How to Make Money from Blogging: Part 2
Learning how to make money from blogging takes a lot of work and then applying what you've learned takes another level of work that many people are not prepared to undertake. This second part of three articles on the subject takes us to the next area of research.
Ok, welcome back. In the previous post, I was looking at how you can make money from blogging and I started explaining about how you will not make any money from social traffic. I did touch on traffic derived from search engines and this is where I'll continue the subject.
Organic Traffic
Traffic from the search engines, as opposed to social traffic, are not seasoned surfers but are simply regular folks that are looking for something. If they find your blog on the first page of Google and click on it, they will read your front page in the hope of finding what it is they are looking for.
If they don't find it, they will often click an ad if that ad promises to give them what they want. That's how you make your money, by providing enough information to attract visitors but not giving them the actual answers to what they need but rather give it to them in the form of ads, which they will click in their search.
Now those ads can be PPC, like adsense where you get paid an amount per click, or they can be affiliate ads where you get paid if the visitor clicks through to the vendor's site and buys the product. Either way you get paid and the more visitors you can attract from the search engines, the more your ads will get clicked and the more money you will make. Its really that simple.
But getting your blog to feature on the front page of the search engines for a well searched term is next to impossible, isn't it?
Ranking Your Blog
Well, it depends on what you know. For sure, if your blog is about credit cards and you want to get it to feature anywhere near the front page for that term or keyword, or in fact the many longer associated terms, also known as long tail keywords, then you don't stand sop much as a snowball's chance in hell of getting up amongst the high fliers.
Why?
Because there is so much money to be made in that niche that competition for those keywords is as fierce as it gets.Some goes for niches such as loans, finance, weight loss, autos, insurance, mortgages, health, make money...
There are a lot of niches that you should not spend too much time on in fruitless competition with sites that will eat your little blog alive. But there are countless other niches that you can work at that are far less competitive and you will stand a much better chance of featuring in the search engine index for a wide spectrum of related terms, which can attract a lot of traffic and make you a lot of money.
Finding those niches takes research and that's something you are going to have to do by yourself. That's because no self respecting marketer is going to reveal to you their cherished money making niches that they probably spent many hours locating only to have you come along and take a proportion of their earnings for the privilege!
Niche Research
So the grunt work of finding profitable niches is where you lay your foundation and you tailor your blog to match the niche you have found. Then you need to write about that niche including as many of the related keywords as possible in your blog posts. Then you need to obtain links to your posts as well as to your blog's homepage. Those links need to be anchored with your keywords.
To get those links, you are going to have to work hard and long, boring hours, but it is necessary work and it is the ONLY way you are going to get onto the first page of Google's index for any terms worth working for.
As for how to get links and how to use them, well, that's the subject for a future post.
Originally posted: November 19, 2009
How to Make Money from Blogging: Part 1
How to Make Money from Blogging: Part 3
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