Blogging For Money

Blogs, a conversational and informal style of writing on the Internet, has provided numerous opportunities for bloggers to make money. This rewarding career has made bloggers spread their interests across multiple revenue streams.

But generating money from your blogs can be time consuming, and challenging too.

You have to provide the content, and have enough know-how to set up affiliate programs and their HTML links.

You have to provide a blog that is valuable and good in content and quality on a consistent basis, with new updates at least a twice each week.

And you have to do it even knowing that it may take months for people to start finding your blog and paying attention to it.

Then you have to research affiliate groups, and apply for them, then provide content which will logically lead them to make a purchase.

And once you join affiliate programs, you have to keep up with the latest deals and offers, which can be a fair volume of email from them, and mean a fair number of updates to your site even beyond the new content you have to post regularly.

In this series of articles, we are going to give you some hints and tips as to how to generate income from your blog.

At the very least, you should aim to recoup the $140 or so a year it costs you to maintain your domain name and blog. At the very best, you and your family and friends can save on shopping, travel, many of the items you would ordinarily have to buy anyway.

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The dreaded SPAM

Once you are up and running, you will find that in no time your readers will comment and link to the post. The question is, are they real, or are they just looking to get links to their blog?

The sad truth is that spam has already made its way to blogland, and it is a vengeful beast. It can not only pollute your site, it can even take it over if you are not careful and have too obvious a username and password. 

In WordPress, there are settings which force a comment to be moderated. Make sure you turn this on. There is also a feature that they have to give an email address and be granted permission to join the site in order to post comments. This will slow spammers down, but not stop them entirely.

It wastes a lot of time and effort to get rid of spam from your blog, but the alternative is to have all your hard work ruined, so be careful and cautious in granting permission.

If it is a very general comment like I agree, this is usually a spammer trying to get a link, and it is also like a fly to honey—soon you will have a ton of spammers all glomming onto your site.

Also make sure that even if the comment looks legitimate, you click on the URL they have posted to be sure it is not porn or something unsavory. Remember that this is your ‘storefront’ to the world, so don’t put anything cheap and tacky in it.

Legitimate trackbacks, pings and comments are a good thing, and once you have bagged a good number of readers for your blogs, then you have to devote time religiously to respond to all comments and suggestions coming from the readers.

You will not only gain their loyalty, but also get new ideas for developing some innovative content for your next posts.

If you are planning to sell online, the good news is that most of the time the customer service will be taken care of for you. However, people will contact you directly, so make sure your own personal customer service is prompt and courteous.

Finally, being an expert on blogging requires all of the above, and of course the will and courage to not only keep on going, but to be brave enough to step out from behind ‘anonymous’ to branding yourself.   

Again, your blog is your storefront for your business, your skills as a consultant, author, or re-seller of a product, so the more relevant and interesting your content, the more likely you will be to rise to the top within a few months to a year, and develop a following.

It does take time, but the rewards can be enormous, and best off, they can be coming in 24/7, 365 days a year, from all over the world once you establish your presence in the blog world and start becoming the go-to blog everyone wants to read.

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Getting content

Your main source of content should be your own work.   It is essential to have a passion for your blogging, and your and posts will reflect your attitude and either keep them reading, or send them to the next, more interesting site because you have not grabbed their attention.

Original and compelling content always wins a good audience.

A new spin on any old topic is also a good idea to rejuvenate it and present it in a more interesting, contemporary form.

All of these can display your unique witting skill in your blogs.  A dash of humor really vitalizes your writing, but don’t overdo it.

Blog writing is much closer to journalism than novel writing or poetry, so keep it tightly written, and again, be sure of your facts.  Cite other websites where you found your information or statistics, and you also get credit with the search engines for outward bound as well as inward bound links.

Always have a great title, your headline just like in a newspaper or magazine.   A

Great title can grab the immediate attention of your readers and hook them.

Use subheads as well to break up text, and skip a line between paragraphs. White space is your friend on the net. Also remember to choose a readable font—depending on what theme you have chosen, you could have some issues here.

Wherever possible, use bold, italics, spot color, and so forth to enhance meaning, but don’t overdo it!

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It’s easier than you think

Lead generation, affiliates, RSS feeds with email delivery of your blog content, it may all sound very complicated, but the technology is all there and a lot easier than you think.

Lead generation and sales are the lifeblood of any successful website, and in this case, even if you don’t make a lot of money, at least you will offset the cost of your blog site, approximately $140 a year.

So, you learn to blog by getting your own blog, and doing it. If you have a great title in mind, and a handy url which is not too hard to spell, go to Network Solutions http://www.networksolutions.com to see if the domain is available. 

If it is, then hurry over to Hostgator, http://www.hostgator.com, and register the domain right away for $14.95.  Get their ‘hatchling’ program, currently $9…95 a month, which comes with a really robust set of tools, and make sure you pay for the domain by credit card immediately, because believe it or not, there are people out there who will steal your domain. It happened to me three times! (Which just goes to show you how a great domain name and website/blog is considered to be a real goldmine!)

In the Hatchling program you get the Fantastico suite of programs as it is called and within Fantastico is WordPress, extremely robust and easy to use blogging software. It takes only a couple of minutes to upload and start editing. So, you can literally get your blog up and running in a matter of a couple of hours. 

Then all you have to do is edit the Welcome content, and start posting, adding content to the site.

ALL? You might say.  Well, if you don’t have any content as of yet, that might seem like a daunting task, but be flexible about what you consider content, and you will soon see that you can get ideas, inspiration, and content from a variety of sources, to serve up great content on a regular basis for your readers.

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Your blog as a new stream of income

Not only is a blog fast to market, so to speak, and easy for one person even with few website skills to maintain, it also has the potential to make money for you almost from the get go.

You can become an affiliate through a variety of different programs, and produce content on the topics related to the products you are selling. Plus, you can write reviews, sell others eBooks, and more. (More about affiliates later and in the affiliate’s category at this site)

In addition, I could use it as a lead generation tool, giving people a free newsletter, either with unique content and a free special report that would lead to a paid product, or auto-delivery of my blog postings through an RSS feed direct to their email box every time a new article went live.

The more you contact people with relevant and interesting information they have asked for, the more likely it is that they will come to trust your opinions, and buy from you.

With my travel site, I am also able to offer big special discounts through my affiliates, deals they will not get anywhere else.

Frankly, these days, anyone who has a website can’t afford NOT to take the trouble to sign up as an affiliate, because even if you never ever get anyone to by, YOU can shop and win. That’s right, you can take advantage of any of the deals you post at your own site, and save some really significant cash.

You not only get the discount offered, you get commission back on the transaction. I get even more bang for my buck by using a credit card that gives me points or cash back on the transaction.

My favorite credit card of all is my Upromise one, because every time I use it, I am putting money directly into my kids’ college fund.

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The wonders of WordPress

WordPress also has a number of templates, themes and widgets you can use to make your site and blog look totally unique, with relatively little difficulty.   Templates are pre-formatted ways of making the page look.  Themes is the overall creative appearance of the site.

The standard is the blue-based Kubrick pattern, but even here, there is flexibility, with you easily able to go in to change the top color.

The widgets are the items down the side, such as recent postings, your categories, a calendar, and so on.  Many of them are pre-loaded already, but you can move your widgets around into a different order that makes sense for you, or, even add new widgets.

Not all themes have widgets; however, so don’t just go on artistic appearance alone, but also on how professional and organized you want your site to appear.

Then you have choices like left-hand navigation vs right-hand, and 2, 3, or even more columns for your blog.  I recommend keeping it simple, with no more than three. 2 is ideal with your article in the wider of the two columns, and your navigation on the left or right. 

Many people do have larger screens these days, but too much stuff running down the side of your article is bound to interfere with people reading it.

Also, having too many or two few choices.  Think about a few main categories you will post about regularly on your blog, and get started. You can always add sub-categories later.

That is another great thing about blogs as compared with static websites—you can very easily add categories and areas and new pages without having to update dozens of pages with the new links. 

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How I Became An Expert At Blogging

Like any other novice, I was a total dummy about blogging once upon a time. I couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. I set up a couple of them, and sort of dabbled with them from time to time.

Then I had a paying client with a tight budget desperate to get started on her own blog so she could start selling her professional consulting services effectively. She was a great reader of blogs, but didn’t find anything in her area of expertise, and so wanted her own blog, without breaking the bank.

So I told her I could set her up with the blog inexpensively, but she would have to do the work herself with all the writing and editing.  You don’t really need a webmaster for a blog, another reason why it is so popular as a website.

So in the process of writing up all her step by step instructions on how to use WordPress, I got the blogging bug.

I loved how fast it was compared to building a website, and how great it was to keep updated. One click and it went live, without having to use a whole bunch of editing and FTP programs.

If you wanted to edit it, tweak, save, done.  If you wanted to add pictures, the same. The WordPress interface has two choices, WYSIWYG, What you see is what you get and HTML, so you could edit in either window. Once I became a member of an affiliate program, I was able to add my html based affiliate links quickly and easily at the end of articles.

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Avoid writing long articles. Instead write short ones with a lot detail, or break up the longer ones into a series that you can queue up and post in the future. I find that I am able to do a month’s worth of postings in a day if I am focused.

Blog on what you believe in and are passionate about, and interested in. If you don’t believe in the content, you will find it hard to convince your readers about the subject matter, or keep their interest.

Choose a topic you want to learn more about.  Even if you are trying to position yourself as an expert, there is always more to learn.

Remember that your blog is meant to earn you money, so ‘reviews’ of your affiliate products, or reviews from pros about your own product, are also useful and relevant content.

In addition, your blog, if done with the appropriate professional tone, will likely be a good ‘calling card’ for people interested in consulting services. The free content you offer at the site should be your best marketing tool, either for a paid eBook you plan to sell, or your own consulting services which you will be hoping to get paid top dollar for.

Great blog content offers information and insight into issues that the reader has not encountered before. Even if you are commenting on a news article or press release, try to explain it from your perspective, or spell out for people why it is useful, need to know information, and how it is relevant to them.

As marketers will tell you, the most powerful question you can answer is “What’s in it for me?” 

Your blog posts should answer that by being interesting, relevant, and keeping them coming back for more.