Bloggers R Us

Anyone can make money blogging; you can even earn enough to quit your present job if you do it right.  But you should be careful with books or courses promising to make you rich overnight.

You might have seen or heard of reports about bloggers making several thousands of dollars every day.

What you don’t know is that it might have taken them many years, or they might have to spend several bucks, to accumulate enough backlinks and traffic. Perhaps they might have their own websites or JV partners, where they can leverage from each others’ assets.

If you’re just starting to blog and you don’t have your own network yet, don’t worry. In this article, I’ll show you how to make money blogging using 5 simple steps. As long as you’re willing to learn and take action, you can skyrocket your earnings in no time.

Step 1: Decide the specific topic or niche of your blog. 

Your blog topics should be something that both you, and your audience, are familiar with or passionate about.

Let’s say you want to make money blogging about video games. If you’e a WarCraft fan, and you understand the game from top to bottom, you’re more likely to come up with beneficial content than if you were to write something completely uninteresting or foreign to you.

Step 2:  Create a professional-looking blog.

Choose an eye-catching design and style for your blog. You can find free themes and plugins on the internet, so you can build attractive blogs and maximize their full moneymaking potentials.  

Step 3: Post valuable, entertaining or controversial content on your blog. 

It’s better if you write the content yourself, so that your personality may shine through. But in case you can’t think of any ideas or you’re pressed for time, you could always outsource the task to a dependable freelancer.  Remember, if you want to make money blogging, you need to invest time and/or money in providing excellent content.

Let’s say you have a WarCraft blog offering free tips for a soon-to-launch ebook, what’s a good plan?

Well, you could write 300-600 word quality articles related to your World of WarCraft blog, and post an article at least 5 times a week in it. If you give quality content, your credibility or authority level shoots up.

Getting people to write comments is an excellent way to get free content and make money blogging. People love to join hot discussions. Encourage comment posting by offering certain prizes for blog commenters of the month. For example, you could give $50-$100, gift cards to Amazon, or copies of your own products (in case you don’t want to offer money).

By posting valuable content and encouraging comments, you’re slowly building a network of fans to your blog.

Step 4: Monetize it.

There are a number of ways to make money blogging through various monetization streams.

You could promote your own products related to your content. If you provide good solid information and they’re satisfied, they are more likely to buy from you.

If you don’t have your own products, you could buy products with resale or private label rights. But if you don’t want to go through any hassles, you could simply promote affiliate products related to your content. 

You could also post Google adsense on your blog, so you can make money blogging whenever someone clicks on those ads, even if they didn’t buy anything.

You can also make money by using pay-per-action programs. These programs usually pay you more than adsense, but less than the normal affiliate programs. How do you earn with pay-per-action programs? Every time someone does a specific action that the advertiser intends them to do (whether it’s filling up a form, downloading a report, subscribing to a list, etc.), you get paid a certain amount. 

If your blog becomes popular enough, you could also offer advertising space where marketers will pay you to put their advertisements in your blog.

Step 5: Bring in the traffic.

There are different techniques to generate traffic and make money blogging.

Set up your blog posts to be “pinged” automatically to a list of ping sites every time you make a new post. Pinging is a method that allows your content to be indexed faster by the search engines.

Use Google Adwords or other pay-per-click methods to advertise your blog. When people search for certain keywords related to your blog, your pay-per-click ad comes out. You only pay every time someone clicks on your ad.

Create informative or entertaining videos, advertise your blog in that video, and upload them to video-sharing sites. Youtube may be the most popular one, but there are other sites worth uploading your videos to. You may use a free service like tubemogul.com to simultaneously upload your videos to a variety of video-sharing sites of your choosing. 

Submit your blog to blog directories. Simply search for “blog directories” in Google and you’ll get a list to submit your blog details to. 

One of the most effective ways to make money blogging is to contact other bloggers and set up a proposal – you put their blog link on your blog, and vice-versa.

Write articles and submit them to article directories. You can then advertise your blog in the resource box.  You could even use your blog content as articles to submit to article directories. But that’s not all…

You could maximize your content to its full capacity by converting your articles to powerpoint presentations and posting them at slideshare.net. You could also convert those powerpoint presentations into videos, and then post them to various video-sharing sites.

Use various Web 2.0 methods to make money blogging.  Bookmark your links at social bookmarking sites like digg.com, stumblepon.com, propeller.com, and many others. However, you should always observe proper netiquette. Most, if not all, of these bookmarking sites prohibit any marketing activities. But you can get under the radar if you give first, become a helpful part of the Web 2.0 community, and bookmark a lot more non-self-serving sites than self-serving ones.

These are the 5 simple steps to make money blogging. Hope you find them useful and may you earn a lot of money with your blog.

After you optimized your Blogspot why not optimize your blogspot to become Visitor friendly blog? If you have a number of regular visitors then it’s good to make them feel welcome and comfortable, which is provided with a number of features. The following are the features you can use to turn a visitor into Blogspot colleagues friendly blogs or blog-friendly visitor or enhance your blog.

Additional: Post imoticon also in your post, so read the post more exciting by the visitor. This is my eleven ways to make my blog in blogger to become Friendly Blogs. But do not forget to chose your good template or you can modify become a good and nice layouts. Hopefully useful.

Source : Yodroo.com

Blogging is a practice that has been around for at least 5 years. It began with average, but opinionated people with something to say, who wanted to share their opinions with anyone who would read them. While it has been popular with the general public, it hasn’t caught on with many businesses until recently. Blogging can be a powerful tool for marketing and exposure for any business if done properly. This article will cover the first steps businesses will need to take to set themselves up for successful blogging.

1. Select the Appropriate Hosting for Your Business Blog

You first step is to select an appropriate host for your blog. There are a couple of solutions that you can use to host your blog. You can:

1) Host it on your own server
2) Host it at a blogging hosting server, such as livejournal.com or blogger.com

If you host your own blog on your own web site, you will need to find blogging software that you can use on your web site. You will need to determine what your web site server capabilities are, and then determine what blogging software will work within your server environment. You will then need to install the software and configure it in order to begin blogging.

If you host your blog on a blog hosting system, then everything is already set up for you. All you have to do is sign up for, and configure your account. Some of these blogging services are free and some of them will have a monthly hosting charge.

2. Configure Your Business Blog

Once you have determined how you want to host your blog, and have installed it, or signed up for your blog service, you will need to configure your blog.

Configuring your blog includes, what template you want to use with your blog. Most blogs whether they are on a blog hosting service, or software that you have installed, will come with several templates. If you are new to the Internet, and don’t have a lot of programming experience, it is probably best to stick with one of the templates that has come with the software or service. It is however, better if you have some programming background, or have the funds to hire someone, then you can get your blog to look like your business web site. Even if your blog is hosted elsewhere, you can do amazing things with the templates to get your blog to look very similar to your business web site. Most services will allow you to modify the templates that come with their subscription.

Other things that will need to be configured are settings such as the name and description of your business blog, the email address you want messages from your blog to be sent to, how you want your blog archived (posts saved for future access), what ping services you want to notify when you update your blog, and other settings too numerous to mention in this article.

3. Determine the Content of Your Business Blog

This next step can be done before you actually install your blog, but you will need to determine the topic of your business blog, and how you want to convey your information to your target market. The content and topics of your blog should relate to your industry. You can focus as narrow or as wide as you choose think is appropriate. In general, it is a good idea to cover many areas within your industry and then separate the different areas of your industry into different categories within your blog.

For example, if you are blogging about your real estate business, the big topics would be commercial real estate, residential real estate, and investing in real estate, etc.

However, it would be better to specifically focus in your main category/industry. For example, if your main industry is residential real estate, you could have topics such as renting out your home, buying a home, and selling a home. Each of these would be a separate category within your blog.

Lastly but most importantly, you should choose topics and categories that will be of interest to your visitors. You will need to research the keywords that your customers would use to find you. There are many keyword research tools available on the web today that will tell you what exact phrases, and how often, your target market is using to find you. These keywords will determine the topics of your blog entries. You should also use some of the phrases you have found in your research in your business blog posts.

4. Begin Blogging for Your Business

The last step is to start blogging. You can choose from a number of different formats to add entries to your blog, as blog entries can take on any format. Some formats that you may want to consider include:

1) Writing articles and posting them to your blog.
2) Finding related news items in your industry and posting them with comments as to what you think of the news item.
3) Answering frequently asked questions you get from your clients.
4) Writing reviews of products/services in your industry
5) Writing “how to” posts
6) Using a free-style posting of anything you feel would be of interest to your potential clients and/or customers.

Your style of posting should match what your target market would find interesting.

Now that you know the basic steps of what needs to be done to begin business blogging, you can choose how you want to host your blog, what keywords your target market uses to find you, and what format would make the most sense to begin blogging. There are many web sites that have more articles and in-depth information about business blogging. You can use these resource sites to help guide you through the process from making your first post, to getting your first customer from your business blog.

Step 1: Choose Your PassionWhat does passion have to do with it? I just want to make money!
Well making money might be a good reason for starting a blog and money CAN be made, but in the end creating and maintaining a blog that is going to last is more about your passion or your driving force. Ask yourself this question;”What would I do everyday, for the rest of my life, without ever being paid to do it?”
Whatever answer you come up with is your passion. That is what your blog should be about; YOUR PASSION. That is what you should be blogging about. Write for yourself before you right for someone else. Money and fame are just icing on the cake.
See, when you first start writing your blog, there most likely WILL NOT be any money returned from your time investment. Making money is usually a result of long hours invested in gaining subscribers and avid readers and becoming known as an “expert”. You might decide to monetize your blog, but without people reading your blog, how are you going to make money?
Remember this:THERE ARE NO GET-RICH-QUICK SCHEMES RELATED TO BUILDING AN A+ BLOG!!!
Sorry to dash your dreams but if you are looking for the “key” to riches beyond your wildest dreams, then please go somewhere else; you won’t find it here.Step 2: Write Down Your Goals
Most likely if you write down your goals those goals will happen. This is because making yourself actually think about what you want to accomplish is half of the battle already won.
“Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail.” ~ English Proverb
What do you want to accomplish? How are you going to deliver your message? When you are finished, what is it going to look like?Step 3: Visit Some Other Blogs
Do some research and check out what other people are doing with their blogs. Learn what blogging is in general. Don’t just search for blogs in your niche, but also in general. There is alot to be learned from others that have already put up there own blogs. Posts some comments so that you can start to get a feel of what the whole blogging process is. While you are researching be sure to bookmark those blogs that you have visited and write down interesting ideas that pop into your head. You might not remember where you have been only a day or two earlier.Step 4: Choose a Blogging Software
There a bunch of options when looking for your blogging software. I would start by doing a search on Google for Blogging Software. Don’t be intimidated by the 62,000,000 + results returned back to you.
For the scope of the article, I am going to talk about WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com). I chose WordPress for my blog not only because it is the most popular, but also because it is backed by a huge community, has some really useful plugins, gives you loads of control and is easy to use. You can either signup for at www.wordpress.com or find your own hosting provider to host the blog for you. If you are new to blogging then signing-up at www.wordpress.com might be your best bet. There are many of bulit-in extras like stats that track your visitors that are beneficial. Best of all it is FREE!!Step 5: Buy a Domain Name
Buying a domain from a domain registry such as GoDaddy will make your blog appear more professional. Choose a domain name that not only fits your blog’s purpose but also has keywords in it. For instance, if your blog is about gardening, then choose a domain such as “MyGardeningBlog.com” or “My-Gardening-Blog.com”. The .com, .net, .org, etc extension is not important although .com extensions are generally recognized as the default.Step 6: Customize Your Blog
Customizing your blog is very easy with WordPress. If you choose to host your blog with www.wordpress.com then you can choose from dozens of pre-installed templates. You can also Search Google for additional templates that are either FREE or low cost for around $45 a template. If you find a template that is not provided by the hosted service then you can simply upload the new template to your account. The control panel that comes with the hosted service is very easy to use.
If you are daring enough to modify the template by hand you can do so. WordPress is built in a web site scripting language called PHP. If you are not familiar with PHP then this route is not for you. You can, however, find additional resources online either at the WordPress website or by doing a Google search.Step 7: Install Helpful Plugins
WordPress is easily expandable by the use of “Plugins”. Plugins are little pieces of software that are created by a 3rd-Party developer that accomplish simple tasks such as helping you manage your Google Adsense(http://www.google.com/adsense) ads or backing up your WordPress installation. There are many plugins to choose from and you can search for them at www.wordpress.org.Step 8: Write Your “About” Page
When you are ready, you can describe the blog and its purpose in an “About” page. Be as descriptive as you can about the target audience and what you will be providing in the blog.Step 9: Start Posting to Your Blog
This is actually the hardest part. If you have done your homework on what your passion was and you did some research, then you most likely did some blog posts in your head. Don’t sweat coming up with great and astounding ideas or intricate essays. Remember the KISS method and Keep It Simple Stupid! (OK I had to break this rule for this article but you know what I mean…)
You have to remember who your audience is in general. Most people read blogs rather than other forms of information because they are short and to-the-point snippets of information that can be easily digested. I think this is just normal human behavior in a conventional society. There is far too much information on the internet and too little time to try to consume it all. Blogs satisfy our normal curiosity like small little squares of chocolate would satisfy our sweet-tooth.Step 10: Marketing (and maybe Monetizing) Your Blog
Since you have been blogging your little heart away, wouldn’t it be nice if people actually read it? Here are a few ways, among many, to go about marketing your blog.