eBay and the Site point Marketplace.
Conclusion
Setting up your Blog doesn’t take time. Maintaining and updating your Blog requires commitment and monetizing your Blog will require having above average traffic. So work on building a Blog with a solid user- base, and you should be on your way to generating income using Google Adsense or any of the methods above.
I wish you all the BEST in your online endeavors.
Thanks.
