Blog For Profit

So you’re making money with your blog and everything is looking good, what’s the worst that could happen?

Actually quite a bit can still go wrong, firstly hackers and scammers who take advantage of outdated blog software to exploit it. Often they can leave your blog intact, but use some space on the site to hide an extra page for a phishing scam. Then they spam the link to this bogus page everywhere to get unwitting people to divulge bank details. But guess who will end up getting taken off the server?
That’s right, your blog comes down, and your domain takes the rap for the spam and gets blacklisted on the spammer sites.

So rule number one is keep your blog software (and any other scripts for that matter) up to date so that any known security holes are plugged. Some updates may also add extra useful functionality, so it’s worth updating your software regularly for those reasons.

Even if your blog is up to date, things can go wrong, and often do. It’s not unheard of for a hosting company to completely disappear, but more often is a hardware failure at the server. When this happens most decent hosting companies will have backups, the cheaper ones won’t. Even the best hosting companies may not have your most recent blog updates saved for you, so you’d better do it yourself.

It makes sense to keep backups of any templates, and modified files locally, and probably a complete backup of the whole site. The thing with blogs and any other non static sites is that they store the information, in the case of a blog all your posts, in a database separately from your main files which run the site. Luckily if you run a Wordpress blog on your own hosted site you can use a plug-in to automatically back up your site as often as you like.

Wordpress Database Backup ( http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup ) can be setup to email your database to you whenever you like. A quick tip I’d like to pass on is Gmail.com, a free Gmail account can be used as the destination for your database backups, and as you get huge amounts of space you can store a lot of backups there. Keep a backup locally on your hard drive, and one online at Gmail and you are fairly sure to have one should you need a database backup.

The worse that can happen is your blog goes down, and there are no backups. Be prepared and this kind of disaster may not be a big hit to your blogs profit. Remember back it up often, and in more than one place.

If you didn’t already know it, the best way to sell something to your blog readers is to sign them up to your own mailing list. Offer something of value related to your blog, and then ask the reader for their email address so you can send them emails to remind them about your site, or offer products they may need in the future.

I just found a quick and easy way to add a subscriber form to your blog with a new low cost plugin, which saves you time as you don’t need to play with widgets, or your blogs theme files.

For more information about Action Opt-in Click Here.

in easy pocket money blogging part one we discussed hosting the blog, and setting it up. We also looked at the first few plugins used to make it an article directory and avoid spam from comment spammers. In part 2 we will look at how we get traffic to the new blog, and how we monetise it.

Firstly I will run through the basic plug ins I add to all my blogs for traffic generation from search engines. I set these up first as they will be helping every time a new article is added to the directory. My first suggestion is All in One SEO Pack as this helps to make your blog posts get ranked in search engines with the appropriate tags, and titles etc. This helps no end in getting traffic for free from search engines, and making sure your listing is right in the searches. Using the defaults in most of the settings works well enough for the lazy people like me too.

In addition to All in One SEO I always ensure my blogs use permalinks, and use the structure
” /%category%/%postname%/ ” in the “Custom Structure” field in permalink settings. These together help give the search engine rankings a boost and bring the traffic in. Once you have traffic you can start monetising your articles, oh yeah we haven’t got to the articles yet have we? Don’t worry it’s coming but lets get it all ready for making your pocket money on the blog first.

To monetise a blog, I use a widget with Adsense in on the right of the page, and also a plugin called Adsense Injection available at http://www.biggnuts.com which will place Adsense blocks in the article text automatically wrapping it in the text. You can also add Link-A-Dink plug in to turn some key words and phrases within articles to text links to affiliate products or your other sites. Of course how you monetise your blog is up to you, and you may do it even better than I do, this works for me and I’m too lazy to experiment.

On this blog I also addeed Role Manager, WP-PageNavi and  MaxBlogPress Favicon plugins. The last of these helps to get your blog noticed by adding one of those little icons to the title bar of the browser and also to the title when bookmarked, which helps it stand out a little and makes people come back again. You can add your choice of plugins too, if you have other things you like to see on your sites.

We now have a Wordpress blog, which looks like an article directory and works like one. It also attracts traffic from search engines to the articles which we don’t have yet. This is where the best bit comes in, free content added automatically. The plug in for this is on the Unique Article Wizard Plugins  page UAW Plugins for Various Article Directories where you can download the unique articles plugins for various scripts including Wordpress. Activate the plugin, and fill in the details in the settings, and you will start receiving articles to your new site almost immediately.
In my case I have had over 3000 articles in a few weeks, and the search engines have started sending enough traffic to earn me some extra Google Adsense cash this month.

You can setup an article directory or any niche themed website with Wordpress, and start getting article submissions in minutes. As it grows, hopefully so will your pocket money. And if you’re one of those people who likes to test and tune, fiddle around with the settings, and you could probably be making a bit more than pocket money from a blog like the one outlined here. The choice is yours. But whatever you do, get started on your pocket money blog soon.

If I was prone to exageration I could claim that I am making thousands from one quick and simple blog. I could write a short e-book on it and then sell that book for silly money to people with a disclaimer that their earnings may not be the same as mine. I’m not prone to exageration, and am too lazy to write the e-book to cash in, so instead I’m going to outline a way to make a quick bit of extra pocket money from a simple blog.

The blog in question at http://www.articlesand.info could probably make a bit more profit with tweaking, probably will make a little more as it grows, but in reality was just a way to use up a domain I already had paid for.  It took next to no time to set up, takes a few minutes a week to keep it going and brings in a little pocket money. Now that’s a way to get started blogging for profit.

So how did this come about?

Firstly I had the domain http://www.articlesand.info sitting around awaiting a script for me to publish an articles directory (I have used a couple before but they were insecure). I also have a reseller hosting account for all my domains at Hostgator which is paid for by my other sites profits. If you are hosting more than a couple of sites, Hostgator is a great place to put them. So I had everything I needed to put together a site except the script for the article directory.

That’s when I saw something about using Wordpress as an article directory. I experimented on my own but it was a bit hit and miss. I googled for a Wordpress article directory plug in and found there was one available at http://articlesss.com/article-directory-wordpress-plugin/ which also offers a nice article directory style theme to go with it. To get it up and running quickly, I used cpanel to install Wordpress from Fantastico (all included in your hostgator hosted account) filled in a few fields on a form and Wordpress was installed. I then installed the article directory plug in and theme. Now it was ready to take some articles from other authors.

Actually it wasn’t ready yet, if you have ever installed Wordpress on your own domain, you will probably have encountered comment spam. So one of the first plugins I activate in Wordpress blogs is the Akismet one which is usually installed with WP anyway. There are other comment spam filters, but Akismet does the job well enough. So this helps to keep my time spent on the blog to minimum as most comment spam is removed for me automatically.

part 2 to follow soon.

Sooner or later, you will be faced with the decision of whether to use advertising on your blog or not. Advertising isn’t mandatory for keeping your blog interesting; in fact, it’s merely an optional tool you can use in case you want to take advantage of your blog’s popularity. But once you’ve decided on placing ads on your site, there’s one more issue you need to consider: setting your blog’s advertising rates. So how much can you expect to charge or be charged?

With blog advertising, there are no set rates. It is up to the blogger to design the correct ad payment scheme that attracts advertisers and allow him to generate a reasonable income at the same time.

To help you determine the right advertising rates for your blog, it’s important to consider doing some research first, particularly about similar blogs and to consider your traffic and perform some simple experimentation using your site.

Playing with figures If you think that setting your ad rates at low prices will attract more advertisers, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Your $300 a month rate may not stand against another blogger’s $600 a month rate if you only have 50,000 page views monthly and he enjoys 600,000 page views.

An advertiser will look at the ratio between the cost of advertising on your blog against the amount of traffic that your site generates, the same traffic that will potentially click on the ads.

A good ‘constant’ to consider when determining ad rates is the CPM or Cost-Per-Mille - mille being equivalent to 1,000. Let’s say a blog receives 150,000 page views monthly. For a 125×125 sidebar ad (usually the most common), the blog charges $250 monthly. Divide $250 by 150 (that’s 150,000 divided by 1,000 to come up with the CPM) and you’ll get $1.66 CPM.

The same arithmetic is used by some of the most popular blogs, including JohnChow and Copyblogger. For your blog, you might want to consider how much traffic you generate and the number of genuine page views you get. These figures will help you evaluate your blog and come up with the appropriate ad rate.

Since these blogs are well established, you could start at far lower rates if you’re still building traffic. Consider a starting figure of about $0.5 CPM, which is friendly enough to your advertisers and good enough for you. Raise this rate gradually as your blog becomes more popular and as more advertisers and sponsors buy ad space from you.

Size and location Advertising rates also vary depending on the size of the ad and where it will appear. Larger ads and those that will be placed in prime locations or ‘hotspots’ will cost more. Ads will also be more expensive if they will appear along with content or on your blog’s header. Cheaper locations will be those found on the page’s footer and the area located after the fold.

Factors that influence ad rates Not every blog can enjoy strong advertising support. That’s mainly because not every blog has the right amount of site traffic, the right visitors, market demographics or niche. These are just some of the factors that affect your eligibility for ad placement and the rate you can charge on your blog.

Blogs, by the way, do not pass through the same channels as traditional print media. The cost of providing information in blogs is low enough that bloggers can offer low advertising rates and still earn a profit.

Professional blogging is a very new idea with a lot of potential for entrepreneurs who have insight, drive, and a basic understanding of today’s innovative web technology. The ranks of so-called pro bloggers are still quite small, and there are very few people who make their living entirely off of their blogs. However, every day there are more and more people who have managed to turn their weblogs into cash cows that supplement their income. The number of pro bloggers is growing by leaps and bounds, but it is difficult to say whether this trend will continue.

Many bloggers dream of entering the sphere of professional blogging. There are very few people who happily devote an hour or more each day to their blog without at least occasionally wishing that they could earn some kind of financial reward for all of their work. Several models exist for making money with a blog, the most popular being to sell advertising space through Google’s AdSense program or directly to a company that wishes to reach the demographic that your blog appeals to. However, there are very few people indeed who can make a comfortable living just by selling space on their blog sidebars.

A lot of the people who read weblogs are bloggers themselves, in part because of the fact that the people who use blogging technology on a daily basis are most likely to be interested in what other writers are doing with the medium. This fact begins to explain why the people who succeed in the world of professional blogging are mostly people who have devoted themselves almost entirely to learning about, talking about, and writing about blogging. More than any other topic, pro bloggers turn their attention to the phenomenon of blogging itself. A lot of pro bloggers make the topic of blogging the stunningly self-reflexive ongoing focus of their blogs.

Of course, professional blogging is destined to become much more complicated in the future than it is today. In the current moment, pro bloggers who attract the largest audiences and make the most money are mostly concerned with investigating the blogging movement and with offering advice to amateur bloggers. However, as the kinds of people who regularly read blogs changes, and the demographics of bloggers expand and diversify as blogging software becomes more user friendly, it is very likely indeed that the world of pro blogging will begin to reflect these changes. Indeed, it is very difficult to predict exactly what kinds of blogs will be reaping the greatest financial rewards five or ten years down the road. The world of pro blogging is one of constant change and flux, which is part of what makes it so exciting.

Learning How to Make Money Blogging

There are two major types of business models that entrepreneurs use to make money blogging. The first and most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising to different companies and brands who want to reach that blog’s readers. The second kind of money making blog is one that helps a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing.

If you are blogging with the goal of selling advertising, there are two basic ways that you can go about recruiting sponsors who want to put ads on your site;
you can let someone else do all of the legwork, or you can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue. Within the first group, many people make money blogging by selling space through Google’s AdSense program. The advantages of this program are numerous, as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger or webmaster to begin raking in profits. However, most people discover that they make less money through this method than they had hoped that their blog would earn.

Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route. People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies. The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action. One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a weblog designed specifically to appeal to that company’s customers and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers’ minds. More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging technology. However, very few people manage to reap the profits they want from their blog. Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons.

Often, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.

The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.  

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you. However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in order to make a profit isnt easy. As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.  

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. To be certain, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati, and once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so dont skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors by setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in the blog community, and following other established modes of winning traffic. 

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

We have just added the “7 Days To Profitable Blogging “ e-book to our discount E-book store

This book is a useful guide to starting, and running a blog for profit, because there’s no reason internet marketers shouldn’t have the most successful, high trafficked blogs on the Internet. No reason except no one has ever bothered to explain HOW to set it all up. So we’ve done that and put it all in the book.

Discover how to quickly and easily set up your first blog, and turn it into a money maker. Follow the instructions and you’ll have a foundation that can’t be beaten, and is strong enough to support anything you choose to do! More than that though, you’ll find that anything you add will be effortlessly easy to promote.
“Ditch The Wannabe Experts and Grab Our Seven Day Master Plan!”
With our seven day master plan, we answer everything from:

• What the four best bookmarking sites are for driving incredible traffic in your direction
• How best to build your blog
• THE single best platform to blog from
• How to choose a the keywords you’re building your blog around
• How to implement those keywords in a way that HELPS your readers and YOUR income
• AND MORE

7 Days To Blogging Profit is a great book, but it is made even better because of the low price which we offer it for, see for yourself just how low at “7 Days To Profitable Blogging “ .

By Joel Comm

Whether you’re just starting out with AdSense or whether you’ve been using it for years, the success of your ads will depend on knowing five absolutely essential pieces of information about AdSense:

1. AdSense Can Make You A Huge Heap Of Cash Lots of people make the mistake of believing that AdSense is only good for bringing a site a few extra pennies a month. Wrong! AdSense can fund your lifestyle - if you get it right.

2. Junk Sites Get Junk Income But just because it’s possible for a site to make a lot of money with AdSense, it doesn’t mean that any site can make a lot of money with AdSense. Your site must have good content that can attract users on its own merit. There are a lot of different strategies available for producing good content for your site. You’ll need to use them if you want to create the sort of site that makes real money.

3. Your Choice Of Ads Matter One of the first things that you’ll have to do when you join AdSense is to pick the types of ads you want to display. Success relies on following certain principles that encourage users to click and persuades them that they’ve got a reason to do so. You’ll need to know those principles.

4. You Can Influence The Ads You Receive! Here’s a little known AdSense secret: you do have some control over the ads that get served on your site. That control isn’t unlimited - but it is worth exercising. It’s also a little complicated but it’s got a lot do with keyword hotspots located in each Web page. (I explain it all in my book, Google AdSense Secrets.) That’s definitely something you need to know!

5. Your Stats Are Your Best Friend The stats you get with your AdSense account might look complicated and well, a bit dull… but they’re packed with useful information that can have a massive effect on your revenues. To make real money with AdSense, you need to know what your stats are telling, what they’re not telling you and where you can find out more.

There’s a lot you need to know to make serious money with AdSense. If you’re missing that information, you’re just throwing money away.

For more Google AdSense tips, visit AdSense Secrets v4.0

Copyright © 2005 Joel Comm. All rights reserved