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.

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.

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.

By default, WordPress makes the URL extension of your posts a number. This does not look good to Google or your readers. So, the easiest way to fix this is by going into the settings tab on your WordPress dashboard and clicking on “Permalinks”.

You will then select the “Post Name” radio button, and finally, save changes. This will make your individual post pages have URLs like “yoursite/your-post” instead of “yoursite/1″. You can see how the post name would be more appealing.

This is considered on site SEO. There is much more to it, but this will get you started and make Google view your blog as more legit.

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• Google Sitemap Plugin
• W3 Total Cache
• Simple Share Buttons Adder

These are the exact plugins used on this blog.

Akismet will filter out the tons of spam comments you’ll get. You’ll get much more than you expect. All in One SEO Pack will help you rank higher on Google. Google Sitemap Plugin will help you get indexed more quickly on Google. W3 Total Cache will make your site run more quickly. Simple Share Buttons Adder allows your readers to share on social networks and social bookmarking sites.

Have fun.

The simplest way to install WordPress on Hostgator is:

1. Log in to your control panel.
   
2. Click on Fatastico De Luxe near the bottom of the page.
   
3. In the left navigation, click WordPress.
   
4. Now, click new installation.
   
5. Then, you’ll enter some quick details for your blog.
   
6. Finally, click finish installation and WordPress will be installed to your server.
   

You can now log into your WordPress dashboard at YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin.

The easiest way to view hosting is to look at it as a blank canvas. Your domain is your site’s identity, but the hosting provides its body. Hosting makes your site visible to the world.

Not everyone needs hosting. Let’s say, you’re not sure about what you want to do online yet. You haven’t decided where exactly to start. If you’re not going to have a site up, you don’t need to waste the extra money on hosting. And, in some cases, you may not need hosting anyway. Maybe you don’t need a website. Affiliates who use Youtube as their sole promotion technique can use direct links to the products they’re promoting, so a hosting account wouldn’t be necessary.

It is always better to have a website, but it’s not completely necessary. You can make money without a site or blog, but you will have much more success if you do have a site.

So, to wrap up, if you want a website, you need hosting.

I use HostGator for all of my sites. They provide great service. My sites are never down, and if there’s a problem, they will contact you directly to get it sorted out. I can’t complain.

When it comes to choosing your domain name, you have some things to first consider. You need to determine if you want to build a brand or build a micro niche blog. Building a brand can be harder but much more successful in the long run, and a micro niche blog is much easier to get started but will likely peak in performance.

Brand

• More work
• Greater reward

Micro Niche

• Easy to do
• Limited Potential

Creating a Brand

If you choose to build a new brand, you, once again, have decision to make. You can either use your name as the domain name, or you can think of you domain name like a business name. Using your own name uses your identity as a real person who is an expert in a certain niche. And, on the other hand, most of the big dogs use single words, many of which are made up words. It all depends on you. Either way you go with it, you can build a huge business. Just remember, building a brand takes lots of time and work, but it’s extremely rewarding once you’re established.

Micro Niche Blogs

Going the micro niche route isn’t a bad choice. It’s a great choice for someone who is just getting started who may not have the time to devote just yet.

First, let’s define micro niche. A micro niche is a sub category of a larger niche. So, if your niche is “weight loss”, your micro niche may be “weight loss for new mothers”. It’s just a more specific part of a large niche.

Understanding, now, what a micro niche is, you can now choose a domain. The best choice in a micro niche would be the exact phrase. Using the previous example “weightlossfornewmothers.com” would be the ideal choice, but these are usually taken. Just play around with different things close to your micro niche keyword until you find one that’s available.

Whether you decide to build a brand or a micro niche blog, this is the beginning of your new business, so have fun with it.

It may seem obvious for most of you, but the first step to building a successful business online is picking your niche. Your niche is your specific category. So, if a hobby of yours is model air planes, then you may want to start a blog about building model planes.

All your niche has to be is anything you can continually add quality content to. Though this may seem like a simple task, it actually does take some serious thought. You want to be sure it’s something you care enough about that you actually want to post new, helpful information on.

Your niche absolutely has to be something you care about if you want a serious business. Having a niche you care about compared to one you do not care about can be the difference between being comfortable and being rich, so do a little research, and be confident in your choice in a niche.

So, get started brain storming, and tomorrow, we’ll discuss the next step.