It's 2010 and you'll have to have been living under a rock to avoid hearing about the concept of blogging for a living. And perhaps it is because you are considering blogging as a possible source of income that you are reading this. Here you will discover a few tips to get you on your way. Remember, the results you get from your blogging career is directly dependent on the effort you put into your blogs.
Many people get excited and jump in to blogging but few make a significant income with blogging
Do your homework
Theme. You have to decide what niche your blog is going to target. Who are you targeting and is the market viable? It really is important to determine this before getting your domain name or hosting. Does the niche you selected have a need you can fill? Being niche concentrated actually helps in content creation. If you know the market, you will know what they want to learn and helps direct how you speak to your audience in your posts.
But the most important reason for niche selection is to identify the needs of the market so you can cater to those needs.
Work Plan. You have to work out a work plan before you start. Blogging is a real business so treat it like one. This is the biggest tip you'll ever read. Have a set number of hours everyday that you work on your blog and stick to it. Obviously your schedule will vary if you do this part time from if you are going to be a full time blogger Some of your time will be committed to generating content but some needs to be dedicated to learning and getting traffic to your blog
Decide how often you intend to post articles. The more frequently you post useful content on your blog, the better your blog performs in the search engine results pages [SERPS]. Also encourages repeat visits to your blog. Most blogging tutorials I have purchased advise posting every day or several times a day. Personally I think a lower limit of three times a week is okay, especially if you want to avoid burn out, to begin with. Once you have your audience you can slow this down.
Having said that only post as frequently as you have useful information to share.
SEO at planning stage
Search engine optimization should start before you put the first word down. A properly optimized blog results in targeted visitors seeking your blog out via the search engines rather than you trying to beg for traffic. It's the difference between looking for traffic to your blog and having the traffic come looking for your content.
Search engine optimization will help you decide the most appropriate title for each of your blog posts, the domain name you choose for your blog and the names you allocate to your categories. It could actually determine the blogging program you decide to use. Wordpress we all know has a fair amount of search engine optimization enhancing plug ins.
Having said that though, the best seo you can do on your pages is in the choice of words you use
Become Your Niche's Guru
At the beginning of your new career, your degree of expertise in your niche is not particularly relevant.
As long as you are enthusiastic about learning about that niche and aim to become an expert in the niche. We have all seen those hurriedly thrown together blog posts that just do not make any effort to make a connection with you the reader. You know, the blogs we never go back to.
And we also all know the blog posts that excite us when we are reading them. The ones that you read them and you feel energized and motivated.
This is the style of writing you want to aspire to and choosing a niche you are excited about is a big step towards achieving this
Jump Right in
Knowledge Paralysis. There is a lot to learn about making money through a blog and this can often paralyze newbies into inactivity.You have to keep in mind that no blogger started off with all the knowledge in his or her head. We all learned as we went along. And the best way to learn is by doing. So get that blog up and running So by all means do your niche selection and determine which blogging platform you want to use but get stuck in. There is the concept of perpetual newbie who is someone stuck in the learning phase without getting into the doing phase. And it is really easy to get into this mode. What with the enormous amount of information you need to learn. But you need to keep moving in this blogging business or you'll find your blog to be one of those million than never make an impression
Search engine optimization is a must do. Treat each post in your blog as an individual webpage and apply seo to each post with this in mind. Select the keywords you want the post to rank for. Different posts should be optimized for a different set of keywords so that your posts cover a larger section of your niche in the search engines The post title and early in the body of your content are places you want to include your keywords Keep this concept in mind when you are generating backlinks to your blog. Do follow anchor text backlinks that contain variations of your keywords is your main aim. Also aim to write about 350 to 500 words per post. To rank well in the search engines the spiders prefer to find a lot of words on your pages. The content must be original. I would advice not to use PLR articles or other content that can be found elsewhere on the internet.
Write your own posts or get a ghost writer but make sure that your content is original
Network. Your reputation is only as big as your network so you need to get busy building a network of friends in the blogging world and in your niche Mybloglog and technorati are good places to start networking with other bloggers. Blogcatalog is another decent option. Facebook has a few groups for bloggers and linked in is another good networking site.
It's important that you pay attention to what other bloggers are up to. Learn the techniques of the successful bloggers and learn form the mistakes of others.
What Blogging Platform Is Best. Blogger and Wordpress are the two main options. Wordpress is a favorite with online marketers because of addons you can use with Wordpress. A new plugin comes every so often that can help with things like SEO, commenting, bookmarking etc.
Blogger has the distinct advantage of doing well in the search engines and each post get it's own optimized page with the post title included in the page URL. It however does not have the advantage of plug ins so a little less versatile than wordpress. The blogger platform is however very user friendly.
Whatever platform you opt for, there is the option of using it as a free hosted platform or getting your own hosting account As a professional blogger the aim is to host your own blogs. Some beginners opt to use the free platform to start with and then when they get to grips with how things work pay for a hosting account and migrate there blogs to the paid hosting.
The one major disadvantage of this though is the loss of your backlinks you would have generated to the free hosted blog.
Getting Traffic
Search Engine Optimization. This has been mentioned before but highlights how important SEO is to getting traffic to your blog in the long term. Each post must be optimized on an individual basis
Pillar articles. These are articles that comprehensively and exhaustively cover a particular subject in your niche. They usually go into a lot of detail about the topic and often become a reference article for other webmasters. These are wikipedia style articles. Every once in a while, find out what people in your niche are most concerned about, what is giving them particular difficulty and write a pillar article on that. This article will act as a magnet for visitors to your site and could help establish your reputation as an expert in the field
Article marketing. No article on traffic generation is complete without at least a mention of article marketing. With article marketing you submit articles to article directories and include a link to your blog in your bio box.
Social Bookmarking. Unfortunately, most of the blog directories and social bookmarking sites use the no follow attribute in the link to your submitted blog. This means the link has no Search engine optimization value to you. However these are high traffic sites and also some bookmarks do well in the search engines.
Social bookmarking sites need a little work to build a reputation. The earlier you start building a reputation or a network at the social bookmarking sites the better it will be for your bookmarks when you eventually start bookmarking your blog posts
Back to school
Apart form learning as much as you possibly can about your niche, you must also keep up to date with what's going on in the world of blogging. Blogging techniques and the resources available to you are continually upgraded and changing. There are new software being developed, new rules regarding sharing of information and a myriad of things.
I suggest joining a few blogging or marketing forums and participating in discussions there. You can learn a lot from just hanging around the forums for short periods every day For tips on internet marketing, the warrior forum has a lot of marketers sharing tips and ideas. Whatever you do, keep learning and keep implementing what you learn
Making Money From Your Blog
So you now have a blog with a few high quality posts that are getting a decent amount of traffic to it. The question is how do you make money from your blog. After all this is the primary reason you set the blog up
Adsense. The ads are targeted to your content via a small code that the Adsense program gives you to paste in the HTML of your blog Adsense is quite popular with blog owners and webmasters because it is easy to use
Affiliate Marketing. This is a really popular method of monetizing blogs and websites. As an affiliate marketer you promote other peoples products and get paid a commission if a desires action is achieved. This could be a sale or a sign up.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is you do not store the product and never have to handle the product. You act simply as a middle man who suggests products to your readers.
Sell your own product. You may have a product of your own or a bricks and mortar business that you wish to promote. Your blog could be your internet portal to get the word out about your business or product.
There are many more methods of making money from your blog but these should get you well on your way
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