6) Write For Your Audience

When you finally get to grips with google analytics you will quickly discover the power of connecting with your audience.  By knowing what the visitors are really looking for (analyse the long tail keywords in analytics) we can target our keywords more specifically, we can root out the long tail phrases and build our blogs and links to build blog reader loyalty.

By securing this loyalty we can then build a relationship and become an authority on our subject matter, which will result in more links to our pages and increased rankings within the search engines and Web 2.0 portals = MORE TRAFFIC.

Keeping in touch with news worthy articles in your niche is an essential part of your role as a blogger, becoming an authority in your niche, writing compelling material for increased reference.  By researching news worthy issues within your subject matter you will remain at the forefront of reference for your peers and at the same time you will begin to build keywords within your blog that are fresh and upto date.

5) Analytics

Use Google analytics to track your visitors and monitor their behaviour when they arrive.  Google Analytics is an extremely powerful resource and it’s free to anyone who has a Google account.  By pasting a tracking code into your html or php you will very quickly see the entry points and exit points and everything in between.

The power of tracking is always completley under estimated and under used, possibly one of the most powerful elements of Google Analytics is the facility to discover which keywords your visitors are typing into which search engine in order to find your site.  Once they are there you can see how long they stay and this is a representation they have tagged as Bounce Rate.  The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that enter your site and for whatever reason they leave almost immediatley, the bounce is a metric that is important in Google determining if your pages are relevant to the search terms and keywords used to enter your site.

Geographical information is also available through Google Analytics so to recap the value in tracking is knowing who is coming to your website, from where they came using which search engine, via which keyword, which page did they land on, how long dod they stay and which page did they exit from!  Powerful stuff eh!  This allows us to change the direction of our writing to better suit the metrics of our visitors.

4) Generate Traffic

In order to make money from your blog you will need visitors to pass by every once in a while and then yhese may buy from you once in a while!  There are many strategies to driving traffic to your blog and it is a combination of the total that will provide the very best results for increasing visitors.

Social Bookmarking is a popular ‘promotional’ method used by almsot every professional blogger, this process allows you to get the word out about yours and other peoples articles and points of interest.  The facility to bookmark on a central service as opposed to on your pc offers a pathway for people to follow links of interest and occasionally allows some Page Rank to pass over to your page.

Article Marketing is another popular form of driving traffic to your posts,  By writing (not copying) articles that are compelling and offer ’slipperiness’ to your subject, you can seduce your prospects to click on your article links and visit your blog.  Very few (if any) article directories offer any Page Rank opportunities.  The most popular article drievtory by far is Ezine Articles, I refer to these sites as content clusters and the sheer volume of unique content and semantically structured writing makes the site extremely Google friendly, so your article sits within an authority framework with high PR.

Link Building is another form of traffic funnelling and in the process gaining a certain amount of PR on occassion.  Submitting your site to Directories results in one way links to your domain which offers more opportunities for being discovered for search terms and phrases.

There are many many different ways to generate traffic to your blogs, there are also many methods that have been in favour and have subsequently fallen out of favour!  Just write about your niche and then see what happens with a little social bookmarking.

RSS (really simple syndication) is a facility whereby each post that you write is pinged (like a digital transmitter speaking to digital receivers) to all of the Search Engines and RSS directories, resulting in frsh indexing from GoogleBot and the other lesser known and cared about SE Spiders.

3) Fresh Content Daily (as unique as possible)

It is not essential to post articles to your blog every day but it is vital that your blog is freshened up and posted at least two to three times each week.  Once you have determined your niche you must be able to write with a flow, if you find that you are having to think and research your posts before you put them up then this is going to slow your overall approach to making money online or to educating your prospects.

Wordpress offers you the ability to write posts ahead of time so if you are really inspired and the creative writing juices are flowing then you may be compelled to write a weeks worth (2-4 posts) of articles in a single day. These can then be queued up to post at pre-determined intervals so that the rest of your week is spent on marketing, social posting, link building, outsourcing or maybe even a little time for family!

Find a Niche

Possibly one of the hardest things to decide when you start to blog is “what do I write about”.  This has a number of elements to it’s answer initially dependant upon your desired outcome.  If you are looking to connect with your audience about a passion then obviously you need to choose a niche that you have a great deal of knowledge about, something that offer you an endless opportunity to spout and scribble.

If your intention is to make money with your blog then you need to take a more scientific and analytical approach to your blogging.  Niche research is a greatly under-performed principle when approaching the art of making money online, there are many things to consider before writing a post, deciding on a theme or a host etc etc.  Check my find a niche category and refer to the research which I carried out on the Camper VW niche before I decided to put any work into starting the blog.

This really is the most crucial part of blogging in my opinion, after all it takes just as long to set up a site to fail as it does a site to succeed and make money online.

Blogging is a very effective marketing process and can be a very profitable tool if used in the right manner. Making money online from a blog is just a matter of seducing the attention of a prospect or audience without directly selling to them. By following these steps to blogging you will begin to see results over a 4-6 month period.

1) What is the best starting point?

There are a number of free blog hosts and blog platforms available online today, Google offers possibly the largest of all platforms with it’s popular Blogger Service.  The aim of a blog is to create a body of work using words, pictures and videos to entertain, educate, inform of seduce your audience so the platform is quite important.

I always opt for Wordpress, independently hosted with Bluehost as I always like to remain in control of my destiny, at least more so than the hosted versions of Blogger and Wordpress offer.  A wrong word or a slip of the proverbial tingue can result in your blog being de-listed by Google Blogger or Wordpress, so the moral of lesson one is “take control of your blogging destiny”

It’s finally arrived, your making money online veins have just been given a huge bypass, with the arrival of YouTube Sponsored Search!

There have been rumours about this service for some time and Google have obviously been planning an income stream from their video search engine superstar.  Michelle McPherson has posted an early heads up on her Social Marketing blog today.

In Michelles blog she details the whole ‘how to ‘ on using the service including the integration with Googles Billing facility.  So what does this really mean??

YouTube is known to be the internets No.2 Search Engine and the 3rd most visited site in the world today  (Quoted from Social Marketing) so the reach of this marketing behemoth is almost unbeatable, currently receiving in the region of 32,000,000 visitors each month with an Alexa Rank of 4.  The ability to reach the audience on a targeted level similar to adwords marketing but using video within a single site structure provides a totally integrated marketing forum.

Early days yet, who knows how this is likely to deliver, are the YouTube crowd in a buying mode or an entertainment mode?  Are they so used to receiving unlimited FREE video resources that they are not in the buying mindset whilst inside the YouTube framework??  Only time will tell!