Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Blogging Basics

There are millions upon millions of blogs out there, with thousands more being started every day. Starting a blog is one of the easiest things you can do on the net, what with sites like Blogger. The problem is most blogs run out of steam a few weeks after they start. Only a few bloggers really know how to turn an interesting past-time into a money making machine.

Blogging is really no different from any other internet marketing. To make money you have to have traffic and that traffic has to want to buy stuff somehow related to what you're writing about. 99% of all bloggers can't get past the creating the traffic stage, much less the monetizing the blog state. Let's look at these two steps, traffic and monetization, and break them down into understandable chunks.

Creating traffic with blogging is almost easy. You just have to write about what everyone wants to read, then let them know about it.

How do you figure out what people want to read? Sites like Technorati are invaluable for this.

Technorati ranks blogs according to how many visitors they get. It is also possible to search through blogs listed at Technorati by tags or keywords. In other words, I could do a search for internet marketing blogs and get the top internet marketing blogs that Technorati lists.

Once you find out what the top blogs are look at the first hundred or so. Do you notice any patterns? Does any particular area stand out? Are blogs about celebrities hot? How about financial blogs?

Of course, you might not want to pit yourself against the big boys and girls. You might want to find a niche to blog about where you have less competition.

The single most important thing about your niche is that you already know enough about it to write a hundred or so articles. If you want success blogging, your topic needs to be something you're happy to live with for the next year or so.

A key to blogging success is frequency of your posts. Ideally, you'll want to quickly work up to posting every day. You might want to start out only posting three days a week, or even weekly. It's very important not to let your frequency drop, for two reasons. Your readers will learn when to expect new material, and they will adjust their visits accordingly. Google's spiders will learn your frequency of posts, too. To get Google coming back to your site more often, post more often.

Other than training Google to index your pages frequently, there are three free things you can do to market your blog--comment on other blogs, participate in blog carnivals, social bookmark your posts.

Once you get traffic, you have to figure out how to make money off of your visitors. AdSense may work, but what you really need is affiliate products you can sell your visitors.

To learn more about how to promote your website, download my free ebook: Five Steps to Web Profits

Lee Cole is an successful internet marketer who can help you get your internet business up and running, and most importantly--profitable! To learn more, visit Lee's website

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