A free blog is an excellent way of beginning your online empire. Costs are low and potential returns are high.
Getting started is easy. Just head over to .blogger.com and setup your blog. Alternatively if you want a more feature rich platform, consider getting your own domain and web hosting so you can take advantage of freeware like Wordpress. Many people start with Blogger then move to Wordpress once they grow in confidence,
Pick a topic you are really interested in and which has good keyword traffic (these are the words people use to search for things in search engines). DigitalPoint has a free keyword tool that is very easy to use. You can also check your keyword (or tag) out at Technorati to see how popular it is. In general, the most popular keywords are the most profitable.
Now, all you need to do, is ensure you post something every day, then when the post is done tell the world that you have updated your blog. You do this by issuing a ‘ping’. Platforms like Wordpress do this automatically. If you use Blogger then you must use a service like Pingomatic to do it for you.
As the number of your posts increase, search engines will regularly stop by to pick up new content. Your visitors will begin to grow. Your objective is to get as many visitors as possible to visit your blog. The more people who visit your blog the more money you will make.
Make no mistake, the opportunity is there. The top blogs make in excess of $10,000 per month. But be warned, there are no shortcuts. Lots of hard work, unique fresh content and a dash of inspiration and you too can achieve these returns.
By now you will have put in the hard work to develop your weblog. It’s become a labor of love. Now its time for all that hard work to pay off. Here are some suggestions for making money with your blog:
(1) One of the most popular methods of making money with blogs is to host ads. Google Adsense is a good example. You let Google put their ads on your site and get paid when people click on the ads. Other advertising works in a similar way. Blogads, Adbrite, Chikita and Double click are other examples of paid advertising.
(2) For a fee you can allow people to place links to their blog or website on your blog. These advertising positions can be sold on Ebay, via somewhere like TextLink Brokers or directly from your site.
(3) Affiliate programs work on blogs as well as they work on websites. Affiliate with companies that sell products related to your site. When people click on the link in your blog and purchase a product, you profit. This is another way of making money online with blogs that doesn’t cost you anything. If you are passionate about a product and write about it, this can work very well.
(4) If you have a website, blog about some aspect of it and provide a link. Your weblog can effectively sell the product, and all the customer has to do is click to your site and order it.
There are many ways to make money with your blog. I hope this simple guide helps you on the way to earning a good return.
As a parting piece of advice, don’t believe the hype you read. There are no short cuts. You are unlikely to make instant, riches, but with some hard work and great content, you can generate a good additional income from your blog.
If you’re like me, every time you turn around, you find an e-mail in your inbox telling you how you can make thousands of dollars online with little to no effort. Unfortunately, there are far too many scams out there telling folks this fairytale of how to make money online with no effort.
The good news is that there are legitimate ways to make money online. All of them will require effort and work on your part, though. In fact, this is one of the main ways you can recognize an online money making opportunity as being false&ndashif there’s a claim that you can make thousands of dollars while you sleep, it’s a good bet that the offer is a fake and will usually cost you money that you will never earn back.
One legitimate idea for how to make money online is to look into affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a good idea if you don’t have your own product or service, as you are marketing for someone else. This type of marketing is usually done by having a link on your website. When a visitor clicks and then makes a purchase, you receive a commission on or a percentage of the sale. Some merchandisers will also pay you a commission on the visitors that don’t make purchase, but do sign up for newsletters and such.
Drop shipping is also a great option if you don’t have your own product or service to sell. The wonderful thing about drop shipping is that you can sell products without having to keep an inventory yourself. You basically serve as a go-between for the buyer and seller. You can easily find wholesale companies online by doing a quick search. Just make sure the company is reputable and has a good track record before you sign up for them, or more important, hand over any cash.
Online auctions such as eBay are also wonderful ways to make money online with little to no risk to you at all. You simply sign up with the auction, paste a picture and product description on the site, and let the bidding begin. You will have to arrange for shipping, but this is a great way to make money on old items you have in your home or garage that you no longer need or use. Think of online auctions as cyber garage sales and have fun with them!
You can also develop your own product or service to sell online. Services are sometimes easier to create and sell online because you already have the skills. Freelance writers, graphic artists, and personal coaches are just a couple of services that can be used to help you answer the how to make money online question for yourself in a very profitable way.
Freelancing is also a great way to make a part-time income while you develop your online business ideas and work on your business plan. This gives you the advantage of having an idea of what it takes to run your own business and provides you with a chance to see if you can make a go of it or not before you leave that cold, gray cubicle for a home office.
When considering options for how to make money online, remember to do plenty of research into them before you sign anything or pay out any money. While there are certainly many legitimate ways to make money online, there are twice that many that aren’t. Choose carefully, though, and you can use your Internet connection to make extra money and perhaps even eventually earn a full-time income, all from the comfort of your home PC or laptop.
Before designing your website and putting it online you have to first plan it all out. For example, you will need to think of what topic your site will be based on. For example, will it be a free stuff site like .1freebieseeking.com or will it be a more larger general site like .simplysearch4it.com with online games at games.simplysearch4it.com a product search at products.simplysearch4it.com and more. You will also have to think of how your site will make you money and also how competitive the market is, which you will be approaching.
Once you have done all of your planning your will then need to design your site. There are many good tutorials around on the web that will help you in designing your website. Once you have designed your website you will then need to consider, which web hosting provider you are going to use for your website. There is a large amount of different type of web hosting providers across the web. Some are very good and reliable and some are not so good or reliable.
So one of the best places to start when looking for a web hosting provider is to us a web hosting directory like .1hostseeking.com just so that you can search for the best web hosting plan for your sites needs. Once you have narrowed down your search and have found a handful of web hosting providers that will be right for you, the best thing to do then is to go to an online forum associated with web hosting. You can then ask others what they think of your chosen web hosting providers so that you have other peoples opinions, which will then give you a better idea of whether they are reliable web hosting providers or not.
So now that you have chosen your web hosting provider you will then need to add something to your site, which will make you some money. One good thing to do is to sell your own products, but if you can’t do this then you can always join affiliate programs and use them on some pages of your site, if not all. To easily find some affiliate programs for your sites topic it is best to use an affiliate programs directory like .affiliateseeking.com . When adding the affiliate programs to your site you must incorporate them so that they look like your own content and are not just a list of affiliate programs links. Doing it this way will more likely result in clickthru’s to the affiliate programs site and also result in more sales.
Now once you have done all of the above, you now need to think about your advertising. One of the best ways of getting visitors to your site is through using the major search engines. To do this you will need to work on your websites seo (search engine optimization). Once you can do seo well enough, then your site will rank a lot better in the major search engines, which will then result in you getting a lot more unique visitors to your site. If you can’t do seo that entire well, then you can also get traffic to your site using other techniques. Some of these include:
1. Adding your site to free web directories and specialty directories
2. Adding your websites link to your signature in the forums that you use
3. Exchanging links with other websites that are on a similar topic to yours
4. Pay other sites so that they can include your link on theirs
5. Use Pay Per Click Search Engines include Adwords
Once you have done all of the above you will then need to keep working on improving parts of your site that is under performing and also finding out ways of doing things better to increase your sites visitors and earnings even further.
Since the release of Rob’s “Blogging To The Bank” (version 1.0 that is), he’s been flooded with thousands of emails telling him of the success people have had applying his techniques on the internet.
We all know that things can change rapidly on the Internet and how a simple change like the Google Slap can turn smooth running profits to nothing overnight.
Rob is all too aware of this and has been working on how to make blogging a more sustainable and long-term income stream. In his book he tells of his trials of developing a blueprint of how to research keywords for your niches, creating a blog (as well as where to host it), content creation, optimizing your blog and generating the traffic you require to become a success.
What we found most interesting is that Rob recommends outsourcing some of the content creation to companies that specialise in the field of writing articles! Although it sounds daunting the math does work out in the long run in your favour. This is definitely an avenue even we at OpinView haven’t quite fully explored. Of course, you can always write your own content. However Rob claims outsourcing provides a fantasic means for content to be uniquely written as well as cost effective - his recommended content creator is .rentacoder.com.
Another aspect which Rob shows in his book is the arrangement of the blog page. We found it cool because it’s just like a marketing tutorial! It’s like, “Place this at eye level for 3 year olds so they can see the bright colours and pester Mom to buy it for them.” There’s a diagram of how to place additional monetization tools like Adsense and content to best attract the reader.
Rob’s book is really easy to read. Again, we covered it in about a few hours and tested it on Blogger.com to see if what he said is actually do-able - and it is! There are some odd bits which will require some knowledge of HTML but for the better part it is geared towards a beginner.
All-in-all this is not a bad book for someone with an interest in blogging and wants a blueprint for how to make money blogging. It contains good content on how to generate backlinks through social sites as well as different methods to promote your blog.
We definitely recommend Blogging To The Bank 2.0.
Check it out before you miss the boat!