Niche Blogging For Profit

Blogging can be a fun and profitable way to work from home. However it is important to know what you’re doing in order to maximize your chances of a successful business. By remembering to write regularly, write interesting and original content, optimize your blog for search engines and most importantly market and promote every change you get, you can soon have a popular and profitable blog. The purpose of this post is to walk you through the four stages of blog building in order to show you what to do and what not to do as a beginner blogger.

The worst thing you can do as a blogger is to write sporadically instead of on a schedule. Determine how often you want to write and stick to that schedule. Some blog experts believe that until your blog has 50 posts you should write everyday. I tend to think that unless you plan to keep posting daily, I wouldn’t get your readers expecting it. I shoot for every other day but my posts aren’t always consistent. However if you can manage to keep your schedule, it will make your blog more appealing. Of course it’s not enough to just write on a regular basis, you should also make sure your posts are interesting and informative.

There is a lot of information out there on the net. With all this competition it’s no surprise that only the best and brightest blogs rise to the top. Every time you write a post, be as thorough as possible. Imagine you know nothing about the topic. Ask what you would need to and want to know. Include as much information as possible without being confusing. Also important is to keep your posts interesting. Nothing makes a reader close a browser quicker than a boring, drawn out post. The simplest way to write a post that people will want to read is to write as if you were talking to a friend – within reason of course. Obviously leave out profanity and obscene comments as well as any offensive or inappropriate language. Other than that write in a friendly and informal manner that your readers will find appealing. Once you’ve got posts that people will want to read, it is time to focus on getting the attention of the search engines.

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, remain the most popular way that people online find information. That makes it important to rank high on them. While there are tricks to make it easier for the search engines to find you and more attractive so the search engines will give you a good rank, usually it is a matter of time before you’ll appear near the first few pages of search. The first trick is to pick a niche, or topic, that doesn’t have a lot of competition and isn’t well covered online. Next you should try to include one or more “key phrases” in your posts that are likely search phrases. For example, if you blog is about themes for sweet sixteen parties, the phrases “sweet sixteen” and “party themes” would be key phrases for your blog and would appear in many of your posts. One of the difficulties of search engines optimization is that the search engines change the rules so often that something that may have worked well last month may not work at all today. Writing good high-quality content never goes out of style so my advice is to rely on that. Of course marketing your blog is also crucial to bringing in traffic.

There are many great and free ways to market your blog. Article marketing is one of the most popular and my personal favorite. Sites like EzineArticles and Associated Content can bring dozens of new visitors to your blog every day. Commenting on related blogs is also a free way to bring in traffic. Just be sure that your comments are relevant and appropriate or your comment will probably end up being deleted. Finally exchanging links with other related blogs can drive traffic to your blog. And these are only three of the completely free marketing ideas for your blog.

These four tips will help you start the journey to a successful blog. Remember, don’t write sporadically; don’t write uninteresting posts; do maximize your blog for search engines; do market your blog extensively. That sums up blogging for beginners.

Blogging is fun and interesting to do but it is also a pretty good way to make money. Follows are the five best jobs for bloggers looking to make a living online.

1. Niche Blogging - Of course niche blogging is at the top of my list. Done well, niche blogging can eventually give you a passive income (meaning you no longer need to do any work) of $5,000 or more a month. Not bad for not having to do anything. Niche blogging is setting up relatively basic blogs about one very specific subject in order inform the people in that particular niche. Money is made through advertising, affiliate sales and personal product sales. Niche blogging is really a numbers game. Generally speaking, niche blogs don’t make a ton of money on their own. You can expect each blog (if built correctly) to make an average $5 – $40 a day depending on the niche and the traffic to the blog. Some may make more but those figures have been my experience. Obviously, in order to make a decent living, you will have to create several niche blogs. Fortunately ofter the original setup, niche blogs don’t require much maintenance. For an example of a niche blog, check out www.yardsaletips.net
2. Authority Blogging- Authority blogging is like niche blogging in that it talks about a certain topic to a certain niche of people. Authority bloggers also make their money through advertising, affiliate and personal product sales. The difference is that rather than writing a bunch of niche articles and basically “finishing” the blog quickly, authority bloggers run an on-going blog with regular updates (new posts) every day, week, or month. They are more work than niche blogs, it isn’t a passive income because you have to continue working on the blog. But if you love your topic (and most authority bloggers do) it seems less like work and more like talking to a group of friends who like the same thing you do. Both niche and authority bloggers could be considered Internet marketers.
3. Guest Blogger- Being a guest blogger usually requires you to be an expert in a certain subject or uniquely qualified to guest blog – if you want to get paid anyway. If you feel you know a lot about a subject, enough to qualify you as a niche expert, or you’ve earned a degree in a certain field, or you’ve work at a particular job for a long period of time, you could be a guest blogger. It is probably a good idea to start by writing articles and creating a lens on Squidoo in order to establish yourself as an expert in your subject. Eventually you can place a small ad on your lens or personal blog offering your services as a guest blogger.
4. Moderator for big-time blogs - Some really big blogs can have thousands of posts and receive thousands of comments each day. These blogs need someone (or someones) to moderate these comments and approve or disapprove of them. You may also be required to respond to comments in a way appropriate to the tone of the blog. While these jobs aren’t big money-makers, it is easy to do and don’t require much effort or skill. This would be a good place to get a start and learn how a successful blog works from the inside out. Later on, if you start your own blog you’ll have a good knowledge of what to do and what not to do.
5. Membership Blogs - If you really want to get involved in a big money-maker and you can pull it off, a membership blog is the way to go. A membership blog is basically an authority blog with extensive and extraordinary content, perhaps with unique features that you charge your readers a monthly (or bimonthly or semiannually) fee for access to. If you can drum up enough readers willing to pay your membership fee time and time again (called residual income) you’re on your way to financial freedom.

Blogging sounds like so much fun that you can’t wait to start. All you have to do is write you thoughts online and people will read them? You can even make money this way? Seriously?

Seriously. So you go out and set up your very own blog. Maybe it’s a personal blog or a blog about something you’re interested in. Great. You pick out an awesome theme and upload your best profile pic. Wonderful. And then that ‘add new post’ page stares back at you. All of a sudden you forget all of those witty antedotes and funny stories and you can’t think of a thing to write. For the beginner blogger, here are five how-tos that will help break blogger’s block.

1. Choose a topic you really love talking about – You know that thing you and your friends spend hours chatting about? Or that subject you’re always searching online for more information about?
2. Don’t overthink it too much - Remember, people are coming to your blog to read the real you, not some fake “writer’s voice”. Blogs are meant to be less formal and more friendly so don’t get too caught up in what you say and how you say it.
3. Save a draft - Sometimes when you spend a good deal of time working on something you begin to lose perspective. In much the same way as when you say the same word over and over again and it begins to lose meaning. If you start to feel like nothing sounds just right, save the post to draft and come back to it later when your view has had a chance to replenish.
4. Read other blogs – Sometimes it helps to read other blogs to get a new perspective. You can choose to read other blogs that are related to the topic of your blog or you can just read any other blog that you like. The point is to get some fresh ideas and possibly a different direction to go in.
5. You can always rely on links - If worse comes to worst you can always fall back on what I call a link post. You either write a little bit about another blog, site or page and then link to it. Once your blog has been going for a while you can write a “favorite posts” post and link back to your own posts. It’s a win-win situation.

Blogging is popular (almost everyone has one), fun and possibly profitable. But before you get into blogging, all the themes, plug-ins, widgets and other lingo can be overwhelming. So if you’re wondering how do I start blogging, this article is for you.

Choose a topic

If you’re planning to blog for fun, you can choose any subject that appeals to you – one that you’re passionate  and hopefully knowledgeable about.

If you’re looking to make money with a blog there is an entire process you should go through. You can read more about that here. Odds are if your find something interesting, there are other people out there who will too (provided your interest isn’t the world record for longest nose hair)

Find a hosting company

There are plenty of free blog hosting companies that are very good. Blogger.com is my favorite – easy to use, plenty of modules, and the ability to place ads. WordPress.com is the free version of the popular WordPress.org hosting. If you want to use your own domain name (www.yourpick.com) you will need to pay for hosting. I strongly recommend using WordPress blogs hosted by HostGator. They are affordable (about 10 bucks a month) loaded with options, you can host as many domains are you want with one account and their customer service is excellent; quick, friendly and helpful.

Set Up Your Theme And Format

Once you’ve picked your hosting option and set up anything you need to set up, comes the fun part – choosing your theme and format. Blogger.com has limited number of themes (about 12) but some are very nice and should suffice for a basic personal or professional blog.

WordPress.org has hundreds of themes and formats to choose from. Two, three, four, or even five columns in every color and background you can imagine. These themes are made by other people – not employees of WordPress – and submitted to the theme catalog. Not all of the themes have all the bugs worked out yet so you might need to pick a backup. The free partner of WordPress has more than 60 themes to choose from and many of the user-friendly aspects of WordPress.org.

Start Blogging/Posting

That’s about it for setting up! All that’s left to do is start writing. For your first post you’ll probably want to introduce yourself and explain a little about what your blog is about. After that the sky is the limit. Let your creative juices flow and have lots of fun. Happy Blogging!

Blogging is not only fun – you can make money with it too. In fact there are many different ways to make money with your blog. Here I talk about just four of the many.

Advertising

Ever since Google came out with their Adsense program, many companies have created similar contextual advertising systems. Simply put you insert a small bit of code on your blog that will display ads related to the content of your blog page. Each time a visitor to your blog clicks on one of these ads, you’ll get paid a certain amount. This amount usually isn’t a lot – between .01 and 2 or 3 dollars on average.

If you really want to make good money with advertising, you’re going to want to sell advertsiing space on your blog directly to advertisers. Once your blog has achieved a following, it should be easy to sell space on your blog. Many well know blogs make hundreds a month just by selling advertising.

Product Sales

Selling affiliate products is another way you can use your blog to make money. Search for your niche plus the words “affilliate product” to find products. Write a post or a page about the product to give your readers an idea of the benefits. If you sell quality items and don’t push by selling, selling, selling all the time – your readers will be more likely to buy.

Pay Per Review

There are companies online that will pay you to review their product, blog, site, etc. Of course how much you get paid depends on how much traffic your blog gets. Keep in mind that both the product’s creator and your readers want an honest review. Don’t feel that because you’re getting paid for the review that it has to be all positive. The review should be thorough and complete, perhaps with screenshots if appropriate.

Membership Blogs

If your blog is suited to a very specific niche and provides quality information, maybe that is unavailable elsewhere or teaches a valuable skill, you could consider running a membership blog where your readers pay a certain amount of money to become a member of your blog. This isn’t the easiest way to make money but if you can pull it off, you’re looking at a great source of residual income.

Blogs have been around almost as long as the Internet itself. Even before blogging as an activity became popular, people created online communities. At some point in the 1990s, the concept of “Threads”, or online conversations that went back and forth, became popular.

During the late 90s through the turn of the century, people began using the Internet to keep web diaries or journals. This was the beginning of the basic blog. A student at Swarthmore College, Justin Hall, is generally credited as being one of the first bloggers – in 1994

Blogs were quite popular at this time with the “tech geek” crowd but hadn’t really taken off yet.

By 2001, blogging was becoming a full-fledged fad. Books, videos and tutorials on blogging began to pop up. Within the next three years, celebrities, politicians and companies slowly began to use blogs as a way to reach people and get their message out.

Today, blogs are used for just about everything. It seems like you’re no one unless someone is reading your blog. Companies have blogs to announce product changes. People have blogs to express their feelings about just about anything. Bloggers have blogs to inform and sell. And I have a blog just to let you know all this about blogging.

Every family gathering is the same for me. Eventually someone asks me what I do for a living usually by saying something like “so-and-so said you work on the computer.” I respond by saying that I’m a blogger and an Internet Marketer. I pull out a business card as if to prove both those jobs actually exist. Then I brace myself for the next question which I know is coming, “How do you make money at that?”

How to explain that money trickles in from various sources – advertising, affiliate sales, freelance writing, product sales, paid reviews, and others? Explaining what I do to someone who doesn’t know a lot about computers and bloggers is a lot like trying to teach someone a foreign language within a fifteen minute conversation.

Have you ever had this same awkward situation? If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky but prepare for the day when some well-meaning but blogging-illiterate person asks you what you do for a living.

What is a blog? – For complete beginners

A blog is both very different and very similar from a regular static website. While the content is created in much the same way, blogs are more fluid to allow items to be placed at the webmasters whim and allows the visitors to respond to the writer’s content. This is beneficial for both sides as well as being quite fun. As a side note you can tell people that technically blog is short for web log and was originally intended mostly as an online journal.

Once people discovered blogs they gravitated that way because blogs were easy to create and powerful for gaining attention and traffic. Basically blogs were a dream come true for people looking to spread information over the Internet.

Since income can begin to dripping in slowly for awhile before you start to see any real income, people will ask you what it is that you do and how do you make money at it? There are several ways to make money with blogs. Selling other people’s products, selling your own products, selling advertising, using contextual ads like Google Adsense and selling your reviews to people looking for marketing.

Finally you will get the most annoying and I find the most insulting question: “Is that a real job?” Yes it is a real job. It is similar to crossing a copywriter and a journalist. I spend hours every week researching and reading. I also spend hours writing and rewriting articles before typing them into my computer and putting then where they need to go. And that’s just the pleasant part of my job. Forget about SEO, networking, marketing, article marketing, link exchanges and keeping up with Google’s frequently changing policies.

There are many different ways to market your home business whether online or off. Most important to remember is not to limit yourself to marketing Internet businesses to online marketing and “real world” business to “real world” advertising.

While many brick and mortar businesses know enough to have websites and possibly online shopping carts, few online businesses expand their marketing plan to include offline advertising.

 Business cards are easy and inexpensive to create. VistaPrints offers cards free of cost – you pay only for shipping. Pass these cards out to people you meet at parties, gatherings, work related events and to people you meet throughout your regularly scheduled day.

Brochures (services) or Catalogs (products) – Depending on what your blogs/sites sell you can display brochures or catalogs in local stores.

Flyers – Similar to brochures except flyers are usually one sheet and contain less information than brochures. You can pass out flyers or leave them in doorways to get people to visit your sites/blogs.

Magnetic Signs – Several business supply stores offer custom signs and letters that are magnetized and can be stuck right to the sides or back of your vehicle. You should keep the wording simple and short but that takes advantage of the most space for your money.

As an Internet Marketer you have to take advantage of every traffic source available. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your customer base ends at your desktop.

When working at home it is important to not let routine tasks suck up too much of your valuable time. Niche  bloggers need to focus as much time on writing and marketing as possible. Answering emails, surfing, commenting on other blogs and networking should be of secondary priority. While those activities are necessary for success, the majority of your time should be devoted to the most important tasks for niche blogging success.

Email – Set aside 15-30 minutes once a day to deal with email. Resist the urge to check email and shut off any automatic email notification.

Surfing - Also known as research. You’ll probably need an hour or so each day but you really should need much more research than that.

Networking- Sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Warrior Forum, while helpful for building a reputation, are also major time-suckers. Update or post only when you have something worth saying of when introducing a new niche blog.

While working at home can be freeing it can also be distracting and tiring. It can also be frustrating to friends and family who think you’ve disappeared because you’re working 10-12 hours a day. There are some things you can do (and some that you can avoid) to keep the good parts of working from home and reduce the bad parts.

1. Schedule one time for personal phone calls. There were many days when I couldn’t get anything done all day because it would seem like every friend and relative would pick that day to call me. If someone calls outside your “phone time” politely explain that you are working and will have to call them back.
2. Don’t over obligate yourself. When people hear ‘work-at-home’ what they really hear is ‘home all day’. So expect to get tons of calls asking you to volunteer, babysit, go out shopping, supervise field trips, etc.,etc. Teach yourself to say no- just like you would if you worked outside the home. Your office hours are your prosperity.
3. Don’t be too rigidly set in your schedule. Things will come up, especially if you are also a parent. Repairmen will need to come fix things, appointments may interfere, kids will surely cause distractions. It happens. Don’t be too hard on yourself and consider it a sick day.
4. Not keeping good business and financial files. Records are essential to knowing how your business is doing and make tax time much less stressful.
5. Spend the day in your pajamas. While this might be an attractive proposition to some, I guarantee you will be more productive if you get up and get dressed as if you were working outside the home.
6. Not setting up “work hours” or at least a stop time to avoid overwhelming yourself. When a company is all yours the pull to work on it as much as possible can be irresistible. Unfortunately you end up neglecting everyone and everything else. And eventually you will end up burning out.
7. Investing money you don’t have. Again it can be tempting to sink as much money as possible into your “baby”. Always work to find frugal ways to accomplish your goals without risking the quality of your work or company.