Make Money Blog

Before you can make money, let alone earn a single red cent from the Internet, you need to at least have one make money blog registered and indexed by Google. But even that might not be enough. You need to do some serious make money forward planning...

First, your blog has to have a readership.

It's no use putting up a free make money blog on blogger or whatever, filling it full of adsense ads, text ads and affiliate products to make money and sit back and wait for the money truck to pull up outside your front door.

Wake-up call!

To learn how to make money online from your blog, you need organic search traffic! And lots of it.

That traffic is not going to mysteriously materialize all by itself, either. You are going to have to do some work on it yourself if you want to make money online. It's called promotion - you have probably heard the term!

Well, before you can even start promoting your new blog to make money, you absolutely have to have something on there that'll make people not only want to read it, but want to come back again and read some new stuff if you want to attract social traffic, but the most important thing you can do is to attract organic search traffic and you'll need top get that from the search engines - or more accurately Google!

To do that, you need to get lots of backlinks from other websites and blogs with your keywords anchored in them - about the topic of your blog. It helps to make sure your content is completely relevant to your topic, so if your blog is all about the clothes industry, don't go posting about where to get the best dog food, or how to make money! You have to stay on topic and make your posts relevant, informative, educational, inspirational and well-written!

If you can do all that - and in the early days you should aim to be populating that blog with a new post as often as possible to get the Google bots spidering your site - then you can go out and start promoting that blog to make money and people will start coming to see it from the SERPs. Of course, nothing much will happen to begin with as it takes time to build up a decent number of backlinks and then they have to be counted and you site has to gain authority before it will see the top pages og the search index for your keywords, but its worth the wait.

A note about ads and social traffic:

If you want to make money from your ads, whether they be PPC or affiliate or banner or whatever, you need to attract organic search traffic from the search engines. Sure, you can get 500 readers a day coming in from Stumbleupon or Digg or any combination of the social networking places, but the problem is that most of those visitors will be Internet Marketers like yourself. Not a bad thing, but you must be aware of one very important thing about Internet Marketers.

INTERNET MARKETERS WILL NOT CLICK YOUR ADS!

On the other hand, organic search traffic are generally not IM'ers and are less aware of what your ads are. They'll see your ads and affiliate products down the side and are much more likely to click on them, which will make money for you.

That's how to get started in a nutshell!

1. Join some Social Networking Communities like MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog for starters. There are more out there to be found. These will put you in touch with potentially thousands of other bloggers many of whom will be interested in your niche. These people are all potential visitors to your blog!

2. Once a member of the above sites, you'll also start viewing lots of other people's blogs. This will give you ideas for posts on your own blog as well as posting comments on theirs with a link back to yours. More exposure = more traffic!

3. Contact other bloggers of high ranking blogs and offer to "guest post" on their blog. What does this give you? More exposure, greater credibility and self-branding, a link back from a high ranking blog and ultimately more traffic!

4. Mention something about one of the high ranking blogs you've visited in your posts with a link to them. There's good chance they'll pick up on your link and come visit you to see what you've written about them. They might then be tempted to write a review of your blog on theirs - more exposure = more traffic!!!

5. Open an account with Yahoo Answers and get busy answering some questions in your niche with a link back to your blog on every one. Lots of people read these things and as the questions are all to do with your niche, the readers are also interested in your niche. So there's even more exposure and the traffic is highly targeted.

6. SEO your make money site with a vengeance to push your site up the SERPs. The most important traffic your site can receive will come from the search engines, in particular Google, so make them your friends by carefully SEO'ing your site. Don't know how? I have written a useful eBook on that very subject that will help you immensely on the subject of SEO. You can see it below, called The Secrets of SEO Revealed

If your blog is relatively new (less than 3 months old) then you're not going to have so many options open to you to how to make money online from it - yet.

Here are two ways you can start to make money from your blog almost straight away:

1. Adsense. Ok, I know it's not my favourite or even chosen way of making money, as for one, I got kicked off the program last year and two I think contextual advertising draws visitors away from your blog before they've had a chance to look around and maybe earn you some real money. PPC (Pay Per Click) ads like this are ok if you want to have a small, residual stream of income (emphasis on small) unless you're prepared to put up several or many blogs and have the time to write for them all and drive traffic to them. My next method is better.

2. Affiliate Marketing. Join Clickbank for free and pick some products in your niche and promote them on your blog. Then join Commission Junction and sign up with some affiliates that match the niche of your sites and get some text and banner promotional material up on your site too. Where adsense will make you a few cents per click, an affiliate product can make you many dollars per click if you get a sale. That's a big difference in my book! The best part is that you can code your affiliate links to open in a new browser tab or window, so your visitor never actually leaves your blog. Once they've seen the affiliate sales page and maybe bought the product, they'll come back to your blog and maybe want to read some more, or bookmark it to return later (exactly what you want them to do!).

3. Niche Affiliate Marketing. Similar to the above, but in this case, you write your blog specifically for one niche product or a couple related products and focus all the blog's attention on promoting them. Niche Affiliate Marketing enables you to concentrate all your efforts onto those products and therefore increase your blog's ranking in the SERPs to attract more targeted organic search traffic. That will, in due course equate to more sales and more money in your bank account!

Update 7th May 2008:

Well what a waste of time and effort that pile of dog crap turned out to be. 7 months of promoting their slow loading and annoying widgets on my sites, not to mention trying to get people to sign up and guess what? For all my troubles, I made about 38 cents.

Well, not about 38 cents,

EXACTLY 38 lousy cents.

Well, they can just give my huge earnings to their favourite chartity, because this blogger is not going to be giving them any more plugs or free links!

Goodbye WidgetBucks

Or more correctly, widgetNObucks

You are among the first to hear about this (and potentially profit from it).

I'm sure most of you have heard of QVC, the cable TV show that advertises just about anything from gadgets to appliances to jewelry etc and sells them for an absolute bargain price every day! This show attracts an amazing amount of viewers in every country it's screened.

Well, a similar phenomenon is about to hit the online world.

I just heard about this and was impressed enough to jump on it. Its called DealDotCom and they have what looks like a killer affiliate program to just die for! I just signed up myself as an affiliate and would love to extend the offer to you too. You can click on one of the links and be nice to me by signing up with my link - then start promoting it yourself and get people to sign up with yours!

The best bit is: It's free to sign up!

Just like QVC, they sell consumer goods at bargain basement prices. As an affiliate, for every customer that you send there who buys, you get paid! The site is in pre-launch at the moment but is about to go live any day now.

Please read the disclaimer at the bottom of this article before you act on this information...

Updated 16th November 2007 - Terry Didcott
__________________________________________

Once you blog reaches its three months birthday, it will be eligible to be entered in some of the blog paid review sites.

But don't expect miracles at first. Sometimes it's better to be a little more patient. But if you really can't wait any more, try these sites out:

• PayPerPost



• Blogsvertise



• ReviewMe



• Smorty

They all pay you for blogging about advertisements that they publish from time to time. They all have entry criteria and one of them is that you blog must be at least three months old and have been posted to regularly without any breaks of more than seven days.

It helps if you have attained some Page Rank from Google in this time, but for most blogs of only three months existence, this is unlikely. It also helps to have been generating traffic like mad so that your Alexa rank is good - preferably below 200,000.

Pay for individual posts vary, but $5 per post is average for newly signed up blogs.

For full details, you should sign-up with these sites and read their individual TOS, as they differ from site to site.

Once you blog has aged and accumulated not only a decent Page Rank but a good regular traffic flow, the amount of money you can earn s well as the frequency of the available opportunities increases - in some cases you can be earning $100 or more per post when your blog is really popular!

So it's definitely worth doing all the ground work early in the blog's infancy by building a regular readership and promoting it wherever and whenever you can.

As an addition to the above, I added Smorty to the list, but they will only accept PR3 and above blogs that have their own domain name. That means if you use a page hanging off a domain like:

www. yourdomain.com/blog

They won't accept it. They will, however accept a subdomain like:

www. blog.yourdomain.com

or of course a dedicated domain like:

www. yourblog.com

Updated 18th march 2008
_______________________

Disclaimer: "All that glitters is not gold"

If you do use your blog(s) to write paid reviews, Google will find out and strip it of its page rank if it has any.

That's because the reviews are really a smokescreen for black hat site owners to buy PR links with anchor text to boost their own sites in the SERPs. Google doesn't like its index being abused and artificial methods to get int the top pages is now heavily frowned upon.

So while all the info above is correct in that you will make money writing paid reviews, you can lose your PR in the process.

You have been warned!

Updated 31st Jan 2008

You can pretty fast make money from advertising on your blog using a couple of tried and tested methods once your blog has matured sufficiently and has attracted a halfway decent readership.

You can do one of the following:

1. Sign up with Text Link Ads for free and let them find you advertisers for your blog. Unfortunately, it has since come to light that this is a bad idea as Google will take away your site's page rank if it catches you using this system. So don't do it as its just not worth it!


2. Set up your own Advertising Schedule and tariff and go and attract advertisers to your blog yourself. This is more work but you get to keep all the advertising revenue for yourself.


3. Get some adsense on your blog and make money from PPC. You'll need organic search traffic to make it work and there's a whole host of other info you'll need about this, which is a little outside the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, don't rely on social traffic to click your ads, they will not. If your content is perfect and provides your readers with everything they want, they won't click your ads either. That's a fact, so get used to it. Your content must not satisfy your reader's needs or they'll simply go away happy. If they don't get what they want out of your posts, they are more likely to click one of your ads to navigate away from your page in search of another site that might satisfy their needs. Bingo! You scored a PPC click and earned some money. Repeat that a couple hundred times and you'll never go back to blogging just for your readers!

Either way, your blog can generate a regular supply of advertising revenue for you which, once in place becomes an easy flow of income direct from your blog.

The most important thing you need to do in order to work at home and make money successfully is to get your blog ranked in Google's search pages.

Google are the search engine you should be targeting, as they produce around 60% of all search traffic from all the search engines put together.

Why do you need search engine traffic as opposed to social network traffic?

Social network traffic is composed mainly of Internet Marketers, who don't click on your ads or affiliate links. Fact.

Organic traffic obtained from the search engines, on the other hand are generally NOT Internet Marketers and are much more likely to click on your ads or links if they don't get what they wanted from your blog or web page. So while you're sitting there frantically trying to figure out why you're not making any money from your work make money from home business, now you know!

There's something to think about!

And while you're at it, don't even bother trying to compete with everyone else who is clambering over each other in the make money niche.

Why?

Because its one of the toughest of all the niches to actually make any money in! You'll spend many months working hard to get a make money site high enough into the SERPs to actually see any traffic and it'll be pretty much for nothing anyway, because most of the people searching for terms like make money are highly unlikely to click your ads.

Much better to spend those months and hard work promoting a website or blog in a different, much less competitive niche.

But that's something you're going to have to find for yourself!

I can't stress enough the importance of keyword research to the success of your website or blog. Most Internet Marketers are fighting each other unnecessarily over a few scraps when they should be looking to places where the madding crowd are not congregating!

By a few scraps, I mean the Make Money niche! It is probably the one niche that you are least likely to actually make money from. Why is that? Because most people who search for make money terms are already aware of what your ads are and when they visit your site, they are not going to click on them, that's why!

Add to that the sheer hard work that is involved in getting a website anywhere near to the top of Google for any of the popular make money keyword terms and the equally difficult task of keeping it there and it just does not add upi to a cost effective niche.

...more to follow...