Mar

Monetize Your Blog

If you’ve read the previous posts and created your site, you should be ready to pick a way to make money.

Ways You Can Make Money

There are several options when deciding how you will monetize your blog. Obviously, the easiest choice is selling your own products, but most people getting start don’t have any products to sell, so you’ll have to try something different.

A few options are:

PPC Advertising
CPM Advertising
Direct Advertising
CPA Offers
Affiliate Products
Drop Shipping

PPC Advertising

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising pays you every time someone clicks on an ad on your site. The best network I know of is Google Adsense. You can sign up for an account at Google.com/adsense.

CPM Advertising

CPM (cost-per-mille) advertising pays you a set amount per 1000 views. I don’t have much experience in this, but I’ve heard that Tribal Fusion pays the most, but you have to have a ton of traffic to get approved.

Direct Advertising

This is pretty simple. Direct advertising is selling ad space directly to advertisers. In this, you sell for a set amount of time. Thirty days seems to be pretty common. Give honest traffic stats and fair prices based on your traffic.

CPA Offers

CPA (cost-per-action) offers make lots of people lots of money. With this monetization method, you are paid when someone performs a certain action. This action can be anything from submitting their zip code to making a purchase. There are several CPA networks out there. Gooffers, ShareASale and Commission Junction are a few good ones.

Affiliate Products

Promoting affiliate products is just like being a salesperson. You promote someone else’s product and they pay you a commission. Clickbank is, in my opinion, the best affiliate network. They provide digital products and the commissions go up to 75%.

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is where you advertise and price a product as your own, and once you make a sale for your marked up price, you go and place the order at your drop shipping price and have it sent to the customer. This isn’t something you should do with any company because many will send an invoice that shows the price paid. Instead, you’ll want to use companies that offer drop shipping. Google it, and you’ll find several drop shipping options.

Alright, you can now turn your traffic into revenue, and if you’re not sure about how to get that traffic, check back here soon because the next post will be on traffic generation.

March 27th, 2013 by Matt | Type: Standard

Filed Under: General, Make Money Tags: advertising, affiliate products, cpa offers, cpm, direct, drop shipping, ppc No comments yet

Mar

Writing Good Content

Google Likes Happy Readers

Many content creators find themselves writing for Google rather than actual readers, and in doing this, they look bad to both Google and the readers. A classic lose, lose. Google wants to index and rank content that is relevant and useful to readers, not an article that has a thousand spammy keywords.

Original Content

Another key point on the subject of content creation; do not use content from other sites. Be original. Why would anyone care to read your blog if you are stealing your content from a source that is more authoritative that they likely found before they found your carbon copy? I realize coming up with good, original content can be difficult at first, but once you have a process, it comes quite easily.

Help Others

Be educational. Provide the content your readers expect to find on your blog. Help your audience solve problems and achieve goals.”How to” and “top 10″ articles are very popular. They tend to be pretty self-explanatory and helpful unless the author just throws a bunch of crap together, in which case, they won’t have a reader base for very long.

So…

Focus on your readers. Do your best to please them, and that will please Google.
Never steal content from other sites. Even though people like to think of working on the internet as a slacker’s job, it is not. Do the work if you want success.
Be helpful. Post content that helps your readers.

March 25th, 2013 by Matt | Type: Standard

Filed Under: Content, General Tags: google likes happy readers, help others, original content, writing good content No comments yet

Mar

How to Pick the Right Theme

This step isn’t complicated, but it is worth digging into a bit.

One mistake that people commonly make when choosing a theme for their blog is trying to make it look cool. You do want your blog to be a reflection of your personality, but you have to think about your readers first.

Things to consider:

Background color – Lighter colors retain more readers and it looks more professional.
Use modern colors – Don’t use generic colors. Old bright colors look spammy and very unprofessional.
People respond well to light blues, pinks, greens and oranges.

Aside from colors, try to keep it simple. This isn’t your old Myspace page, so don’t clutter it up. Less is more when it comes to a blog. When you have fifty buttons in your navigation, people don’t know where to start, so keep it simple and make the purpose of your blog obvious. Give people what they’re looking for.

March 24th, 2013 by Matt | Type: Standard

Filed Under: General, Wordpress Tags: how to pick the right theme, theme, wordpress No comments yet