Four step guide to blogging
Blogging is a popular way to generate income working at home. The essence of this business model: select a topic, write about it, cover it properly and collect advertising dollars.
As with any other business it takes time to learn and improve your skills in blogging, but it can be very rewarding. In this post I will cover the steps required to start and grow your blogging business.
1. Niche or topic selection. What are you going to write about? Here you should keep in mind both parties: yourself (you should be familiar with the topic) and the readers (they should find something in your blog, otherwise they will not read it). This should help you with your topic research:
• Alexa Top 100
• Google Answers: see what people pay for
• AssociatePrograms.com: check new programs
• Check stats at http://www.clickz.com/stats/
• Websites for sale: topics, traffic & revenue details
• WordTracker.com reports: what people search
• Check forum sections: need services/ will buy
• eBay.com What’s Hot
• Shopping.com consumer demand index; MySimon top searches (1000)
• 7Search.com top paying keywords
• Investigate affiliate networks
• Study high paying keyword lists
• Amazon: hot selling books (topics) and products
• ClickBank.com: subscribe to Affiliate Alert
• Find niche forums: explore FAQ, user’s signatures in posts
• Yahoo! Buzz Index, AOL Search: hot searches monthly, Lycos hot 50
• Google Zeitgeist
• Picks.yahoo.com/picks
• Del.icio.us (most popular tags), Slashdot.com, Digg.com: angles/ buzz/ trends
• Blog Buzz Index (search for stories rapidly propagating through blogs): www.technorati.com/pop/news/, www.blogpulse.com/trends.html
• Feedtser top 500: www.top500.feedster.com/
• Bloglines.com
2. Get a cheap domain name and hosting for your blog.
• I would recommend to check www.godaddy.com and www.moniker.com to acquire a domain name and hosting
• Mosr popular and free blogging software: WordPress, MovableType, Blogger.com, TypePad, bBlog, Nucleus
3. Blog promotion – the hardest part. You need to build a stream of traffic to your blog that will help earn your adv dollars. Your blog is new so do not expect much free traffic from the top search engine – Google (due to its ‘sandbox’ effect). You should focus on other traffic techniques. Hopefully this will help:
• PPC (pay-per-click search engines)
• Del.icio.us & other social networking websites – add your blog posts weekly
• Much good content
• Many quality links
• Viral marketing
• Press releases. Find angles monthly.
• Tests for $ (buy links; sites; expired domains; directory listings)
• e-Mail marketing
• Adv in e-zines
• Focus on getting FREE traffic from Yahoo!, MSN, other SE
• Return, loyal visitors: give a number of reasons to come back
• Adv at the related forums (where it is allowed): in your signature – the link to your blog
• Banner adv
• Classifieds (incl. Craigslist).
• Award sites in your niche (top 100 sites, top 10 sites, etc)
• Mega traffic mega quick: try to get your posts featured on the 1st page of www.bored.com, www.digg.com, www.slashdot.org, www.shoutwire.com, www.ebaumsworld.com, www.fark.com)
• Alexa top 100 most trafficked sites: need to discover ways to get your tiny traffic stream from them:
• Flickr: submit best images with the description & a link to your blog
• YouTube (see above)
• Wikipedia
• MySpace (friends generation, bulletins)
4. Monetization. What are the ways to collect money for all your efforts? It depends on the topic, but some combination of the below methods is a good approach:
• CPC – cost per click (top players: Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Chitika)
• CPA – cost per action (top players: Commision Junction, LinkShare, Shareasale, ClickBank)
• CPM – cost per impression (top players: TribalFusion, Casale, FastClick, BurstMedia)
• Link sales (top players: AdBrite, linkworth.com, linkadage.com, textlinkbrokers.com, text-link-ads.com)
5. An extra step (bonus): best resources that properly cover all described steps and help to be current on the development of blogosphere:
Problogger.net
Performancing.com
Just research each step and make blogging model a nice income generation business to enjoy.
[tag]blogging, blog, home businesss, home job, home income, self-employment, affiliate income, blog software, affiliate programs, website traffic, website marketing, promotion[/tag]
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