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You have probably heard a lot about blogging as a way to earn lots and lots of money, have you? Well, that’s basically true. Blogging indeed can help you earn some money. However, you have to take note that earning money through mere blogging is not going to be as easy as just writing about yourself.
If you want to use blogging as a way to earn cash, you have to realize that a “business” or a “profit earning” blog is highly different from just a “personal” blog. If you want to make blogging your career, you should take blogging a bit more seriously and spend more time for it. If blogging is going to be one of your monetary resources, you will have to strategize your every action in your online platform. Below are ten techniques that you can apply:
1. Sell advertising
The simplest way to make money out of your blog is by allotting a space for advertisements. These advertisement spaces are usually rented out on a per month basis. You can define an area dedicated to button banners under the “Sponsors” area or an area for text links on the sidebar. This can be done using widgets on your blog’s sidebar. You can also create spaces for header banners, inline Post banners, Blog Rolls and Feed Footer Area (Feed Footer WordPress Plugin). I’m using OIO Publisher WordPress Plugin to manage all aspects of my advertisement zones including payment tracking, advertisers, advertisement state and many more. With the pro version, you can gain access to their sales platform and all their API Services. I find this tool to be quite indispensable.
The easiest form of selling context sensitive inline Post advertisements is through the use of Google Adsense. Basically, AdSense choose a set of ads which are related to your niche or to the topic of your blog. When Google posts ads in your blog, your pay will be based on the number of advertisement clicks that your readers will make. Thus, your blog should have a lot of visitors in your blog. If you adapt the following techniques, make sure that you have enough web traffic to generate a lot of ad clicks. Other similar advertisement networks include Kontera ContentLinks, Text Links Ads and Adbrite.
2. Blog for business
You will have to be very careful about your blog posts. If you want to make your blog profitable, you will have to post content that matters to other people. Identify your niche based on what people want to read about. If you don’t have any idea, check keyword research services such as the Google Zeitgeist or the Yahoo! Buzz Index.
3. Use keywords
Posting articles that are rich in keywords will definitely help you increase your blog’s web traffic. These keywords refer to those words that most internet surfers use when they look for articles using major search engines. The more often they appear in your posts, the more likely the search engines will detect your blog. However, note that you should avoid bombarding your blog with the same keyword all throughout. The recommended keyword density is 5 percent. Here are some free keyword research tools – Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool , NicheBot and Trellian
In addition to defining the keywords as Tags in your Post, you would also need to define the HTML Meta Description and Meta Keywords as well. The must-have WordPress Plugin for this purpose is the “All in One SEO Pack”. This plugin allows you to easily define the description and keywords for the Post and will automatically generate the HTML Meta Tags for you.
4. Post on a regular basis
Updating your blog regularly will help you retain your visitors and readers. The recommended blog posting frequency is at least once a day. However, if you don’t have the time, you can opt to post two or three times a week, with each post comprising of not less than 1000 words. Search engine spiders can easily track an online site which has fresh content on a regular basis. However, take note of the fact that you should not exceed an average of 2 posts everyday, especially if you have RSS subscription
5. Respond to your comments
Comments are the lifeblood of a blog. To earn money, you have to make sure that you have a lot of readers. In order to retain your visitors and eventually attract more of them, you will have to pay extra attention to their comments on your blog. Never ignore a comment. No matter what message they leave you, regardless of how short it may be, you always have to respond.
If you can, respond to each of your commenter via e-mail. In composing the mail, do not forget to include hyperlinks to your blog or website. Note that every time you reply to their comments, you have to mention them by name and you will have to respond in a highly professional manner. A WordPress Plugin that would help you in this area is “Comment Relish”. It will simply send a short ‘thank you’ relishing type message to users when your readers first comment on your weblog. This would help to increase your readership and RSS subscription rate.
In addition, you won’t want to go without the “Subscribe to Comments” WordPress plugin that allows your readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
One way to encourage more comments and discussions is to reward the top Commentators by having their names displayed on the sidebar linked to their home blog if they provided one. The “Show Top Commentators” WordPress Widget does the job nicely. Another method to attract more comments would be to implement the “CommentLuv” WordPress Plugin which will automatically link to the Commentator’s last blog post. This would not only saves time and build link equity for the Commentator, it would also provides an incentive for the Commentator to give a more constructive comment, thereby resulting in increased referred traffic to their blog.
6. Post comments in major blogs related to your niche
Find out who are the major contenders of your niche. You can find the influential bloggers in your niche using Technorati. Visit their blogs and read their posts. If you can relate to their posts and you have something intelligent to say, do post a comment. Make sure that your comment will have links to your own blog. By posting sensible comments, you will not only attract attention to your own blog, you will also have the chance to attract more traffic to your site.
There’s a free desktop tool called “Comment Kahuna” that will help you search blog comments related to your niche keywords that have the highest Pagerank. It also has the capability to filter the result sets even further by Blog Platform and the type of Comment Plugin installed. For instance, if you are only interested in WordPress type blogs and blogs that have CommentLuv plugin installed, the tool would narrow your serach results down to that level. I’ve found this tool to be of a great time saver, and all you’ve to do to download it is to opt in for their email subscription. A small price to pay for so much to be gained.
7. Avail of multiple blog directories
To make money out of your blogging, popularize your blog. Make sure that it is listed in not just a single blog directory- but in various directories. These days, there are many blog directories that would be happy to include your blog site in their list, for free. You will have to fill up a form or send them an email. Make it a point to avail of many blog directories for as long as they are provided for free.
8. Utilize email subscriptions
Aside from using RSS newsfeeds and the like, your site should offer email subscriptions. Keep in mind that not every internet surfer understands what newsfeeds are and how do they work. However, it is more probable that most readers know how to subscribe to newsletters which are sent via email. To apply this technique to your blog, you can make use of Feedburner (Feedburner FeedSmith WordPress Plugin)
Also, provide an incentive to your readers for subscribing to your newsletters by offering a free ebook upon signing up for it. Some of the stated benefits of using newsletters are that it help to promote your posts; improve your blog;build community; drive sales and increase blog readership.
So, what kind of tool would you use to manage the newsletters ? The most popular commercially available newsletter management service is Aweber. What I find attractive about this service is that it has a pretty high level email deliverability according to general concensus, though I’ve never used it myself. This is important for any email campaign as bounced emails marked as spam are a very common everyday occurrence. With Aweber, you can also choose between a plain text or html, and it comes with a good selection of email templates. Webmasters would like the email analytic capabilities of Aweber, it keeps track of the links the user clicked on where the user go next on your blog. There are other free email list programs around, the best of the bunch is Phplist. I’ve found this program to be quite comparable in features to some of the paid services. However, it does not come with support and all the bells and whistles of a paid service like Aweber.
9. Ping news aggregators
Your daily update of your blog will be a lot more effective if you make use of pinging services. Basically, these are websites that would like to monitor your blog updates. Every time you publish a new blog post, you will just have to let them know that you have updated your blog. Ping them. Once you do, expect that the whole World Wide Web will know about it in no time. Among the most popular ping services are Technorati, Blogdigger and Ping-O-Matic.
10. Offer sponsored reviews
Aside from making money by generating traffic, you can also profit from writing sponsored posts on a wide selection of topics. You can check sponsored review marketplaces and look for companies that are willing to pay for blog reviews about their products and services. If you have no idea on how this kind of online marketing works, you better check major networks that offer this kind of service. These include PayPerPost, Sponsored Reviews, ReviewMe, BlogVertise, and Smorty.
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