Who couldn’t use a little extra income each month in these difficult economic times? You’ve probably heard that you can make money blogging, in fact you have probably been bombarded by email offers shouting out how to make thousands overnight simply by blogging. Fortunately you can tell a scam when you see one and you haven’t fallen into that marketers’ trap of buying program after program looking for the one that actually works.
The real shame of it all is that you can make money blogging and thousands are already doing it. You’re certainly not going to make it overnight but you can build up a nice stream of revenue to help out with the household expenses if you’re willing to put a little effort into it. In fact you can make thousands (not overnight) if you invest the time and energy. You actually could blog your way out of your daytime gig.
But to make any money at all you have to understand the basics of the blogging business.
Pick A Niche
Obviously you are going to need a subject to write about and picking the correct one is the difference between success and failure. The ultimate objective is to get traffic to your site, develop a relationship with the visitor, and then offer something for sale. Selecting the right, low competition niche is critical in achieving that objective.
So how do you do that?
Well there are some general rules to keep in mind. An old direct marketing saying says that a marketer (and that’s what you are going to become) needs to find a starving crowd, find out what they are starving for, and then feed it to them.
Another qualifier is to find a crowd whose need is on their mind at least once a day and that they are emotionally invested in. For example if a person has hypertension they probably think about it everyday as they take their daily pills. They are emotionally invested because this disease could potentially kill them. What they are starving for is a way to cure the condition or at least end the side effects of the medication.
Niches that address health, relationships or wealth are loaded with these kinds of crowds.
Finding a crowd is easy. Finding a crowd that is starving for something takes a bit more work.
One way to find out what that crowd is hungry for is to take a look at what they are buying. You can do this online by going to Amazon and looking at the best selling items in a particular category. Or you can piggyback on the thousands of dollars that others have spent in market research and see what they are selling. For example a trip to the website for “Dummies” books will give you a list of titles that they offer. If those titles weren’t selling they wouldn’t be offered.
Once you’ve picked a niche, try to make it as focused as possible. For example if you pick trading stocks then start refining it down like day trading to day trading futures. Focusing on day trading futures eliminates a great deal of competition and speaks to an audience who has a specific interest. By the way, the keyword phrase “day trading futures” has about 9000 searches a month.
Pick A Product
Once you’ve selected a niche then you need something to sell and that’s the easy part. Almost every manufacturer sells through affiliates and that includes big names like Wal Mart, Macy’s and literally thousands of others. Using the above example you could do a Google search for day trading related products by entering “day trading affiliate”. You’ll get some junk but you’ll also get some gems. Select three or four and sign up.
Own Your Blog
There are obviously free blogging platforms like Blogspot.com, Weebley.com and a host of 2.0 networks like HubSpot, Squidoo and hundreds of others. However, if you want to blog for money buy your own domain name and host it your self.
There are two major reasons to make this modest investment. First of all it is your site and you are not subject to anybody’s terms and conditions. If you are on a free site, and they decide that your niche as a group is spamming, they can close your blog. With your own domain you can do as you like and don’t have to worry about being slapped down by anybody.
Secondly the domain name itself is key to good search engine optimization. Using the day trading example you would try to get daytradingfutures.com or.org or.net.
Content Is King
You can have the hottest niche and the most popular product but if your content doesn’t have value you’ll fail. Don’t put up fluff just to put something up. The content has to be grammatically correct and inform or entertain the reader. If you have a difficult time writing then contract it out. There are numerous freelance sites that have qualified writers at reasonable cost.
Take Action
Once you have this blog up you have to keep adding quality content and that’s one of the beauties of using the free blog platform WordPress for your blog. If you take a weekend and write 15 or 20 entries, you can load them into WordPress and schedule them to publish over a specified amount of time. This then gives the impression of “natural” growth which Google loves and also gives you a break from writing for nearly three weeks.
