Yes is the short answer, it is possible.
Today many people are making money from their own personal blogs, and if you want to make money blogging then here are a few simple steps to help you get started.
Step 1 – Sign up for a blogging account
There are a couple of options here, you can sign up for a free blog online, the two I would recommend are Wordpress.com and Blogger.com. The second option is to install a blog on your own domain name, i.e. www.yourwebsitename.com/blog and I highly recommend Wordpress Download as your preferred option here due to the vast themes and plugins available for your blog.
I would recommend you sign up to Heart Internet Hosting as they offer a one click install of Wordpress on your domain name if you host with them, this saves all the database and server setup that some newbies may find difficult when setting up a Wordpress blog on their own domain name
Step 2 – Find a niche
Finding a niche is where most bloggers fail. It’s important that you find a niche that has high search volumes and low quality competition. My advice is to try and rank highly for long tail keywords and not mass traffic keywords if you are just starting out. Here are my tips to help you find a profitable niche that you have a realistic chance of ranking highly for:
1) Use the Google keyword tool to research your chosen topic. Try and stay away from mass volume keywords, instead concentrate on long tail key phrases that get an average number of searches. Here is an example, “holiday” gets 16,000,000 searches a month in Google, but is very generic and very competitive, and the chances of your blog post ranking highly for this keyword are very slim. Instead try a keyword such as “holiday self catering cottages” which gets about 12,000 searches a month and has lower competition, you stand a much better chance of ranking on the first page for this keyword.
So now you’ve found a keyword which you would like to target with your first blog post, now I suggest you do a little research into the competition. Head over to Google and type your targeted keyword into the search engine in this “keyword” format and do a search. Make a note of the domain names of the top5 results and also the number of results returned by Google
Then pop over to Yahoo.com and do a search for the following: linkdomain:www.websitename.com, website name is where you put the URL of a competitor.
The results will show you all the websites that are linking to your competitor, after you’ve done a little bit of research on the competition and the quality of the websites linking to them, you will get an idea of how competitive your chosen topic is.
Some key tips:
- Find a key phrase rather than a single keyword
- Use the Google keyword tool to find a key phrase that your interested in and has an good number of searches per month
- Anything less than 1,000,000 returned results in Google can be considered less competitive (in my opinion)
- Do a linkdomain:www.competitorname.com search in Yahoo and try and find a website with less than 200-500 incoming links, the quality of those links is also important, if they are all from low page rank 0-2 sites with no real relevance or authority then you can consider them to be less competitive
When all the above factors come into place you may have found a good key phrase to write your first blog post on.
I’ve just very quickly touched on finding a niche, this article is meant to give you an overview not an in depth guide to finding a niche. There are several keyword research tools available and I will blog about these at a later date. But for now, if you are a newbie, the above tricks will help you greatly.
Step 3 – Let’s Make Money Blogging
Ok, you’ve found a niche key phrase, now we need to write a blog.
Content in king, remember that. High quality content and lots of it will make your blog profitable. Make sure you are offering content of value. Over 750 words in length with a main keyword density of about 3-5 percent (in my opinion)
If you are using Wordpress then download the All in one SEO pack and install the plugin.
Make sure you create a unique title tag that contains your key phrase at least once, same with the description tag, a good description with your key phrase prominent, but don’t over do it. Keyword tag again should contain the main key phrase first and then other related keywords after separated by a comma.
The content needs to be good, and if you need to copy content from other sources on the web then re-write it so it’s not duplicated or use a free article spinner such as Jetspinner to re-write the content so it’s unique to you. Google does not like duplicate content, so copy and pasting from another website is not a good idea for newbie bloggers.
Tags – in Wordpress you can assign tags to your post, make sure these tags are related to you key phrase and content, I usually assign 3-5 tags for every post.
Permalinks – make sure your permalink settings in Wordpress are set to %postname% , this enables SEO friendly URLs to be generated for your blog post. Example www.yourblog.com/self-catering-holiday-cottages, make sure your permalink contains your target key phrase (very important)
Some key tips:
- Write good quality original content, over 750 words in length and a target keyword density of 3-5 percent
- Make sure your title, description and keyword meta tags are all relevant to your content
- If using Wordpress add 3-5 tags that are relevant to your target key phrase
- Make sure your blog post URL contains your key phrase
- Do not duplicate content, instead use a free article spinner to re-write duplicated content so it is unique to you
Well done, you’ve written a good quality post of high quality original content based on a single key phrase that has low competition and high search volumes. Now let’s make money blogging.
So how do you make money from my blog?
There are several methods of making money from your blog; I’m just going to touch on a few of the main ones briefly here:
Google Adsense
Placing Google Adsense on your blog is a great place to start. It’s free to sign up for an account with Google, you place the Adsense code on your blog and Google will show relevant ad’s on your blog, when your users click on the ad’s you will get a small commission from Google. Now I need to write a whole new post just on using Adsense effectively, but for now here are some basics to get you started:
- Make the Adsense blocks blend into your page, make the link colour the same as the link colours on your posts. Make the border the same colour as our page background and make the url link a light shade of grey
- Place the Adsense code in the body of your post, and stay away from the obvious sizes in the obvious advert places
Here is a great article on using Adsense effectively
Affiliate Marketing
Another method to enable you to make money blogging is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is selling other peoples products online and getting a commission for your efforts. I recommend you research in Google the following affiliate marketing programs, clickbank and commission junction. Once signed up you will be able to find products that are relevant to you niche and place banner adverts and links to the products within your blog. When people click through from your banner or link, and purchase a product, you will be paid a commission for the sale, and with some products this commission can be as high as 75% of the sale value.
Again this article is meant to be a quick overview for the newbie blogger, please take the time to research affiliate marketing and I recommend the following website to start learning – http://www.affiliatetips.com
Sell your advert space
Ok your blog is now getting traffic, your Adsense code is in place and you’re affiliating with a few products relevant to your key phrase. A good method to quickly get income from your blog is to sell your advert space. Your blog is about “self catering holiday cottages” well get on the phone or write a few emails and offer a monthly fee for featuring their accommodation on your blog, its can be in the form of an article or banners and you can charge whatever you want. Install the Max Banner Ads plugin for Wordpress and start making money immediately from selling ad-space and writing reviews that are relevant to your blog.
These are just 3 methods of making money for a newbie on your blog. It’s possible to earn a steady income from these 3 methods alone once you start getting traffic.
Getting your blog found – traffic is key
You may have the best content, the most relevant adverts and the best affiliate products, but without traffic you will not get a single penny in income.
We have already structured our blog well to perform highly on search engines, the title tags are good, the content is good and our tags are all relevant. Wordpress code is very SEO friendly as standard and we have added the SEO plugins to ensure our blog post is well optimised, now all we need to ensure our blog ranks highly are links, and lots of them.
Getting links to your blog is where most people struggle to make any serious impact with their blog. After every post in your blog, you must go and find several people to link to your post.
Here are some methods to gain links:
- Go to Yahoo and type linkdomain:www.yourcompetition.com and see who is linking to your competition, do this for the top 5 URLS in Google that appear for your chosen key phrase and see who is linking to them, visit all the websites and see if you can get a link to your blog on those websites also. Type a link suggestion template that you can easily send out to people suggesting your link for inclusion on their website and why it may be relevant to their readers. Offer them a link back in return if needed.
- Try and only link from websites that are relevant to your blog post, relevancy is key when acquiring links, the higher the page rank of the website the more important that link becomes to your campaign.
- Use social book marketing sites such as Digg.com to publish your blog post. I’ve have seen some of my posts appear in Google hours after adding my article to Digg. Some good social book marking websites are; Twitter, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious, Propeller and the list goes on, if you submit your blog post to all these after you’ve made each post you will see your blog post indexed very quickly.
- Use article submission websites and social network websites to submit articles relevant to your blog post that link back to your blog. Use a free article spinner such as Jetspinner to create several versions on your blog post that you can then submit to article submission websites. Make sure your submitted articles are over 40% different from your blog post, Google does not like duplicate content. You can quickly submit your article to several websites that have good authority with Google and your blog will be quickly indexed. Some of my favourites are Hubpages.com, Zimbo, Wikispaces, Blogspot, Wet Paint, Msn Spaces, Go Articles, Ezine Articles and Amazines. Get submitting different articles that are all relevant to your blog and link back to your blog in every article.
- Use blog comment posting to gain links quickly. This is a neat trick, and can work wonders in getting back-links to your blog quickly. Find relevant blogs and leave comments with your blog URL. Don’t spam people’s blogs, instead write comments that are useful and relevant to your blog, leave your URL in the comment signature if possible and get comment posting. Use www.commenthunt.com to find blogs that DOFOLLOW links and start posting relevant comments that link back to your blog. You can also use Google Blog Search to find relevant blogs.
Well I hope that enough to get your started with link building for your blog, again this is just an overview for you to understand how to quickly build links to your blog and how to gain traffic and good search engine rankings quickly.
Google Analytics
You need to monitor all your hard work, make sure you install Google Analytics so you can keep track of where your traffic is coming from.
Overview
Right guys and girls, you can now start to make money blogging, you’ve got all the tools and knowledge, but it will not happen overnight. Making money from blogging is not easy. It’s a numbers game and it will not happen overnight. You need to be posting 2-3 articles a day in your spare time and making sure you following them up by getting a few links from relevant website to each blog post. Then after a few months you will have about 60 posts on your blog, and a lot of relevant incoming links, then you will see a jump in traffic, Adsense revenue and affiliate revenue. After a year you will have 500-600 posts on your blog, and hopefully you will have a good blog with good content that people are linking to, you will have good traffic and your blog will be generating a good income for you from Adsense, affiliate marketing and your own sold advertising articles and ad-space.
It will not happen over night, but if you stick to the formula above and post 2-3 posts a day for a few months and follow each post up as above, you will start to earn an income from your blog, it won’t be much but after 6-12 months you will start to see a good income just from blogging.
I hope this post has helped some people make money from blogging, and understand how to quickly generated links and quality content that will make their blog a success.
Until next time,
Ciao
Tags: blogging money, earn money from blogging, how to make money blogging, make money blogging, make money from blogging
