Blogging

This is one of the easiest way to make money online.

Getting Started

You can start by logging on to blogger.com or wordpress.com and create an account. Follow 3-4 steps and create your own blog.

You can make money through your blogs by placing ads provided by Google Adsense or through Affiliate marketing sites.

Blog Advertising has become a big industry now and it is set to become one of the largest forms of advertising on the web only surpassed by PayPerClick marketing.
This is good news for bloggers as small companies through to large corporations will be throwing money into the blogging world and it’s up for grabs.

Use blogging services like Blogger or the free WordPress.com version will make you the money that you are looking for as a Blogger.

Make sure your blog has a unique look to it as you’ll want to engage your readers and grasp their interest the moment they land on your page.You can engage the reader through competitions or asking for comments and by just writing about interesting stories, techniques and ideas.

Your blog should have people coming back to it and reading it again and again. Make sure you include RSS reader buttons so visitors can subscribe to the feed.

Update your blog from time to time. You don’t have to post every day or even every week.But make sure you don’t just set them up and forget about them because they will die off and lose traffic.

Market Research

You need to do some decent amount of market research for target audience and specific Keywords.

The first thing you need to decide is whether you are going to target an affiliate
product or adsense to generate money.

Different people prefer different ways to monetize their blogs.

So if you want to set up a blog to promote mainly affiliate programs, then I would suggest Clickbank.com products because of the high payout on each sale. You can promote a range of info products and physical goods from your blog using affiliate programs on Commission Junction and Amazon but for starting out I would recommend Clickbank. So log on to clickbank.com and spend sometime browsing through different products that they have to offer.

The next step is to evaluate the amount of search engine traffic you can drive to your blog. Now traffic will come from more places than just the search engine but this is one of the easiest ways to evaluate the phrases your potential market searches for.

You can do this using free softwares like Wordtracker:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://iotaweb.org

Without traffic your blog will never even get going so it is the life of your blog.

You must see some advertisers for your main keyphrases. If there aren’t advertisers then it’s a red flag because it shows the market isn’t very profitable.
You’re also looking for the info product you’ll be promoting. The best possible thing you can see is the is that most of the ads you see on the first page are info products and mainly the one you’re looking to promote.
Now if you see just one or two ads for that product on the first page then it’s great news and you can short list this market.

Optimize Your Blog

Now you’ve created your blog you need to optimize your blog. This isn’t just for the search engines but you need to optimize every blog in 3 ways:

• The easier and more enjoyable your blog is the more sticky it will become.
• You need to make sure your blog is easily crawled and indexed by the search engines for maximum exposure.
• You blog needs to make sure it isn’t losing potential dollars by having it poorly monetized.

So lets start

Put yourself in the readers position. Do you want to see the basic template with no extra’s.The visitor will leave.You have just 10 seconds to make that important first impression with your blog and it must be good to stop the visitor clicking the back button.

You can get some good looking templates here:

http://btemplates.com/
http://www.bloggertemplates.org/

You can also add the RSS Reader icons so that users can subscribe to your blog in their RSS Reader. This is very important to do so here’s an easy way to do this…

First you need to download the plugin:

http://www.twistermc.com/blog/chicklet-creator-plugin

There are simple instructions on that website on how to get it working. Once you have the plug-in activated you get to select the icons you want displayed. I personally like to add most of them in the sidebar but make sure you atleast add the main ones like yahoo, msn, Google, technorati, etc.

The Content

Posting regular content to your blog is crucial. It will keep the search engine spiders coming to crawl your posts and have existing readers coming back to read the new stuff.

Marketing & Backlinks

Now you have your blog set up with excellent content and its monetized correctly and even the search engines will be crawling your blog and indexing it. We now need to promote your blog mainly by getting quality backlinks to your blog which gives you more exposure on the web and also moves you higher up the search engines giving you even more traffic.

You can start by exchanging your website’s link with other sites. This will get you additional traffic from other website’s visitors.

Here are a few sites where you can exchange links:

http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/
http://www.linkexchangeit.com/
http://www.link-exchange.ws/

You can also submit your website URL to a number of search engines through a few simple clicks.

Here are a few sites where you can do this:

http://www.submiturlhere.com/
http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html
http://www.submiturl.com/

So there you have it. The most simple way to make money online. And the best part is that it’s all free. Just need to put in a few hours of work initially and then sit back and enjoy the benefits.

Happy Blogging!!!