Making Money Blogging Basics for Beginners

There are literally thousands of people who are making money blogging right at this very moment, and hundreds of new blogs are becoming profitable every day. Yes, YOU can make money blogging, and it’s really not quite as difficult as you might think. Yeah, I will admit, it’s not the easiest thing in the world, but anyone can do it if they are willing to put in the time and effort necessary.

The first thing to remember if you are started a new blog is to stay away from the “Make Money Online” (MMO) niche. It is very hard to make money blogging in the MMO niche. There are many reasons for that but I won’t go into them right now other than to say the competition is fierce, profits are low, and it’s simply not worth the effort! Just take my word for it, you are FAR better off building a blog in a different niche.

There are thousands of easier niches you can tap in to and make money blogging about them. All you have to do is use a free keyword tool and do a little research. Start with things you are interested in or know a lot about, and go from there. You should be able to find a good niche pretty quickly. The more it gets searched for, the better. However, volume of searches is not the only thing you need to take into consideration. You are looking for niches that have a fairly large market with money they are willing to spend, and not a lot of competition.

You can find the first one with the Google keyword planner. It will tell you the approximate monthly search volume for any keyword phrase and how strong the advertiser competition is, and a bunch of other useful information. If there is a lot of advertiser competition then it’s usually a good indicator that the niche has profit potential.

Then, you need to see how much competition there is for that keyword phrase. An easy way to do that is to go to Google and search for it in quotes. The results will come up with sites that are using that exact phrase on their sites. You can see that number at the top of the search results page. You do want some competition, but not a ton.

Once you find a good niche then all you have to do is set up your blog and start blogging (writing). WordPress and Blogger are popular blogging platforms that are free and very easy to use. After you get some blog posts written and published you should start getting inbound links (backlinks). This can be done through article marketing, link exchanges, dofollow blog commenting, buying links on related sites, guest blogging, networking, site directories, social bookmarking, forums and many other ways. Be sure to learn about SEO before you jump into this!

Updating your blog often with quality content and getting relevant inbound links will increase your search engine rankings and start bringing in a lot of traffic to your blog. Once you have the traffic, you can put up some affiliate links, do reviews, sell advertising spots, publish Adsense, or any of the other methods there are for making money from a blog.

That’s pretty much all there is to making money blogging. Of course, this post is a very summed up and simplified guide for how you can make money blogging for free. But it is the general basics of how you do it. Use my tips as a guide and do some research for a more in-depth explanation of anything you don’t understand. You could have your niche picked and blog set up in a matter of hours, and be making money from it very soon.

Healthy Habits for Becoming a Successful Blogger

These days it seems like just about everyone has a blog, and thanks to content management systems like WordPress, it is easier than ever to get started blogging. Most new bloggers and internet marketers have the misguided idea that building a successful blog is easy, especially if you are already an expert on a specific niche. However, the vast majority of new blogs receive very little traffic and getting it can actually be quite difficult. In fact, building a following to your blog and making money from them is the hardest part of being a blogger.

In the past it was relatively easy to start a blog and build a successful internet business around it fairly quickly. Those days are long gone! There are simply too many blogs out there in pretty much every niche imaginable for everyone to attract an audience without a lot of time and hard work. Professional bloggers these days must work at lot harder to get readers, keep them coming back regularly, and earn money off them.

Getting visitors and building a successful blog depends greatly on how well you write, what kind of content you are producing, the internet marketing strategies you use, and what type of blogger you are. A unique, entertaining and informative writing style will certainly go a long way towards getting readers and keeping them coming back for more. However, that’s not the only way you can build a loyal following. There are some healthy habits that will help any blogger keep readers interested and content fresh.

You will quickly discover that members of the blogosphere do not like copycats and posers. Dishonest bloggers who plagiarize or rehash other people’s posts will get found out sooner or later, so it’s very important to be original. If even one reader figures out that you’re not legitimate they will tell others and it will ruin your entire online reputation before you get anywhere. That’s why the most successful bloggers are those who are honest and open.

Along the same lines of being honest, the best bloggers will also admit when they are wrong and don’t pretend to know everything. They often give credit to other pro bloggers and internet marketing experts when it is due. Newbie’s tend to worry that linking to other bloggers in their niche or crediting them some other way is bad because it is helping their competition. But top bloggers know that building a successful blogging business is all about networking and creating strong relationships by sharing information with others and linking to them.

Another great habit that successful bloggers get into, which also relates to transparency and honesty, is doing legitimate product reviews. If you have ever tried to find reviews about something then you have probably come across many blog posts with fake reviews designed to do nothing more than gain affiliate commissions for the owner. Those are not real reviews and they are easy to spot after a while.

People appreciate when a blog review is fair and balanced. That means giving the positives as well as the negatives about the product or service. Otherwise it will soon become clear that the reviews are for your own benefit in the form of earning affiliate sales, rather than helping your readers make an informed decision.

Being honest with your readers goes a very long way towards build up a great reputation on the internet, which in turn builds your following and increases your earnings. You need to form these healthy habits if you want to be a successful blogger in the long run.

Are Pictures Monetizable (Part 2)? Find out in Future of Publishing!

Last week’s Future of Publishing was the first part of an interview dedicated to how to monetize pictures. This week’s episode is part 2 of that interview:

Highlights:

• Banner ads don’t make as much money as they used to…
• A large part of this is because today’s internet users are blind to banner ads…
• The solution is to embed ads within the content, like monetized images and in-content links…

Future of Publishing brought to you by BlogWorld and sponsored by VigLink.

Are pictures monetizable? Find out in this Future of Publishing episode!

Traditionally, there have been two avenues of monetization: Monetizing space nearby the content, and monetizing outside of the content. With the advent of in-content links and image monetization, publishers now have the ability to make money within the content itself. In this Future of Publishing episode, VigLink CEO Oliver Roup and Influence People CEO Murray Newlands explore how to monetize images with Rey Flemings and Chas Edwards.

Highlights

• Almost all images are monetizable…
• But they must be well-directed toward their intended audience…
• Thus, image monetization, like most other forms of advertising, works well on niche sites…

Blogger Relations: Learn how to market to other bloggers in Future of Publishing

IntMktr.com is proud to be an Official Media Partner with Future of Publishing, an American TV show hosted by Murray Newlands. In this week’s episode, Murray interviews Darren Rowse of Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. Darren talks about blogger relations and how good relationships with other bloggers can be pretty profitable. What he says might shock you:

Highlights:

• Make friends with other bloggers and online marketers…
• And market products to these friends.
• Make sure you’re only selling them good products or else you’ll ruin the relationship.