Making Money with a Blog

There are plenty of ways in which to start making money with a blog that you have hosted and out there in the world wide web.

So I've decided to put together this high level guide that outline the basic ways of doing this in terms that are easy to understand.

Attracting traffic is the be all and end all of making money with a blog, but as we have already pointed out in earlier posts, it's not just any old traffic that will do for the task. Social traffic is fine if you want people to read your blog, but if you want money, you need search engine traffic.

To get this you'll need to know how to get ranked in the index and ranked well. This all boils down to SEO, as I'll talked about further down the page, so no need to go there just yet.

Attracting Traffic

Now, if your goal is to actually make some real money online with your blog, you will need a different strategy, as we have already explained in earlier posts. To put it simply to save you backtracking, you need targeted, organic search traffic turning up to your blog.

This is the kind of traffic that are searching for something and if they can find your blog in the search engine they're looking in, then as long as you have what they want, they will have had a good experience in visiting your blog.making money with a blog

This is what the search engines want and by providing this, you and your blog will remain in their good books.

Of course, those very same visitors may be looking for more information than you can provide them with, in which case they are very likely to click out of your blog and go elsewhere to find that additional information.

Now you can either allow them to hit the back button and leave your page and not make you a dime, or you can place some ads in their line of sight, so that they may see something more interesting than the back button and click on the ad. Which makes you some money.

That's the basic principle of making money with PPC ads or even some affiliate ads that provide the visitor with the answers they are looking for.

How to Promote Your Blog

Having covered the basic principles of making money with a blog, I will carry that theme on in some way by looking at how to promote your blog in order to get that traffic turning up on your doorstep that will make you the money you want while you work at home.

One of the most important ways of getting your blog noticed by the blogging community is to make use of social networking sites such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc. This is fine of you genuinely want people top come and read your blog and you can make a lot of friends in these places.

Social blogging is perfect for social bloggers to get themselves and their blogs out there in the blogosphere and get noticed. It won't make you any money however!

But if your goal is only to get yourself notices, then using the social scene online is the perfect way to do this. If you want money, you're going to need to use different tactics to attract the organic search traffic that you'll need to your blog for you to make money.

There are several ways of doing this, and most Internet marketers already know them. They all consist of generating links back to your blog and the main ones are:

There are some other methods of obtaining backlinks to your blog that will help to get it ranked in the search engines, although these methods are frowned upon. They are sometimes called black hat methods of SEO and are underhand and cheating ways of getting to the top.

They consist of buying links outright from site owners who have authority sites and using link farms. If you get caught using either of these methods, you will probably get your site into all sorts of trouble, although that doesn't seem to stop the big fish in this pond.

If you look at the top sites in Google's index for terms such as credit cards, finance, loans, make money, weight loss etc, they all have one thing in common. They bought their way to the top.

The top credit card sites have very little in the way of relevant content, so you can safely assume that Google does not place the amount of relevance on that medium as all the so-called content gurus would have you believe. So if the top sites in that niche have hardly any content, how did they get to the top?

They bought a ton of links and continue to buy them in order to stay there.

The true Internet entrepreneurs that make the most money do not slave away writing in blogs or doing article marketing. They sit on a beach somewhere buying links. So do you feel deflated?

Well you should because they are not playing by the rules yet they are making all the money and no one, not Google, not other site owners, no one is stopping them.

So read into that what you will. The lesson in this post I guess is don't bother going after the really big niches like those I just listed above. Instead, there are thousands of easier niches to target where you do not have to take such drastic action in order to dominate them.

You can write good content, do article marketing and get links naturally and using methods that do not upset the search engines' quality guidelines, but instead work with them and get your site ranked legitimately.

How to Rank Your Blog in the Search Engines with SEO

Part of knowing how to make money online from your blogging adventure means looking at learning, understanding and using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank your blog in the search engines.

This is of major importance to making money with PPC or affiliate marketing, CPA or lead generation etc. It is also the most powerful way to make money online from any source, be it affiliate products, your own products, eBay, advertising or any other means.

SEO is usually divided into two main sections:

  1. On-site SEO
  2. Off-site SEO

On-site SEO deals with the things that you can do directly with your blog to optimise it for the search engines and you may have limited success in small, uncompetitive niches employing these methods.

Off-site SEO involves obtaining backlinks to your blog from other blogs and websites on the Internet. Of the two, off-site SEO will be responsible for about 90% of your blog's search engine placement success.

For this reason, you should really devote 90% of your time on off-site SEO, or gathering backlinks to your blog from as many different sources as possible. These include guest posting and outreach, article submissions, directory submissions, blog comments, forum posts, social bookmarks as well as outright asking for links from other blog owners.

The last one will usually provide the strongest links, but are often the hardest to obtain.

Backlink Creation

Another way is top create your own backlinks to your blog by building supporting sites such as Hub pages, web 2.0 blogs on other free hosting platforms etc where you can control the links that come to your main blog or money site.

Some care is needed with this method so you don't appear to be obviously creating what is known as a link farm, as this pastime is frowned upon by the search engines. So don't overdo it and link sensibly!

A really great way to get links to your blog is to join up with a paid link acquisition scheme that gives you access to a huge community of bloggers who all know the powerful benefit of giving and receiving links. This is basically buying links, which is frowned upon by Google but you have to do what you have to do in order to compete with others that are doing exactly that to rank.

On-site SEO is potentially far more complicated and simply not worth going too deeply into for its small percentage of overall benefit. Obvious things you can do is to write posts that are optimised for the keywords you are targeting.

This includes using those keywords in the content, in the post titles, in the blog's main title and in the blog URL. This is also necessary to get the best and most relevant Adsense ads to be served on your blog.

So there is SEO in a nutshell. If you need more detailed information on SEO, there are some good blogs hosted right here on the subject as well as checking out the forum.

What is Domain Authority?

What is domain authority and how does it relate to your blog?

Well, first of all domain authority is something that is given to a domain by Google (and other search engines) that has shown itself to be trustworthy, is informative and relevant to its niche or main keywords and provides the visitor with what is considered by the search engines as a good user experience.

How it relates to your particular site is an ongoing project that you will need to undertake with the aim to achieve good domain authority for your site. I'll explain how that can happen.

For a domain to achieve authority status in the first place, it needs to have some age behind it to begin with and then must provide its visitors with a worthwhile experience while they are on its pages.

So say a person was looking up information on men's wigs and they found the page here amongst the Bake Radio Stations. When they landed on that page and they were provided with a good, informative and well written article on the subject, they would go away happy that they'd found what they were looking for.

This is a good user experience and one which Google wants people who use its index to get when they click on sites listed in there. If, on the other hand they landed on a page that contained little or no useful information buried inside a page full of ads, that would be a bad user experience and one that would reflect badly on Google's index.

A site like that would not be welcome in their index and they are working constantly to eradicate those types of sites.

So getting back to domain authority, if your site can provide lots of well written, informative articles targeted to either the main keywords that are relevant to the domain, or to the categories set up in a more general themed domain, then Google will look upon that site as being exactly what they want to be found in their index.

Add to the mix other established and well respected websites that regard your site as worthwhile and relevant to their own linking to your articles and your domain is then deemed by Google as being an authority in its niche.

This is what I'm working toward with Bake Radio as I create more Stations with good, original, informative and relevant articles. The more I create, the bigger the site becomes and the more likely that other site owners will link to my articles because they are worthwhile and useful.

It's a necessary process for any site owner who wants their site to grow and become established as an authority on whatever subject or subjects they choose.

Less is More: Keyword Density

I want to talk on the subject of keyword density in posts or articles, as this is something that is not always very well understood. That lack of understanding can either cause some unwanted results as far as search engine ranking goes or it can lead to problems with ad targeting if you're using PPC such as Adsense on your blog.

When you write an article on a certain subject, whatever it may be, as long as you are knowledgeable about that subject and are able to write naturally and normally, then chances are you are going to include your main keyword in that article a number of times as well as a number of related long tail keywords.

Most people do this without even thinking about it and that's what a well written and natural article will and should usually look like. To readers, it should flow naturally and be interesting and informative and relevant to the topic, while to the search engine and PPC ad bots that will crawl the article, it should tell them enough about it for them to do their job and report back to base that the article needs to be included in its relevant section of the search index and relevant ads should be served to its visitors.

In an ideal world, that's how it should go. But more often than not, it doesn't!

To write articles that are optimized for both search results indexing and ad serving, you need to be aware of what you are doing as far as including your keywords goes. It means you need a little of that on-page SEO knowledge to really get the best from your article if you want search visitors to find it and if you want them to be served relevant ads for them to take action with should they so desire.

It comes down to the density of your keywords in your article. If that density s too low, you may not get ranked well and your ads may be non-relevant.

If that density is too high, you could face a penalty certainly from Google who may view your article as what is termed "keyword stuffed" which they view as a technique used by spammers to try and game the system to get ranked higher. It doesn't work but that still doesn't stop noobs from trying it, with often disastrous results.

So what is the best or optimum density that you should aim for? Well, you should ensure that your main keyword appears at least 1% of the time but absolutely no more than 2%.

If your keyword is a two-word or multiple-word keyword, then you need to make sure that the density is correct for the multiple and not for the single individual words. As an example, if your post was about "make money online", then if that three word keyword shows up once every 60 words, then you have a 5% density and you may want to consider reducing it.

For a two word keyword, the same density would be achieved if it showed up once every 40 words.

The optimum then, is around the 1-2% density mark and that is sufficient to get the right ads to fire up (assuming your keyword also exists in the post title) and you won't incur a penalty from Google and your page will be one further step toward being well optimized.

Creating Useful Websites and Blogs

Some time ago, you may or may not have read articles about the problems some bloggers are having with blogs they have built on blogspot that too closely mimic other related blogs. This can happen when using a common theme and making an ugly, simple blog that is designed for maximum PPC clicks.

If not, the explanation here will probably start ringing alarm bells.

Blogger (blogspot.com) crack down on these sites that look like they are designed for nothing other than to harvest PPC clicks. Which they are.

The same treatment will undoubtedly filter out to the rest of the blogging community on whatever platform you care to choose. Only it may not be the blog host that starts deleting blogs, but Google themselves who might start de-indexing blogs they believe are MFA (made for adsense).

It is a sensible move by them as while there were only a few blogs of this nature a couple of years ago, now there are hundreds, or maybe even thousands littering the SERPs and not delivering what Google want their index to deliver, which is quality, useful and interesting sites/blogs. The message then is pretty clear - if you want to rank in the SERPs then you had better provide a site/blog that is worthwhile to the visitor and provides a good visitor experience.

Content Rules the Waves

So back we go to the "Content is King" wave that has never really gone away. But now you have to be a little more careful. There is content and there is content. The content Google wants to see on the sites it has ranking in its index is originally written, interesting, informative or entertaining and above all else, readable!

So if you like to spin articles with a software spinner, or publish badly rewritten PLR or other forms of literary gobbledygook, then don't expect to advance in the SERPs especially for even moderately competitive keywords because the Google police are watching and they have a bog stick to whack you with if they catch you putting junk content on a site that also displays Adsense ads.

Even if you don't display Adsense on your site, if your content is garbage, while you may rank well using strong backlinks, you are exposing yourself to visual inspections that may result in a "slap" where you lose rankings because your site is not worthy of a place high in the SERPs. If you want to be sure of anything, then write solid, original and useful content for your site.

Make your site something that you would be happy to land on and read yourself. Make it good enough so that if your granny read it she would be impressed and want to return. Don't leave this stuff to chance.

Ignore this if you want. I don't really care what you do with your sites. In fact, from my perspective i actually want you to create junk sites so that my well written, useful and well presented sites will have less competition breathing down their necks from junk spun sites.

For me, I will continue to make the effort to make this site decent enough to pass a visual test.



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