How to Make Money from Blogging Part II
Posted on November 19, 2009
Category: make money | 1 Comment
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.
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?
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!
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.
How to Make Money from Blogging
Posted on October 28, 2009
Category: make money | Leave a Comment
Making money from your blogging takes a good deal of knowledge and application of that knowledge before you see any benefits. Far too many people are touting the belief that its easy to make money from the Internet with little effort or time invested in achieving that. Of course that belief is seriously flawed for many reasons, but while not wanting to put anyone off trying to do this for themselves, I also don’t want anyone who reads this blog to think that making money from blogging is an easy thing to do and that anyone can do it.
Ok, lets set up some definitions before I go any further.
How much money you should expect to make from blogging is an important factor. If we’re talking about just making a few dollars here and there, maybe enough to cover the cost of hosting and maintaining a self-hosted domain with a blog on it, then I will concede that this is far easier to do and very achievable by anyone with a reasonable level of intelligence and common sense.
But a few dollars here and there does not constitute the means to quit your job or become self sufficient, which when I talk about making money online I am more concerned about. Then you have to weigh up how much income you need to derive from your blogging to sustain at least a basic level of living in the real world. That means paying your rent or mortgage, buying food, clothes etc, paying for transport, health care, renewing appliances as they wear out, leisure and entertainment etc.
All those things cost different amounts depending upon where you live and what your expectations of your lifestyle are. In the US, you should realistically aim to derive at least $5k a month give or take a few hundred depending upon which state or which town you live in, whether you live in a city or in a small town as costs vary from place to place.
In other places around the world, this figure will also vary widely, so you have to sit down and figure your own costs for yourself and then work on your income accordingly.
So to how it is done. How to make money from blogging and make enough to provide a living.
The first notion you are going to have to get out of your head is that if you write lots of interesting and well written articles on your blog that lots of people are going to come running and click on all your ads. That will not happen. It will not happen because people will not know about your blog for starters. So the first thing you are going to have to do is set about telling people about you and your blog. How to do that?
You need to figure in the search engines index for a well searched term, or keyword, then search traffic will find you. So how do you get your blog to figure in Google when it doesn’t currently appear anywhere inside the first 500 results? And why can’t you just post your blog on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit etc?
The social media can provide your blog with a lot of traffic, that much is true. But it has been proven that traffic from social sources rarely, if ever click on ads in a blog. The reason for this is that they are generally seasoned surfers, who probably own blogs of their own meaning they are hardened to the sight of ads and tend to simply ignore them through familiarity. Also, if they have PPC ads on their own blogs, they are conditioned NOT to click their own ads as this will cause them to lose their account. So when they show up at yoru blog, they will not click yours either. This means that you may see a huge flow of traffic which is next to useless to you as far as making money is concerned.
I’ll continue this article in the next post…
Building Authority for Your Blog
Posted on September 16, 2009
Category: blogs | Leave a Comment
When it comes to building authority for your blog, you need to be aware of some things to make sure you do it right so that the search engines will love your blog and not hate it! Its pretty simple to do, but just requires some thought and some work to get it the way it should be.
The main focus you should be aiming for is to provide plenty of good quality, original and relevant content for your blog’s main topic and keywords. This is important from the search engines’ perspective as they want to make sure your site is properly targeted so that when a user types in a keyword search and your site is displayed in the SERPs it will provide the right information for that user. That means if someone typed in “handicap shower seats and followed the link to your blog, they should find a post specifically written about handicap shower seats and not “toys for dogs” or something equally irrelevant.
This way you are doing exactly what the search engines want you to do, so that their index displays the most relevant sites and not a bunch of poorly optimized rubbish that is full of ads.
The other way you’ll build authority for your blog will come from other website owners who, upon seeing your well written and informative articles will be happy to link to them if they are relevant to their own sites. Of course, you should also help that process along by writing articles along the same theme as your blog’s and submitting them to good authority sites like Ezine Articles, create Hub Pages or Infobarrel articles or similar and link to your blog from those articles.
The more strong links you get to your blog coupled with its own relevant, original and well written articles, the more authority your blog will gain from the search engines. This is because your blog will gain trust and establish itself as an authority on its chosen subject.
This is the direction that the search engines are moving in, so if you want your blog to rank well in the SERPs, then you’re going to have to work this way to ensure the search engines love your blog and then you will get your just and well deserved reward!