Browsing Category: "Blogging"
Motivating Yourself to Build an Online Business that Can Buy Your Freedom
What are you going to be doing over the next year or two that has a significant impact on your life?
Would you like to build a business, one that helps you to buy your freedom, such that you no longer have to work at a regular job?
What if you could work on such a business in your spare time, and that business was paying you $1,000/month at the end of two years?
What if you quit your day job, put only 20 hours each week into your business, and then grew it to $2,000/month in income?
What would your life be like if you could earn several thousand dollars per month with only an investment of an hour or two each day?
I can tell you what your life would be like, because I have achieved the legendary four hour work week.
Life is awesome when you own a lean online business. It is almost like being on a permanent vacation, where you only work on something when it gets you excited to do so.
That may sound like a completely impossible fantasy, but it is actually not that complicated to achieve.
While the plan to build passive income is relatively simple, that does not mean it is easy to execute. There is a difference. However, let me show you just how simple it can be to achieve the four hour week and thus buy your freedom back from society.
A simple business plan
Create a single website. Just one.
Oh, I know…. conventional wisdom dictates that everyone needs to diversify, lest they risk losing their online income that they have worked so hard to achieve.
Let me tell you a secret though: Building authority and link juice for a website is tough.
It’s so tough, in fact, that I strongly urge you to only try to do it once. You’ll understand why when we look at the promotional strategy.
I would also urge you to choose a topic for your website in which:
* You have at least some working knowledge or expertise.
* The products or services being advertised around your topic cost over $100.
In other words, choose a profitable topic for your website that you can write about with real authority.
You can determine profitability by looking at existing websites based on your topic. What are they advertising? How much does it cost? If the cost is very low, move on and find another topic.
If you have a team of writers working for you, by all means, start several websites. But if you are going to be the only one publishing content on your website, I would urge you to just start a single site and put all of your energy into it.
A simple content strategy
Create articles for your website that are:
* Detailed, in-depth, and insightful.
* Original, with a depth of knowledge that goes beyond what is already available on the web.
* Useful to the audience in a specific way. Consider including action items that the reader can implement directly.
Thoroughly research the internet regarding your content and identify the absolute best information currently available. Your job is to create a website that is superior to what you find.
Each article you publish should explore slightly different ideas and concepts regarding your topic. Each article should target unique long tail keyword phrases in the post title.
Quality of content must remain extremely high. That said, volume matters as well, and publishing three articles daily is ideal.
Balancing volume and quality is tough. Publishing one quality article per day will result in slow growth. Publishing three per day will result in exciting growth within a year or two.
A simple promotional strategy
Build relationships with other website owners in your niche, with the goal of landing a guest post some day.
That’s it. That is the entire promotional strategy. Very difficult to do in high volume, but take your time and keep plugging away at it. Websites need time to age anyway.
There are dozens of ways to manufacture cheap links and give your website a quick boost in the search engines. All of these “cheap” methods are losing their effectiveness over time because the search engines are always improving at measuring real trust and authority.
The simple way to promote your website is to build real trust and authority. You can do that by building real relationships and creating amazing content.
Your promotional strategy hinges on having premium content. No one wants to link to a poor quality website. No one wants to publish a guest post that is anything less than premium quality. Therefore, an important part of your promotional effort is to focus on creating amazing content–both on and off-site.
Simple but not easy
I built a profitable website and sold it for six figures by:
* Building a single website in a profitable niche.
* Publishing lots of quality content–around 1,500 articles total.
* Promoted the site with real relationship building and guest posting.
Looking back, it was dead simple. I published helpful articles every day and did a bit of promotional work. The promotional work was probably only five percent of the effort, while creating the website itself was ninety five percent.
Anyone can do this with almost zero overhead and only a consistent time investment on their part. The question is, who will do it, given that it is so difficult?
What about you? Are you motivated to purchase your freedom by building a simple internet business?
Ways to Make Money Blogging
The internet is full of opportunities to both make and save money from home! Whether you are getting a good deal on a product that you were wanting to buy or you are a stay at home mom wanting supplemental income from a work at home job, the internet can save and make your family loads of cash.
Here are some ways you can make money online and use the income to better your life in whatever ways you see fit:
* Become a paid SEO blogger
Blogging isn’t easy but it’s not too complicated either, and a lot of companies will pay pretty good money for people to write articles for them and get them published online. They do this primarily because the articles have backlinks to the company’s site, which helps the company show up high on search engine results and gives them targeted traffic. And since so many people use search engines today for almost all of their business research needs but ignore the ads on the top (I bet even more so lately since Google recently has been putting so many ads at the top that over half the page space is ads on small screens and mobile devices). This means that it is really valuable for companies to show up high on Google’s organic results because more people will click on those than will click on the Adwords ads that are shaded a different color.
* Start your own blogging company
The real way to make money in almost any field is to build connections and start your own company. This is especially true in the search engine optimization (SEO) world where companies will pay a premium for good SEO work. If you hire other people who are good writers, those writers benefit because they may not have the connections themselves to make money. You benefit because you profit from their work. Even if you only profit $20/hour/worker, if you hire 20 employees then you make $400/hour, and that’s excluding work you do on your own with your own two hands.
* Get paid to write PR articles
You can get paid to post articles for public relations purposes. These articles will be read by actual humans and, while still containing links to your product, will not be there for the primary purpose of bumping you up on Google. Instead, the articles will be read by actual people who will be interested in them and you will make money this way.
* Build an Adsense website/blog
Google Adsense provides an easy way for marketing people who want to make money online. What you need to do is first create a niche site. These sites should be geared toward something that is commonly advertised online, such as health, fitness, and financial services products like trading. Then, you need to write articles that should be at least 500 words for these websites and write lots of them.
Make sure the article is good for ads:
In order to make money off Google Adsense, your site needs to produce ads that are relevant to things people search for. There are complex professional ways that you can figure out what keywords work, but the basic ways involve using the Google Adsense keyword tool and also using common sense. For example, consider two articles: One about “making money blogging” and one about “monetizing your blog.” The one about monetization will draw professional bloggers because they use the word “monetize” while the one about making money will draw people who do not yet blog but are looking to get into blogging.
How to write the articles:
The articles should use keywords for terms for which people have bought a lot of ads and one term should be in the title. That term should also be used in the first paragraph, especially the first 200 words, one or two times (it’s okay to break up the term as long as the words are close to each other). The keywords need to be for terms for which there are ads, so make sure to do a Google search and see that there are at least 10 or so ads for the term you’re using a lot in your article.
Those are some great ways you can use the internet to make money blogging and writing. It’s not rocket science but it’s not super easy either. You will need to do a lot of writing every day and be creative. If you can do that then you can definitely earn money online!
Monetizing Your Blog with Two Great Ways
There are a lot of good bloggers with highly focused niches, but the authors still don’t know how to make money off of them. Almost everybody these days knows how to use Adsense ads, but there are other ways that can be used in conjunction with Adsense that you can use to make money off your website.
I’ve been in online marketing for years and I can share two great ways that you can make money off of your blog:
1) Monetizing your text
Companies like INTENTclick, Kontera, and Viglinks work in a pretty unique way: They create advertising links on text that is on your blog. When somebody’s mouse goes over one of these links, a pop-up shows up which they can then click on.
Some of the older in-text monetization companies like Infolinks only pay you for each click, but the more modern ones like INTENTclick pay you a higher rate if you have a higher conversion rate. This is great for publishers (like bloggers) because it means that they get more money, and it’s great for people trying to sell products and services online because it incentives bloggers to produce high-quality content that is aimed at people who are likely to convert farther down the sales cycle.
2) Publish an eBook
Once you have a large amount of readers on your blog (or even if you do not if you do good SEO work), you can publish an eBook, which has two main ways of making money:
* Give the eBook away for free – The most common way to make money off eBooks is to give it away for free. You ask people to provide their email address and provide other information, and inform them that they will receive information about offers, or you can have them sign up for your newsletter as a requisite for downloading your eBook. Most people do not like it if you sell their data to other companies (that’s how you would make money if you go the “special offers” route) so make sure you clearly inform them if you do that. If you send them a weekly newsletter then you can put ads in the letter but keep your trusted readers’ information private.
* Sell the eBook – Selling the eBook can work really well if you have established yourself as a trust agent and if you have an audience that is wealthy enough to buy it. Pricing can be tricky but you need to keep in mind how much money you would be making per person (on average, though there can be high variance) if you had given your book out for free. Remember that people usually use PayPal and they can take a hefty rake!
Is Blogger or WordPress Better for Blogging?
One you have decided to start a blog, there’s a strong chance you will ask the same question that most beginning bloggers ask… Is Blogger or WordPress a better choice to use? In this post I will discuss some pros and cons of each.
1) Blogger
Blogger.com has some good benefits; probably the most obvious one is that it’s completely free. It’s also incredibly easy to set up and use. It only takes a few minutes to get a blog up and running, even for beginners and people with no tech skills at all.
They also have some easy add-on “gadgets” to easily customize your blog. With a few mouse clicks you can add a list of followers, a search box, Google Adsense code to monetize your blog, photos, videos, links, create a poll, etc… There are several things you can add.
The biggest downside of using Blogger is that they own the blog, not you. So they can shut it down at any time for many different reasons, and it does happen to people quite often. You are also limited to what you can do with it because you don’t actually own it. And there’s a lot less options than there are with having your own domain, hosting, and a different blogging platform such as WordPress, which I will now discuss.
2) WordPress
There are actually two ways to create a WordPress blog, but one is far better than the other and that option is what I will mainly be discussing. The first way is to create a free blog on WordPress.com and it will be hosted on their servers. This is similar to Blogger, only worse for most internet marketers, so I am not even going to go into much detail on that option.
When you hear someone say, “WordPress blog” they are almost always talking about the wordpress.org blogging software that you use with your own domain and web host. This is by far the better WordPress option and is the one that gives you full functionality with almost unlimited things you can do with it. You own this type of blog so it’s yours to do as you wish. But this option is not totally free because you do have to pay for hosting and a domain, the actual WordPress software is free to download though.
If you choose the free wordpress.com version they don’t allow you to place commercial advertisements on your blog. It would be for personal use only and no affiliate links or contextual ads are allowed. There are other restrictions as well. This is bad for internet marketers and that’s why I say not to use them. If you host the blog yourself with the wordpress.org version on your own hosting account, you can do whatever you want with it.
Another great thing about WordPress.org is that there are thousands of great themes and plugins available for practically anything you want to do. Almost anything you want to add or change about your blog most likely there’s a plugin to do it. The downside is that it can be confusing to configure and learn what to do with all this stuff if your technical skills are minimal.
Overall, I would say there’s no doubt that using the wordpress.org software with your own domain and hosting is definitely the best option long term. However, you don’t have to choose one or the other – you can use both!
Why not build your main blog on whichever you feel is the best option for you after reading this post and then create another one on the other platform to use as a 2nd tier blog to help feed your main one? That’s a great way to do it. Or run two blogs that share slightly different information and target different keywords within the same niche. No need to limit yourself to one or the other when you can do both to keep from putting all your eggs in one basket.
Having a blog has become an integral part of building a successful internet marketing business so pick a platform and get one started right away!
How to Make Blogging Fun Forever
Whether you make money blogging or just do it to share your thoughts with the world, you will be much more likely to stay committed to your blog if it doesn’t seem like a job or chore. Your blog should be updated regularly, considering that is the point of blogging, but you might eventually reach the point where you feel like you have nothing left to say. If you’re not careful, your blog may end up joining the millions of other blogs that have already been abandoned.
I have a LOT of blogs about all sorts of different topics and many of them are even on the same (or similar) topics. I don’t update all of them frequently but several of them I do, so I know a thing or two about trying to keep the blogging juices flowing. Keeping your blog alive while continuing to have fun doing it doesn’t have to be difficult. Below I have discussed a few good ways to make sure you have fun with your blog while updating it regularly:
1) Be enthusiastic about your topic
The more inspired and passionate you are about the subject of your blog, the more that enthusiasm is going to shine through to infect your readers. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging about internet marketing strategies, amusement park rides, weight loss tips, or whatever else – if you find it interesting, your readers probably will too and you will have fun blogging about it.
It’s also helpful if you have strong writing skills so you can properly express your enthusiasm rather than writing flat, uninteresting posts. Blogging is writing so you should like to write if you are going to stay enthused about your blog.
2) Always be looking for new information
When you first start your blog you’ll probably have a ton of tips and information to share, but as time goes on you may feel like you’re running out of things to say. A good way to overcome this problem is to stay active in finding more information relating to your blog topic. Visit bookstores and skim through magazines and books related to your blog niche. Do the same with your local library. Sign up for newsletters on your topic, and participate in online discussion forums. Watch TV, read other blogs, browse through article directories, etc… All of these resources offer plenty of information to keep your blogging ideas fresh.
3) Challenge yourself
One of the most common reasons bloggers get bored and abandon their blogs is because they stop challenging themselves to create interesting posts. Try playing an association game each day to liven things up. Let’s say your blog topic is digital cameras. Take any book (a dictionary or thesaurus works well) and open to a random entry. If you opened to the word “counterfeit” you could research and write a post about how to avoid getting burned by buying a counterfeit camera. If you opened to the word “lopsided” you could write a post about how to properly frame a shot, and so on. You can come up with thousands of great post ideas this way.
You could also start at the beginning of each week with a list of topics and push yourself to write at least one post per day to cover one of the topics – even if you may be tempted to procrastinate. Challenge yourself to be more disciplined, and eventually you’ll enjoy the feeling of satisfaction you get from accomplishing your blogging goals.
There are plenty of ways to keep your blog fresh and fun forever. Just think outside the box and use the things that are all around you. Blogging is a great way to make money, build a business, share your thoughts, have fun, and so much more!
