Guide To Blogging

Tips and advice to get your blog up and running
February 14th, 2009

Can your blog earn you cash ?

by Trevor Weir

A blog is an expression of yourself in written form. Basically, it is your thoughts, your ideas, your stories, your opinions, and your information displayed through your written voice. Blogs can be written on just about anything. Although making your blog pay you may not have been the original goal, it is certainly something that most blog owners wouldn’t say no to, if they could make it happen. Earning revenue via your blog can be a very satisfying experience.

Blogs were started on the internet as dairies and journals. It wasn’t until 1997 that the word “blog” came into existence. Joran Barger was said to be the first recognized person to use the term “weblog”. Peter Merholz took the word weblog and broke it into we blog as part of a joke. Other bloggers latched onto the term and its popularity as a term needing dictionary status, grew and grew.

Still for all this, the term “blog” remained relatively unknown to the mainstream public until bloggers ousted the 2002 Senate Majority Leader. Trent Lott. Senator Lott made some statements that were largely ignored by the general media who covered the event. Bloggers started writing about these hot comments. As more of the public became aware, Senator Lott became the center of a controversy. Finally, public pressure was too much and Senator Lott resigned from being the Senate Majority Leader.

Senator Lott was not the only victim of his own “fame”. The popular news show “60 Minutes” also fell victim to the tenaciousness of the blogger community. News anchor, Dan Rather, was reporting a story about President Bush’s military service. Documents presented to backup the story were later discovered to be forged and it was bloggers once again who raised the uproar. As a result, Dan Rather was fired and CBS had to broadcast a somewhat red-faced apology to the public.

Some bloggers have a hard time keeping fresh content in their blogs or other activities come up that steal away their time. When this happens, they often put their blogs along with the domain name up for sale. This is where you can make money without actually having to write a blog. You can buy these lower priced blogs, fix them up a little just like you would for a renovation on an inexpensive house and then resell them for a profit.

The goal of many advertisers is to get customers to buy their products. To do this, they spend millions on advertising. You can profit from those advertising dollars by allowing those advertisers to place ads in your blog. Ad revenue sites such as Google Adsense, and Adbright can help you start earning ad dollars very quickly. Some think that the trick is to pick ads that fit the blog content, however in reality Google scans your blog and knows what kind of content ads to place there already.

The great thing about ads is that you don’t need to constantly monitor your blog to get them. Visitors click whenever they want. Once the ads are in place, the residual income is yours to enjoy. There is no need to rotate them because the ad-services do this chore for you.

Selling products from your blog is a good way to make the traffic on your blog work for you. Your blog can help you promote items that you wish to sell. A percentage of each item sold goes to you. Note that this is percentage of the sale which is different from google ads where you get a percentage of the Click earnings. When starting out, you might want to pick products that you use and are familiar with. It is easier to connect with the customer when you know what you are talking about.

Some of the affiliated marketing sites you can look at are Commission Juncton, and LinkShare. Linkshare has a one time cost that is a little expensive, however most of Commission Junction is free, and clickbank the massive info marketplace is definitely free. These groups have a massive variety of products for you to choose from. Your blog can be the platform to showcase related products that sell themselves easily.

Cluttered ads on a blog are particularly unattractive to potential customers. A nice mix of valuable content combined with related product ads is your best bet at getting your product sold. Try not to put too many different classifications of products together. This can make your blog awkward looking and turn off some potential buyers. Another tip, the more focused the topic of your blog is, is the more money you will make from Google’s adsense should you choose to use this easy option. Blogs that talk about everything under the sun, tend to have audiences that are searching and not buying. Blogs that focus on Polish Camera Lenses or light weight racing bicycles or dating in afghanistan ( note how specific these topics are ) tend to have audiences that are far more likely to buy or purchase something and Google and others are well aware of this distinction.

Getting traffic to your blog is the most time-consuming part of the process. Recruit friends and family to display your blog link on their sites. Use your blog link as part of your signature in forums and your email. Don’t forget the power of those social networking sites.

MSN and Yahoo are two search engines that appear to put emphasis on indexing blogs which are up to date. Reach 100-200 search engines just by submitting your blog posts to a number of ping services. An automatic ping/alert goes out when you update your blog so insure that your blog settings include a number of ping services and not just the standard default rpc.pingomatic.com. This will tremendously ensure that many search engines are immediately made aware that you have a new entry in your blog. Thus you can increase your traffic, with a simple update.

The power of a blog can be extraordinary. Most of us who have blogs update them once or twice a month, oblivious to the fact that there are others who are earning tremendous 6 and 7 figure amounts from their blog. At some point in time, most of us have heard of these few geniuses and have even tried a few things to see how we can monetize our blogs. Unfortunately most of us have failed or just not made more than a few dollars monthly. The truth is that sometimes a few simple changes can both increase traffic exponentially and also create a steady income of $50 to $100 dollars daily on autopilot, which most of us would find to be quite fantastic. What kind of changes would those be? Click below to find out.

About the Author:

If you liked this post you can buy me a coffee :-)

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