Blog For Profit

Archive for the ‘Start Blogging’ Category

I know it sounds tedious to back up all your blogs files, but it’s neccessary and it doesn’t have to be difficult as there are loads of easy ways to back up all your blogs files and more importantly the database where all the posts are stored.

I was the one who set up a blog ready to make money in under an hour. It’s a Halloween themed blog which I could have added Adsense to, but instead I put up some ebooks in the Halloween Niche for sale to monetise the blog for me. So here’s my step by step account of how I setup a new blog in under an hour.

I am an Internet marketer who loves WordPress. I have come to discover that there are lots of ways to make money online using the power of WordPress..

Often I get asked how to get started making money online. In the past, I had different answers I would give depending on the person.Today though, I tell nearly everyone the same thing.The first thing you should do is to learn how to use the power of WordPress.

This simple content management system is your gateway to online profits.

You don’t have to learn the programming or developing stuff. Just learn the basics of how to use it.

Once you know WordPress, the opportunities are everywhere. Whether you decide to help businesses get a website or you decide to build affiliate or AdSense based websites, WordPress is your solution.

When I take on consulting clients who are trying to get started online, the first thing we will do is brainstorm various ways to start an online business depending on their skill set and focus.

Over the past few years of doing this, I have built an extensive list of ideas for how to make money with WordPress. Now, for the first time ever, I am publicly releasing my WordPress profit blueprints in one resource.

50+ Money-Making Blueprints for Success…

Most people have NO Idea how POWERFUL WordPress is for making money online.

It has never been easier to compete with the big boys to make professional-looking, highly profitable websites than it is today. WordPress has really evened the playing field.

In WordPress Cash Machines, you will learn over 50 different methods of making money with WordPress.

Here are a few of the concepts you will learn:

• Learn How to Cash-in on the Local Real Estate Business with WordPress
• How to Profit from Online Coupon Shoppers and the Groupon Phenomenon
• How to Use WordPress to Build Local Business Review Sites
• How to Make Money Combining WordPress with Facebook
• How to Create Income-Producing User-Submitted Content Sites
• Generate Income with WordPress and Amazon and Other Affiliate Feeds!
• Make Your Own Niche Social Networking Site with WordPress.
• Two Different Ways to Make Money with WordPress and Food!
• Plus Many More Exciting and Profit-Driven Strategies

A Little Something for Everyone…

Just about every type of Internet Marketer will pickup an idea or two in WordPress Cash Machines. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete newbie or a seasoned marketer, you will pickup new ideas in this book.

There are blueprints for success not matter what you focus on. We’ve got topics covered for:

• Affiliate Marketers – Learn Several Surefire Ways to Generate Affiliate Income with WP
• AdSense Marketers – Many unique ways to make AdSense income generating WordPress sites.
• Product Creators - How to leverage WordPress to promote AND Sell Your Products.
• WordPress Experts - Exciting Ways to Cash-in On Your WordPress Expertise
• Offline Marketers - Ideas on How to Profit from WordPress with Your Offline Customers!

If you can’t find a new money making idea, then simply ask for your money back. You are fully covered under a 60-day, NO QUESTIONS ASKED money back guarantee.

Buy Now for just $4.99

	Product	Description	Price
	Wordpress Cash Machines	Start making money with wordpress blogs	$4.99

Total Price: $0

Blogging For Profit The Simple Way – Don’t Hang around

Despite the fact that blogs may well have got the most news coverage a few years ago, they are still as popular as ever. When they first started, they were typically used as a manner of online diary. In spite of this, it didn’t take long for people to commence blogging for profit. And, once more and more people realized there was money to be made with blogs, they took off to a whole new level. Today, it’s a safe notion that most blogs are started in the hopes that they will earn money. With that in mind, here some tips to help you make more money with your blog.

1. Treat it like a business. The intent of every business is to make money. Therefore, if you want your blog to be profitable, then you have to run it like a business. That doesn’t necessitate you have to hire employees, or anything like that, but instead that you need to take it seriously, and be willing to invest some time, money and resources to make it successful.

2. Have a plan. You might as well start off on the right foot. The vast majority of successful businesses began with a written business plan. Try to be as precise as you can. How will you generate income? Who are your visitors? What percentage are likely to click on ads or buy something? How will you get traffic to your blog? What is your marketing plan? These are only a small amount of of the questions you should answer.

3. Free isn’t always best. Blogger.com and WordPress.com have made it simple for any person to start a blog for free. There is nothing incorrect with using free blog services to learn about blogging. In spite of this, you will have less control over your blog if you host it on those sites. Yes, it’s free of charge, but they can also take off your blog without any warning, and that’s not good for blogging for profit.

4. Invest a little. Okay, so going the free route isn’t good for business, but what’s the other alternative? The good news is that you don’t have to pay anything to Blogger or WordPress to benefit from their blogging platforms. Nevertheless, you should set them up on your own domain name and web hosting. You should be able to get a new domain name for under $10 per year, and suitable web hosting can be found for as little as $10 per month. That’s almost nothing when compared to starting a conventional business.

5. Monetize it. There are two main ways people use to generate income from their blogs. The first is by selling affiliate products. This is where you get a percentage of each transaction for selling somebody else’s product. You will get a exclusive link that identifies you as the seller, so they distinguish you made the sale. The second way of monetization is Google AdSense. You sign up for their program, then add a fragment of code to your blog. They will then add targeted adverts, and you receive money every time one of your visitors clicks on an advert.

Video blogging or vlogging has many advantages over ordinary text-based blogging, and it is small wonder that this relatively new technology is gaining followers all over the World. Vlogs are very effective at grabbing the attention of web surfers, and people are a lot more likely to become excited about the dynamic content of a vlog than they are to find a written posting very stimulating. The more enthusiastic visitors are about a site, the quicker the word of mouth spreads, and the more traffic the site will get.

As you’d expect, there are also some disadvantages to video blogging as well. web hosting a v-log requires more server space than a traditional written blog, which can make it harder to get started. It takes more time to record, process and upload a video file than it does to dash off a quick bit of text, which means that running and updating a video blog can be quite a bit of additional work. Also, web surfers frequently grow frustrated with the longer loading times of the files on many video blogs. Whether you take the option to run a video blog or not depends on what type of subject matter you want to cover, and how much time and effort you can devote to vlogging. Before you make the decision to start a vlog, consider if there is an easier way for you to get your message across.

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 web hosting company to completely disappear, but more often is a hardware failure at the server. When this happens most decent web hosting companies will have backups, the cheaper ones won’t. Even the best web 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.

Many webmasters are still running static sites, a lot of them making money from Adsense as their site gets visitors to its pages. Some of them must be wondering whether a blog may be a better option than the static site they run especially for their adsense revenue. Here is a quick list of five reasons that using blog software such as WordPress is advantageous over a static site.

1. A blog automatically updates all the links on your site if you decide to add an extra section or page. A hard wired static site can use PHP or other includes to update the links across the whole site, but it then takes a re-organisation of the menu to fit it all in. A blog will update all the pages, and menus instantly with no further work on the part of the webmaster.
2. Posting to a blog is as quick and easy, as easy as filling in a form. You don’t need to look at html tags, and images can be added as you write. A static site will require an html editor or knowledge of HTMl tags to write your new post or update.
3. Plugins, wordpress has a great plugin system which means you can add functionality across your site with minimal effort. Almost anything you’d want to add to a site is available as a WordPress plugin, from forms to social bookmarking, adverts to search engine optimisations, all are available to upload and activate.
4. Changing the look and feel of a website can be a hit and miss affair. Especially if the site has a few hundred pages to change. Search and replace software can be used on static sites to replace chunks of html across the whole site, but a blog just needs a new theme. When you theme your blog, the whole site changes with just a click of a button and you don’t need to upload the entire set of html pages each time. Don’t like it, change it back. Try doing that with a static site.
5. Search engines love blogs. Because the whole raison d’etre of a search engine is finding and cataloging content for people to find, a regularly updated blog will have the search engines coming around to check regularly for new posts. You can also choose whether your blog displays a static page at the front or one which changes as you add new posts. Which one do you think will bring the search engines back over and over again? The one which shows the latest post looks like a new page each time, fresh and ready to be re-indexed.

So there are some good reasons to blog rather than run a static site, what do you think isn’t it time you started blogging?

in easy pocket money blogging part one we discussed web 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 web 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.

   Because there are so many blogs and web sites about blogs on the internet, it can be tough to distinguish your blogging web site from all of the others. Whether you are starting up a new web site aimed at bloggers or whether you are looking to make your existing blogging site more distinctive, the key to building and maintaining a site that will capture the interest and attention of the blogging community is finding your niche. If you can fill a unique need in a way that no other web site does, you’ll be able to build a lasting readership among web surfers.

Once you have discovered a niche, you will still have a lot to do, but finding your place in the blogosphere is the place to begin.   Every great blogging web site starts with a great idea, and you can’t build a successful site that will last without one.

There are many great sites aimed at today’s bloggers, and competition for the attention of this growing demographic is fierce. To make your blogging web site stand out from the pack, you will need to offer something that no other site is currently offering, or you will need to do the same thing that an already popular site does but in a more impressive or valuable way.  

One way to discover an ideal model for your blogging web site is to look at the sites that have successfully captured a blogging audience already to determine if you can appropriate some of their strategies to help realize your vision. Of course, you will also need to add a unique flair to your project in order to stand apart from your competition. Many people agree that the web sites that do the best in today’s market are the sites that have the most personality. The fiercely individual surfers who are bloggers are a demographic that responds especially strongly to personality, so consider how you can give your site a unique and attractive feeling by lending your own voice and sensibility to your site’s design and content.  

Once you have a great idea for your site, have pinpointed a special niche that you are well equipped to fill, and have infused the site with personality, the next step is figuring out how to get the word out to bloggers. In the long run, a great idea just isn’t enough to propel your blogging web site to success. You will need to draft a smart and realistic marketing plan in order to draw readers to your site. Once you hook a blogger, your great content will keep them coming back, but it is vital to get that first glance or your site won’t have a chance to shine.