Blogging for money: How to monetize your blog


Make Money from Blogging

What most bloggers or wanna be bloggers are actually concerned about when they blog is the money that can be made from blogging. Making money from blogging, or monetizing their blog.

Make Money from Blogging – Affiliate Marketing

One of the quickest and easiest ways to monetize your blog is to advertise on your blog. You can either create your own product and then promote it on your blog or promote some else’s product through affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are websites where the owners have a sales page on their website advertising their products. When you visit the website and like the product, you can sign up as an affiliate. Among the biggest affiliate network is Clickbank and they only sell digital products, e.g. information e-books and softwares and they pay at times pay up to 75% per sale of product.

Once you sign up to Clickbank and get an affiliate Id, go to Clickbank ‘market place’ and choose any product of your choice to promote. Then write an article about the product and post on your blog with your affiliate link to the merchant’s site.

Some affiliate programs give you resource tools to promote their products, so all you need do is copy and paste or re-write the articles provided and paste on your blog. Then get tons of traffic to your blog to read your post and you will have a big chance of making sales.

When resource tools are not provided and you wish to promote the product, then visit the owner’s website and get an idea on what to write in your article from the sales page

Monetize your Blog with Adsense

Adsense is actually the easiest way to monetize your blog.
Adsense is a free advertising program from google. When you sign up for google Adsense, google provides you with some codes to put on your blog that enables them to put contextual ads related to your keywords on your blog. And you are paid whenever someone clicks on any of such ads
It is free to sign up for Google Adsense

You can learn more about google adsense at the site.

Other available advertising revenue programs are: searchfeed, Adbrite, and Yahoo’s Publishers Network (YPN).

You can also monetize your blog by selling text link. Just like Adsense, you are given some codes to put on your blog and it automatically sets up a campaign for you.
Read more about it at www.text-link-ads.com

Make Money from your Blog Selling Services

You can also make good money from selling services on your blog. Are you skilled at something that is needed by Internet marketers/bloggers? Like Ecovers, graphic designs, Blogging etc. Then advert it on your blog. You can also sell the service of one on one consulting.

Make Money from your Blog Writing Reviews

Paid reviews can be seen as selling your blog traffic for money.
Writing paid reviews is another way to monetize your blog. To write a review on a product or website the payment ranges from $5-$600 depending on the level of traffic to your blog. Have at least 100 visitors per day to your blog before signing up to review sites.

Here are some review sites

Blogsvertise.com
BlogTo Profit.com
Creamaid.com
Blogitive.com

After signing up follow the steps there to create a campaign once you are done, you are set to sell reviews on your blog. But start out with a low fee and increase it as the traffic to your blog increases.

Make Money from your Blog Selling Banner Ads

You can also monetize your blog selling banner ads. If you choose to sell it yourself you make more money but you’ll have to take up the task of marketing the banner space yourself unlike when you assign it to a network and they handle all the work for you. You can run a check on google for banners ads networks.

Blog for Money Writing Contents for other Sites

Finally you can make money blogging by providing contents for other sites, one of such sites that create room for that is payperpost.com
You can monetize your blog and make good money from all the ways listed above but you have to understand that it will take some time to start making money from your blog. How soon you can start making money from your blog depend on some factors such as: How soon you can provide enough good content on your blog, how soon you can get good traffic to your site, and how consistent you can be.

If you really are serious about making money blogging and soon, download Atomic Blogging 3.0 by Alvin phang, a success in the blogging business, it contains a step by step tutorial on virtually everything about successful blogging

Blog Traffic Tips – Ways/Steps to give your Blog a Jump Start


There are two strong challenges in blogging business, first is providing strong content regularly and the second is getting targeted traffic to your blog to read your content. But every business got its challenges right?

Once you have some valuable information on your blog, you need to give it maximum exposure so your blog can get some good traffic daily and you can start monetizing your blog. At the end of the day, how much money you can make from blogging boils down to how much traffic visits your blog.

There are a lot of free traffic tools you can use to promote your blog. One of the free best traffic tools you can maximize is search engines. Search engines are quick to indexing a blog with strong regular content so if you can provide a well optimized strong content you have a good chance of ranking high up in search engines. The higher up your blog page appear on search engines, the more targeted traffic you will get to your blog.

To get a jump start leverage on the power of social book marking and networking sites such as dig, reddit, technorati, stumbleupon, mybloglog, blogcatalog, squidoo, facebook, twitter, myspace etc (use google search to get a longer list). Sign up to some of them and maximize its power. I must say though that you should concentrate more on providing content on your blog and getting free search engine traffic because you are almost sure that traffic from search engines are ready to buy but most of the traffic from social networks are just passer bys and they hardly will click on an ad in your blog talk more of buying. But the traffic helps also, it at least increases the number of visitors to your blog and that has its benefits. It draws advertisers to you and visitors to your blog are impressed. When you have good number of traffic to your blog, visitors see you as an expert in your field for controlling such numbers and would want to associate with your blog.

Have people subscribe to your RSS. RSS means Really Simple Syndication and all that it requires is your RSS address and the RSS address of your reader. And RSS automatically delivers your blog to those who wants to read it. So it is necessary you ping your blog to every blog directory available.

Alert blog directories whenever you have a new post on your blog. You would get a huge traffic when search engines follow such links from the blog back to your blog. Google ‘blog directory’ for a list of blog directories sites.

Look for colleagues in your niche market. Use google search to find blogs that are related to your niche and make interesting comments on their blog and leave your link. You can also exchange links with them.

Put your blog link on your website if you have one.

Announce your blog in message board and request for opinions/comments about your blog.

Invite people to join conversation and comment on your post and offer them a chance to self promote their websites or businesses through their comments on your blog.

Offer something free e.g. e-book or software. This brings traffic to your site and also helps you build a mailing list as you will ask them to fill a form with their names and email addresses to get the your free gift. This works well with a squeeze page.

If you have a website, message board, and a space for advert where people can advertise, you can announce a contest and promise free advertising space to the persons with the highest comments on your blog.

Advertise your blog in various newsletters and ezines.

Register to forums and participate by commenting on other people’s post and make a post when you can. Do not scam forums or blogs by making a direct advert about your blog rather make a meaningful comment and leave a link to your blog. Also have your blog link in your forum signature file and in the email to your email list.

Post articles to as many article directories as possible, with google search you will get a very long list, but here are some:

www.ezinearticles.com

www.goarticles.com

www.ideamarketers.com

www.articledashboard.com

www.searchwarp.com

To ensure that your article get to larger readers, you can use paid article marketer, www.articlemarketer.com

But if you are working on a low budget, you can submit individually to article marketer sites. Visit: http://articlemarketer.com/p_distrolist.php

Send articles to mailing list.

Send articles to RSS directories.

You should repeat the last 3 steps whenever you make a new post on your blog

Repeating these steps can be very tasking, so I strongly recommend you get Atomic Blogging 3.0 by Mr. Alvin Phang one of the top successful bloggers. It directs you with step by step pictorial illustrations on how you can automate most of your blogging tasks with the tools he uses. And he has a wonderful keywords search tool that you can download for free. Atomic Blogging 3.0 contains lots of helpful resource tools you can’t do without, this amazing book left no aspect of blogging out.

10 Blogging Tips -The Don’ts of Blogging


Blogging for business

If you are blogging for business, and you want to avoid the pitfalls of blogging use the following blogging tips as a guide when blogging

Blogging tips #1

Don’t just write for the sake of writing.

You might think, oh, it doesn’t matter as long as I make a post. It sure does matter my dear, because your readers won’t keep coming to your blog if there is nothing ‘Valuable’ to spend their precious time reading and if they don’t visit your blog, No traffic, no traffic, No money. It’s as simple as that.

It is true that having to write a blog post regularly is demanding, I know because it happens to every blogger at the beginning, even the Big shots experienced it too!
But if you keep at it you’ll eventually find it interesting as you will be learning new things in the process and eventually start making money.
If you don’t know how to start writing on a topic or what to write, use search engines to do a research on your topic (After all that is what search engines are for), there’s hardly any topic that has never be written on before. Gather different points from various sources on your topic and neatly put it all together in your own words for a unique and better content.

Another way to get content for your blogpost is through ‘free articles’, edit them (pick out the points and re-write) and post on your blog.

Blogging requires that you be a good writer and researcher. People don’t have time to do research by themselves so they appreciates it when there is a webpage they can go to and get all the necessary information they need on a particular topic. And as you research you find tips that you can use to enhance your blogging too.

Blogging tips 2

Never duplicate copyright contents if you don’t want trouble. What you can do however is study people’s content on your topic, understand it and then write a unique article.

Blogging tips #3

Do not make offensive post using vulgar languages.

Bloggng tips #4

Stay on point when writing your blog content.

Blogging tips 5

Do not post without first proof reading your content

If you use firefox browser it has a built-in spell checker, but if you don’t, you can type your content on Microsoft word or copy and paste your contents on Microsoft word to check for grammatical errors.

Blogging tips #6

It is not advisable to put your feedburner subscriber count button on your page as a beginner without traffic. Why? Hell! People love numbers and like associating with professionals in the game. When they see high number of readers they are impressed and want to keep associating with your blog but when the opposite is the case, guess what happens.

Blogging tips #7

Do not over-crowd your blog with too many adverts. It doesn’t make it look neat and it can confuse readers on which advert to click on. And when they can’t make up their minds they may just choose to ignore all completely. You don’t want that now do you?

Blogging tips 8

Do not leave your blog to promote itself. Promote your blog with every opportunity you get.

Blogging tips 9

Don’t give up. It takes determination and persistence to succeed in any business (online or offline). At the beginning it could be real hard-work but eventually when you learn how to put some of the work on autopilot it becomes easy.

Blogging tips 10

Most of all, DO NOT SCAM your readers. Be credible and always tell your readers the truth, when they come to trust you, they will continue to associate with your blog and never doubt any product you promote/sell.

Have you ever wondered why some people are more successful than others in the same line of business, in this case blogging? It can’t be helped; some people do far better than their competitors, while some bloggers are generating $2,000 monthly, others are making $10,000 upward. This is because some have better technical no-how and tricks of playing the game. Mr. Alvin Phang is one of them, his amazing book Atomic Blogging 3.0 will take you from a nobody online to a professional. The book shows you with pictorial illustrations how you can start a WordPress blog and build it into a 21st century blog. It explains in detail the different tools he uses to get maximum traffic to his blog and automate most of his blogging work. He made available a lot of resources; he left no aspect of blogging out. Since I read the book, I just can’t stop talking about it and I believe it’s a book every blogger should have in their library. The book is called Atomic Blogging 3.0

How to create an Effective Squeeze Page and Opt in List


A squeeze page is very important to your list building, no squeeze page, no list and no list, no money.

The appearance of your squeeze page is also important if you really want to maximize it power and build a strong list. Since you want to be squeezing an email address out of visitors who opt in, you want to make sure that your squeeze page is compelling and with catchy information to make your visitors decide it is worth exchanging their names and email addresses for.

There are different types of squeeze pages and all of them are effective depending on how you create it. The type you should use should be determined by the goal you want to achieve.

Semi Squeeze Page

This is attached to a small section of your website and it displays on every page of the website usually at the right hand upper corner of the website
It is used to attract visitors to sign up for a free e-book, newsletter, product trial etc
This has proven to be the most effective for list building

The Back door to Website Squeeze page

This type of squeeze page act as a landing page that immediately redirects people to your site or affiliate site upon sign up. You benefit in two ways using this form of squeeze page

If you are redirecting people to an affiliate site this allows you to build a targeted subscribers list that you can send relevant products to in future,

If they purchase a product from the merchant’s site you also get your commission.

This is the best way to do your affiliate marketing business if you really want to make good money from it.

If you are redirecting them to your site, you stand to build a targeted subscribers list and increase traffic to your site which will help your ranking in search engines.

Static Homepage Squeeze Page

Here everyone gets to see your squeeze page at first glance at your website. The advantage of this is that there is no way visitors can escape seeing your squeeze page and the obvious disadvantage is that visitors could get irritated by it and stop visiting your page.

To get this form of squeeze page to work for you, you have to add very helpful information links that will almost literally force visitors to go further by opting in their names.

Tips to make your Squeeze Page Irresistible

Headline

People usually feel reluctant to give out their information even when you promise to give them something for free. So your headline has to be very catchy to make them curious enough to opt in their email

Product market

Is there a market for your product? Even when your offer is free people wouldn’t opt in their detail if they think it’s not worth it, I know I won’t.
Forums are helpful place to know what is hot, create a free video or e-book on the hot niche and create a squeeze to give it out.

Positioning

The right hand corner of a website has been proven to be most effective in list building

Use catchy and call to action statement

‘Download or get this amazing information within seconds…’

‘Click once and start making money in minutes!’

‘Offer available for a limited time only or offer available for only the first 20 people’

Best way to use with a Squeeze Page with affiliate product

Have landing squeeze page to build targeted list, then redirect subscribers to merchant’s site, and also have auto responder give subscribers links to merchant’s website and remind them that they will receiving lots of great information and tips from you

Colors to consider for your squeeze page

Yellow, Blue, Red and Black

You can create a squeeze page in minutes with Ewen chia’s FreeWebsiteBuilder