Blog For Profit

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.

Easy Link Exchanging With your Wordpress Blogs

If you didn’t already know it, one thing which can help your blog get more traffic is backlinks. Backlinks are any link which points to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site the better, not just in the hope someone will click on the link from someone elses site, but also for Search Engine rankings.

Search engines (some of the major ones anyway) use the amount of links going to a site as part of the algorithm for deciding its position. That oversimplifies it somewhat as they also take into account many other factors but for the benefit of brevity and staying on topic we’ll just say that more backlinks will help your ranking in the search engines.

There are lots of ways to get links back to your site, such as writing and submitting articles, which is highly recommended as it gives you one way inbound links which count more towards your score. Another way which can help is by exchanging links with other site owners.

As the phrase “link exchange” implies, you will be exchanging a link for a link. So in other words you find someone with a similar site to yours, link to them and they in turn put a link on their site back to yours. With a blog this can seem a difficult and time consuming occupation, as you’d need to post a new page for your link exchange partners, and edit it each time you add a new link.

Wordpress comes with a built in link system called a Blogroll, which shows the links you add to it on your site. Obviously this could become unsightly and take up a lot of space in the sidebar as you start getting more and more link exchanges made. Because Wordpress blogs are easily upgraded to perform new tasks with “plugins” it isn’t as hard as it may seem to deal with link exchanges using the Blogroll.

You can download the Blogroll Page Plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogroll-links which turns your blogroll sidebar widget into a full blown links page. Each time you add a link to your blogroll it will be added to the page. It even allows categories to be used to segregate the links however you wish.

Increase your sites visibility start your link exchange process today, it’s easy now you know how to make Wordpress Blogroll work for you.

Article by Douglas Titchmarsh (c)