Let me show you how to make money with a blog.
First, you need a blog. This is one of the easiest ways for a beginner to start making money online. You’ll need to register a domain name. Go to http://www.godaddy.com. You can also get hosting here and rather than explaining to you how to change DNS (domain name servers) at this time I’d recommend you just pick the cheapest Godaddy Linux hosting and start from there.
Once you have your domain name and hosting you can have Godaddy set up a WordPress blog for you through their Hosting Connections service. Voila, you have a blog ready and waiting for you to start. (The explaination of how to do this is completely available on Godaddy so I’m not going to do it here). It’s really simple.
Now, the making money part (the hard part I’m afraid).
First, let me warn you: you can’t make money online working a few hours a week. It takes a lot of patience, focus and effort to get to the money, but if you are willing to put this in and stick with it you can definitely make money with a blog!
Second, you have to decide up-front how you are going to monetize your blog and then focus on that one monetization strategy for maximum effect. For the purposes of this post (and because I don’t want it to turn into a book) I’m going to focus on two possible strategies: 1. affiliate marketing and 2. Adsense text ads. For affiliate marketing you simply put up banners and write reviews linking to products and for Adsense you install text based ads from Adsense on your site (and Adsense will show you how to do this).
Third, no matter what you decide your blog is going to be about and how you decide to monetize it, you are going to make more money blogging about something that relates to needs people have, than other things. It is the needs in people’s lives that motivate them to spend more money than anything else and if you can tap into one of these needs as a subject for your blog in particular, or even just in a good portion of your posts then you are following the money.
Now – almost everything else you need to know is all related to getting targeted traffic to your site. That is the final key you need for me to show you how to make money with a blog. Traffic is the lifeblood of all businesses whether they operate on the internet or not. Without customers and without leads that turn into customers you’ll never make a cent.
To get traffic to your website you’ll need to do either pay for it or generate it because of your authority (ie reputation, influence or brand). The simplest and cheapest way of doing this is to focus your efforts on the search engines either for paid advertising through Google’s Adwords program or to post content that is going to get you ranked with some authority on the search engines. I recommend doing the latter because unless you really know what you’re doing you are going to end up forking out a good deal of money on Adwords with little reward.
To get traffic from the search engines you need content and authority. The content part is relatively easy – it involves you writing lots of long posts about your subject and doing it on a daily basis. This consistency will also slowly build your repuation with the search engines and earn you authority over time, so much so that with in a twelve month period, if you do nothing by write quality unique content your site should be ranked with a PR2 at least and you’ll probably be getting about 100 unique visitors to your site each day. But that’s not nearly enough to make any sort of serious money.
To boost your authority and traffic further you’re going to have to focus carefully on the keywords you’re using in your posts and get backlinks using those keywords as anchor text. This means building relationships with other webmasters and asking them to link to your sites, writing articles that link back to your site, bookmarking your sites and leaving links to your sites in comments and posts on other blogs, in forums and wherever else you can get a link (like profile pages on your favourite social sites etc). The more links you get pointing back to your sites the better your rankings on the search engines are going to be and the more traffic you’ll get.
Check out this post by Allyn Hane from Blogger Illustrated for everything you need to know about backlinks.
Ok – so this is just a very short explaination of a long and complicated subject, but I hope I’ve been able to show you how to make money with a blog, even if it’s just through a sketch. Now go out and get started and fill in the blanks as you go!
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