There are ways of making money with blogs. The method you’ve probably seen on most blogs is to host ads from Google Adsense. Those blogs get paid when people click on the ads. Search engines seem to prefer blogs in that blogs tend to be content rich and stick to one or two topics. To create a successful blog, you have to write articles on something you are passionate about or at the very least have some knowledge of the subject.
However, before writing articles, make sure you have selected a niche that is under served and with less competition. If your blog serves a niche market well, it will become an avenue for making money with little or no cost. The whole process goes something like this: Write about what you love, market your blog, and see money roll in to your bank account (This is the best scenario).
1. Select the niche you want to operate in:
The first key to creating a successful blog is that it has to target a group of people, or a niche, who are hungry for information of a specific nature. These people must have problems that need to be solved, or they are looking for pleasure. Problems here mean something that causes people pain, whether they be financial pain, physical pain, or emotional pain. A blog is a place where you can provide real solutions (products or services), and hopefully people will buy them from you. Remember that a profitable niche must contain at least two elements: There are enough people looking for a solution to their problems, and there are quality products available for you to promote to serve the niche.
2. Research the substance of your articles:
Once you have chosen your niche, start using search engines to get a feel for the information that’s being returned for your search phrases. Then, check out Forums to see what questions people are asking and write articles with the information they are seeking. Give people what they want, and they will respond. You may also want to visit article directories (Searching the term “article directories”. There are plenty of them out there. EzineArticles is one of the most famous article directories. ) and do a search to see what information other authors are submitting. It’s not necessary to go through every article posted on there because it will probably result in too much information and you will never get an article written. Keep a notebook and pencil at hand to jot down your ideas. Great ideas always occur when we don’t have a pencil.
3. Create A blog to capitalize on your niche:
Blogs are so easy to use, maintain and update that they have become a number one choice for niche markers. Also, the structure of a blog is generally by nature and search engine friendly. I use WordPress to create this blog. This great, free service provides tons of themes, widgets and third-party plug ins ready to be added instantly.
You need to create a blog that is visually pleasing or aesthetically sound. Arrange your blog in a way that maximizes all the content you created to make your blog sticky in order to maintain your readers’ attention and draw the most attention to the programs you are affiliated with.
I suggest you choose a clean and neat theme with a predominantly light/white background with black text. Other themes tire the eye easily and make it hard to keep your readers’ concentration. Make sure your content is clearly located and your sidebar and navigation is user-friendly for readers to know exactly where they have to click to access the information they want.
There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your blog, including an About Us page, a Privacy Policy page, and a Contact us page. Google particularly looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Moreover, you want to have an archives page so that your archives won’t take up valuable room in your blog sidebar.
4. Drive traffic to your blog:
After you create and optimize content based on keywords for your niche, the built-in pinging function provided by WordPress will notify other websites of your new content, and you’ll be getting ranked and receiving traffic for the terms you target withing a few days of your blog’s presence.
Below are other useful methods for generating additional traffic to your blog.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
The Internet is becoming part of our daily lives. People tend to look for solutions to their problems via the search engine. Optimizing your blog for search engines will give you a head start in generating quality traffic. I’ll delve into this subject later.
- Article Marketing:
Article writing is one of the best marketing strategies to obtain free, natural search listings within Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Thousands of online marketers are now using article writing as a free way to generate traffic to get links pointing back to their blogs. Article Marketing works something like this: you write an article about a topic you want to get listed under, submit it to an article directory like EzineArticles or GoArticles, use their article distribution and repository services, and then wait for search engines to pick up your article. Article directories allow you to place an ‘author bio’ (also known as signature or resource box) below the article body, where you can leave a link or two pointing back to your blog. By submitting articles to Article directories, you are adopting their search engine rankings, which means you can get listed on the first page of the natural search results in a matter of days. This is something that could take months if you tried optimizing your blog for search engines (SEO). If you write an article and submit it to a ‘popular’ article directory, your article will inherit the popularity of that entire site, giving your article a head start and greatly increasing the chance of your blog’s getting listed within the top search engines.
- Link Building:
Links still rule when it comes to the most powerful blog promotion campaign you can run for your business. In general, links include reciprocal links (two-way links) and non-reciprocal links (one-way links). My understanding is that Google and other major search engines tend to ignore reciprocal links and put much greater emphasis on non-reciprocal links because search engines assume that it is impossible for web/blog masters to manipulate the number of links pointing back to their blogs. Link building is both for search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your blog. The number of backlinks from relevant websites indicate your blog is more trustworthy and worthy of better search engine rankings.
- Joining Social Networks:
Using social networks like Myspace, Facebook, and Squidoo, etc can be another good way to drive traffic to your website. By submitting all the posts you make to these social networks, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, as well as the potential of having your content read and shared by your target audience. Most online marketers hang out at social networks for some reason. As long as you can find where your niche is hanging out and leverage that, you can increase both your earning potential and traffic exponentially.
5. Manage your blog:
The last step in creating a profitable niche blog is the management. Below are some of the elements involved in the managing a successful blog.
- Keep track of your blog statistics. Monitor your search competition and the rankings and traffic from various pages to your blog. All website hosting services provide a back office management platform. I check my blog traffic statistics via cPanel from HostGator every day.
- You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. You can then focus more of your content on these terms.
Hope you’ll find this article helpful in creating a profitable blog.
