How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 10 – Ways To Promote Your Blog And Get Backlinks
Finally we’ve reached the last step in our how to make money blogging guide. You’ve got a nice looking blog that is search engine optimized, you have chosen a method to monetize it, and you’ve submitted to top blog and website directories, and you are periodically adding good quality relevant content to it. So now it’s time to do some serious promoting and get traffic to your site.
This step is very important and is a continuous process. It requires a bit of leg work, money to get your site promoted, or a little of both. You have to do all that you can to bring attention to your blog. People need to know you exist and unless you call attention to your blog no one will know you exist, no matter how “pretty” your blog looks.
Just having good content is not enough to get traffic. Don’t wait for people to accidentally stumble into your blog. The key is the more traffic you get to your site, the more money you have a chance of making. Providing that you have good useful content on your blog of course, because if you have garbage or non relevant content your visitors will just leave and not come back. Take action and let the world know that you exist!
Mainly when you’re promoting your blog you want to get backlinks. Backlinks tell the search engines that you are popular. The amount and quality of in links to your site can help you get very popular, therefore improving your search engine position, and even ranking. This leads to more traffic, and more traffic means more sales, more sales equals more money for you. Getting a lot of traffic is one surefire way to make money blogging.
There are tons of different ways to market your blog. The best strategy is to pick a combination of several different methods. It’s important to get a variation of backlinks from different sources. There are plenty of programs and software that can automate the link building process to make it easier for you. You can also outsource your link building. There are many promotional and link building services but some can be quite costly.
Below are ways to get you started building one way links and diving traffic to your blog. Some of the top sites are listed so you can get started right away!
Article Marketing
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a great way to get backlinks and traffic to your site. People will read the article and follow the link to your site. There are many article directories, some are well established and get decent traffic.
Article Directories
- EzineArticles.com
- GoArticles.com
ArticleDashBoard.com - Articlesbase.com
- Amazines.com
- Articlealley.com
- EasyArticles.com
Social Bookmarking
A great way to promote your site and create backlink is through social bookmarking. Just like you bookmark a site you like, the same way you bookmark your own website by telling the world, “hey check out this exciting site”.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Networking
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter has become a big source for businesses to marketing their product and services. Even big corporations understand the value. They have taken advantage and are profiting from these types of free marketing venue. You should be too! This is a great way to network and can help you make money blogging. Some of the networking sites have forums, groups and classifieds that you can post in.
Social Networking Sites
Press Releases
Press releases are not just for major brands, big businesses, and celebrities. This is one method that should not be overlooked and you can get some “juicy” links from this. There are several paid press release websites that will get the word out for you. Most likely you won’t get television and news coverage, but the possibility is always there if your site is unique enough. However though, you will get some traffic and link juice.
While there are free and paid press release submission services, the professional paid ones gives better results.
Press Release Services (Free)
Press Release Services (Paid)
Online Forums and Discussion Groups
Forum and discussion group promotion is yet another way that can help you make money blogging. This is an old school (social networking) way of getting backlinks to your site. It is still is a good way to get backlinks. The web is filled with this type of medium. However you want to find quality forums and groups and not the ones that are abandoned or are spam haven.
The best strategy is to find search online for group or forum within your niche or topic. For this to work you will have to actually become an active member and participate in the conversation. You then include your website link in your forum signature. By participating and adding to the discussion without being too “sales-sy” and overtly pushing your site people are more apt to click on your link and check out your site, product, or service.
Forum & Discussion Group Sites
- Google Groups
- Yahoo Groups
- Best of the Web (listings of internet message boards)
- Big Boards (largest message boards and forums directory)
This is the conclusion of our quick start guide of how to make money blogging. I hope you have found it very useful and that you are implementing it by creating a blog and getting started right away.
There are more resources on this site so use them to successfully make money blogging and site creations!
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: article directories, article marketing, backlinks, discussion groups, Facebook, how to make money blogging, LinkedIn, make money blogging, online forums, press release, promotion, social bookmarking, social networks, Twitter
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 9 – Register Your Blog With Top Directories
You have quite a few relevant posts and your blog is developing quite well. But however you have no link juice and no traffic. It’s now time to get the word out to the world. You want all the publicity you can get. Therefore you want your blog to be found by both people and search engines. So we begin the first phase of promotion with getting your blog listed with blog and website directories.
Blog and website directories give your site free links. There are countless of these sites available. Be aware that some of the directories ask for a reciprocal link, while others do not. Many require email verification, so make sure you use an email address that you don’t mind getting hundreds of verification from.
Some blog directories are niche specific while others accept all types of sites regardless the topic. For example some directories only accept blogs in the food niche. These directories are constantly crawled by the search engines checking for new content. Listing your site with them will get the search engines to notice you.
Some of the directories are high rankings so they do get search engine traffics. Therefore you may get some visitors from them. Just don’t expect a whole lot of traffic this way; however this is a good start at getting exposure.
Below are some of the top blog and website directories to submit to right away. Remember this is only a small list and you should submit to many more directors and use an email address that you wouldn’t mind getting hundreds of verification and approved email to.
- Yahoo Directory
- Blogs.com
- Boingboing.net
- BOTW.org
- Mybloglog.com
- Blogged.com
- Virtual Library
- DMOZ.org
- Jayde
- Best of the Web
After you finished submitting to blog and website directories it’s time to move on to the next step of our how to make money blogging guide. This step is our second phase of promoting our blog. You will find many ways of getting traffic to your site through social means.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags:
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 8 – Monetize Your Blog With Affiliate Programs
One of the top methods used to make money blogging is from affiliate marketing. It is a very popular method and a lot of bloggers and site owners use this to rake in much cash from using this system. How affiliate profiting work is that each time a visitor to your site clicks on an ad and then goes to that site and buys a product or service, you get paid a commission. As you can see this is the method that blogaholic.info uses the most.
Suppose you have a site about gardening. You offer advice and tips about growing, maintaining a garden, and different varieties of plants and flowers. You would join affiliate programs from gardening stores and products. Then you will refer your visitors to the gardening products or store. When your visitors make a sale you get paid.
You can basically find almost any product or service in your niche or topic to refer your viewers to.
Most people who want to make money online but do not have a product or service of their own find affiliate marketing the next best thing.
However to be truly successful with affiliate marketing, you have to have a content rich site. The information has to be useful. That is why you should pick a specific niche or theme that not only has a high interest level to other people but that you also like to blog about.
It also helps if you believe in the product or services you are pushing. This is especially so if your site is based on reviews or you are strictly promoting a particular product or service.
Affiliate Networks
Individual business can set up an in-house affiliate program to sell their products and services where they personally handle everything. But ad networks handles the affiliate program of many different businesses, so an affiliate network may have anywhere from a few products and services to thousands of products and services for you to choose from and promote.
Well known affiliate ad network in this category are:
Join a few of them and take a look around at what they offer. As with the CPC ad networks you should have a well formed site, with good content before you apply to these affiliate networks or programs. Many of them will review your site to see if it’s acceptable.
You can pick either affiliate products or pay per click ads or combine both on your site. There are certain advantages and disadvantages of doing so depending on what your site is.
You can try different formats to see what works best for your site. Now that you know more about the basics of how to make money blogging It’s all up to you!
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: Advertising network, affiliate marketing, affiliate networks, Commission Junction, how to make money blogging, Linkshare, make money blogging, Shareasale
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 7 – Monetize Your Blog With Ad Networks
Finally we are at the step of our how to make money blogging guide where you will be choosing how to monetize your blog. Basically you want to generate money from the visitors that will come to your site. There are many different ways to do this. I am going to describe the top methods that most bloggers use to make money in this step and the next.
While this step covers advertisement the next step will cover affiliate marketing programs.
So let’s go checkout the types of advertising networks that can bring in money for you.
Pay Per Click Ad Networks
Pay per click ads network provide contextual ads based on your site’s content. So what does “contextual mean”? You seen them all the time, they are ads which are directly related to the content on your site. So these ads are displayed within the content of your site’s post and have related advertisement for whatever is in the post.
With Pay per click or Cost Per Click (CPC) model you get paid each time a visitor click on the ads on your site. The most popular and widely used program is:
For example let’s say you write an article about how to build a dog house but did not mention where to get the materials. Adsense will display ads about places to get the materials and other relevant ads about building dog houses next to the article. Most likely the reader looking for info on building a dog house will click on the ad for dog building materials. So having relevant content is both beneficial for your readers as well as for you.
Other popular ad networks in this category are:
CPM Ad Networks
Unlike Adsense that pays based on clicks, CPM (cost per thousand impressions) pays by the number of times the ads are shown on your site. They can pay from a few cents to a few dollars per 1000 view. This may not seem a lot but if you’re getting a lot of traffic and if you own several blogs the money will add up.
Popular ad network in this category are:
So these are the ad networks you should look into. Adsense of course being highly regarded, you can try the different ones and see how it goes. CPM ads are good if you’re getting a lot of visitors or if you have a few other sites or blogs. But if you’re not getting a lot of traffic and don’t have more than a couple sites I recommend Adsense to start with.
Make sure your site look “pleasing” and that it have good content in it before signing up for any ad network as most will check out your site to see if it’s acceptable.
Next segment on our how to make money blogging guide is affiliate marketing programs. A lot of bloggers use affiliate programs in conjunction with advertising programs to maximize their earnings.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: advertising networks, CPM ads, how to make money blogging, make money blogging, pay per click ads
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 6 – Writing Content On Your Blog
Now we’re at the very core of our lesson on how to make money blogging. You have to remember that this step is a continuous process. This is what you will be doing a lot of. The actual writing; the posts and content on your site.
So where do you start?
Before we start the actual posting it is a good idea to create 3 essential pages on your site first.
The fist page should be an “About me” or “About us” page which tells your visitors what your blog is about. The next is a privacy policy page. This one is important and basically tell your visitors what info you collect on them if any and if you have links to third parties on your site ie: affiliate links. Google take “privacy policy” very seriously and since we are going to use affiliate links and advertisers (which we cover on our next step) make sure to include one. The last page is a “contact us”.
You can find WordPress plugins for both “privacy policy” and “contact us” page so these are very easy. Just install and fill in a few steps and you’re done.
Ok so now we start to blog!
By this point you have chosen a good topic or niche for your site. You are familiar with or have done some research and made yourself familiar with this topic or niche. You have your keywords prepared and these keywords will be used throughout your blog.
You want your content to be interesting and informative to your readers. You can quickly make a list of all the concerns that people have in your niche or your chosen topic. What are their issues or problems? Do they have particular questions? Are they trying to find a solution? Do they want to know how to do/make something? Are they looking for reviews of particular products or services?
Choose any of these questions and start writing about it. It can be as simple as writing a top 10 list with each item supported by a sentence or two. Or you can write a full length detailed article outlining each particular point.
If you look around at different blogs you’ll see that the post lengths vary in length. You have short posts like only a paragraph or two while others are very long. A good post however should contain around 400-500 words. This is the best practice. You may go longer of course. You can mix it up and have some short and some long but the bulk of your content should follow the 400-500 word guidelines for best results.
How you choose to write is all up to you. Just make sure you are providing good useful information for your readers. Once you get the hang of it, you will soon find out what works best for you.
So now your blog is up and running, you’ve got some decent content on it, and you’re on a roll. But you are eager to delve into the actual making money from it….so then what?
The next step in our lesson of how to make money blogging involves the actual monetizes your blog. I’m going to give you various sources you can use to make money blogging.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: blog posting, blog posts, content writing, creating blog post, how to blog, how to make a blog, how to make money blogging, make money blogging, posting to your blog
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 5 – Install Top WordPress Plugins
You have picked a nice theme for your site and you’re satisfied with the layout, so it’s time to move on to the next step of your site’s configuration. This step requires that you install and activate some of the top essential WordPress plugins onto your site.
One of the many reasons that I love and recommend WordPress so much is because it has thousands of plugins. Whatever it is you want to do with your blog chances are there is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to do it.
There are so many things you can do with your blog with a WordPress plugin. You can optimize your site, make it more search engine friendly, make it social media friendly, make it more user friendly by encouraging feedback and comments from readers, make it more visually appealing, and countless more fine-tuning can be done with WordPress plugins.
Here are 5 must have WordPress plugins to get you started immediately. They are a must for any serious blogger on the road to make money blogging.
1. All in One SEO Pack – There are many SEO plugins but All in One SEO Pack is a winner. It is one of the best SEO optimizing plugin. It makes your blog more search engine friendly. This plugin allows you to override any title and set any META description and META keywords which gives you more online visibility.
2. Akismet – This is one of the first plugins you want to activate. Akismet is a fine anti-spam solution. It comes automatically built into WordPress and it automatically moderates your comments for you. Akismet is reliable and does a great job at fighting spam comments.
3. W3 Total Cache – This plugin keep your site performing at optimal performance. W3 Total Cache makes your website load faster by speeding up the loading time of your pages. A slow loading blog can result in losing your readers and search engine traffic.
Your site’s ranking can suffer if you have a low site performance. Also W3 Total Cache requires less CPU processing than using WordPress alone. So keep your site in top performing state with W3 Total Cache.
4. Google XML Sitemaps – A very handy WordPress SEO plugin. Google XML Sitemaps plugin auto-generates a site map in a format supported by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Each time you publish a new posts Google XML Sitemaps automatically pings the search engines.
This is very useful for search engine page indexing since a sitemap acts as a blueprint for the contents on your website. This map makes it easy for the search engines to crawl and ultimately index your site’s pages.
5. WPtouch – More and more people are using their smart phones mobile phones to browse the internet and visit different sites. This is why it’s important that you make your website mobile compatible. WPtouch plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly site. Your blog will be easy and convenient to read on the go for any BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, and iPod touch users.
You have done all the main designing, tweaking, and SEO on your site, it’s now time to move ahead to the next step of our lesson on how to make money blogging. This step is very essential since it’s the actual content creation of your blog.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: creating a blog, how to create a blog, how to make a blog, plugins, top wordpress plugins, wordpress plugins
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 4 – Customizing Your Blog With A Great Theme
I’m sure you’ve heard of how first impressions do make a big difference. This is also the same for your blogs. Creating a blog is easy enough but how your blog physically appears contributes to whether your visitors will stay and actually read your content and possibly become a repeat visitor or leave within the first 5 seconds, never to return again.
In order to have an enticing blog that captures your visitor’s attention, you will need to put your best “face” forward. In WordPress this “face” is called a theme. Themes are basically your website’s design. They make your blog truly unique and more interesting. Some themes are however clumsy and less appealing. You should choose a good theme for your blog.
There are many themes out there. Some of them are free like the default ones that come in your WordPress dashboard while some are paid. A theme’s function is much more than to have a “pretty face”.
The paid themes allow you to highly customize your site to make it more unique. Besides aesthetics, these themes are SEO optimized for your blog to greatly boost your rankings, and some are also optimized for better ad placements on your site. Placing ads in the right spot on your blog can greatly help you make money blogging. You can do so much more with the paid themes and reap some excellent benefits.
If you’re just starting out and don’t have the funds then just pick a good free theme. But once you’re up and running in the right direction and blogging away, it’s best that you invest a few bucks and get a good theme for your site.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: creating a blog, how to create a blog, how to start a blog, themes, wordpress themes
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 3 – Creating A Blog With WordPress
Now that you’ve got your web host set up it’s time to actually create your blog. There are different blogging softwares out there. However the top choice is by far WordPress fromWordPress.org. It is used by so many bloggers and webmasters because it’s simply the best.
WordPress software is easy to set up and maintain (once you get the hang of it…it’s easy sailing), flexible, and of course free!
If you’re totally new to software installation and you are not the techie type, WordPress may seem like a bit of work but if you follow the directions it’s quite easy to install and set up.
You should get access to your own user control panel when you sign up for hosting. This is called your cPanel.
We recommend HostGator hosting for many good reasons. Besides their great reputation as a stable host, low prices, and 24/7 customer service, their hosting plans come with many great scripts and software that makes it easy to build your website and add all the extras automatically.
One such program located in your cPanel is called “Fanstastico” which makes it very easy to install wordPress on your site with its “one-click installation”. A good host should provide cPanel and useful scripts like Fantastico.
Installing WordPress is the best way to actually creating a blog. Like mentioned before it is easy and simple to do. All you have to do is follow the directions. For an easy guide to installing WordPress just check out my in depth tutorial Quick Tutorial: Easy One-Click WordPress Installallation With Fantastico.
Now that you have seen how easy it is to install WordPress on your website with HostGator hosting, let’s continue with how to make money blogging.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: creating a blog, fantastico, hostgator cpanel, how to create a blog, how to make money blogging, how to start a blog, installing wordpress, starting a blog
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 2 – Picking a Domain Name & Web Host
I combine these two steps as they go hand in hand. As already mentioned many times if you’re serious and want to make money blogging it’s important that you take full control of your sites. In order to do that you need your own domain name and you need to self host your sites.
Now that you have your niche it’s time to pick a domain name. If you have used the suggested niche tools you probably have a good keyword rich domain name. As tools like Micro Niche Finder, Niche Finder, and Traffic Travis have domain availability checkers and will actually find exact match keyword domains for you.
If you do not have those tools then go to name.com or namecheap.com and start searching for a domain name in your niche. A domain name might cost you around $10 a year (you might even catch a sale or discount and get it for less).
Now that you have a great domain name it’s time to head over and pick a host. This is also a very crucial step. Remember Free blog platforms like WordPress.org and Blogger.com will not allow for full control of your site. You risk your blog disappearing without notice and losing all your hard work, there is no support, you have very limited access to designing your site, and a few more values that you will lose going with a free blog.
So it is strongly advised you self host your site if you are serious. Getting a hosting account can cost as little as $7 a month with a dependable web host. There are many web hosts out there. I have used many different web hosts.
The number 1 host I highly recommend is Hostgator. They are reliable, stable, and offer great prices. Unlike most hosts they offer real 24/7 support.
I recommend you go for the baby plan if you’re just starting out because they allow unlimited domains so you have room to grow. That mean you can set up many money making websites on this plan. Currently the cost is $7.96/mo. Hostgator often run specials. In fact you can get your first month for $0.01 (1 penny) by using code: 1BloggingMachine.
Use code ExtremeBlogger11 to get 25% off. This code works best if you buy 6 months and up plan as you will be saving a great deal.
Now that you’ve got the first 2 crucial steps, you are well on your way to learning how to make money blogging.
Categories: How To Make Money Blogging Tags: best web host, domain name, hostgator coupon, how to make money blogging, make money blogging, web host
How To Make Money Blogging In 10 Steps: Step 1 – Finding Good Topics & Niches
Find a good topic or a niche to blog about. This is a very important step and is very crucial to whether you are successful or fail with your blogs. You will derive your keywords from the topic or niche you choose so this is very important.
Plan this step carefully. So how do I come up with topics to blog about? There are many ways to do this.
I am going to give you ideas on how to find good topics to blog about. I am also going to list some places where you can find the topics. Using these you’ll be able to find some hot and interesting topics to get you started.
Brainstorming
We are first going to start off by doing a little brainstorming about your interests. …..yeah I know this may sound boring when you are first starting out because everyone wants to start making money NOW. You need to relax think of the topics you are interested in and write them down. Make sure the topic is something other people are interested in also. Choosing a topic you are interested in helps because you will be more committed to your blogging instead of giving up in a day or two.
Television & Magazines
Turn on the news, and see what’s hot on the talk shows. Browse the magazine racks to see the latest topics.
News Aggregator Sites
News aggregator sites basically collects news from many different sources all over the internet and brings it to you in one place. The sources can be from mainstream news sites themselves and from blogs. All topics are categorized and are usually updated every few minutes.
Most of these news sites list the most popular news in the order of their popularity. There are many news sites out there that you can check to get some interesting topics to blog about. Everything is covered from sports, culture, politics, entertainment and more. Some of the sites are Google News, Yahoo! News, Newsvine, and Topix.
Blog Communities
Blog communities do the same thing as the news aggregator sites but they or more of a blog social network. They gather sources from many blogs from around the net. You can join a specific network based on a topic or niche. You can get many niche ideas from checking them out. Some of the popular ones are Technorati , Bloglines, Blog Pulse and Blogcatalog.com .
Niche Finder Tools
This is the technique I use the most for my blogs. You just can’t find the right topic? Find this step too time consuming? Plan on setting up network of blogs? Just want something easier? Niche finder tools make all the above techniques amazingly quicker and easier if you’re serious about scaling up to make serious cash. If you want to seriously make money blogging by creating a blog or even a network of sites then I strongly suggest you look into niche finder software.
What a niche software does is automate the process of finding good money making niches. They cut to the chase and find you niche keywords. Most of them find keywords, evaluate them, and tell you if that keyword is a profitable niche or not. Some even find good domain names to fit your niche.
