Posts Tagged ‘blog’

How To Get Paid To Blog

March 9th, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in For Beginners  |  4 Comments

There are literally millions of people who blog. Most of these are personal bloggers who use their blogs as a platform to provide updates about their lives to friends and family. It’s no surprise that blogging is huge. It’s fun to keep track of friends and family.

After people have been blogging for a while, they start to hear that it’s possible to make money blogging. This usually leads them to articles like this one.

Types Of Blogs That Make Money

The blogs that make the most money are almost always blogs that share advice. News blogs also make money but it’s significantly harder to make money with a blog that provides news. Personal blogs rarely make a lot of money. In order to make a lot of money, your blog needs to line up with information that a lot of people are looking for.

Advice Blogs That Make A Lot Of Money

There are of course thousands upon thousands of blogs that make a lot of money. Right here in The Keyword Academy community we have hundreds of people who are making great income from their blogs. Some of them are blogging daily and others are simply providing information on blogs that are rarely updated. It’s very possible to use either approach once you understand the concepts that lead to making money.

How To Get Paid To Blog

Step 1 in this process is starting a blog that lines up with information that people are trying to find. There are a lot of people who hope that they can make money with their personal blogs. However, massive amounts of people aren’t going to be interested in seeing pictures of your kids or in hearing about your latest trip. You would be a lot more likely to generate interest and traffic if you provided tips about your profession and/or hobbies.

The technical side of getting a blog going shouldn’t be too difficult for people that already have personal blogs. The setup will be virtually identical, it’s the topic that will be different.

How To Choose A Topic

Choosing a topic really isn’t that difficult. I personally like using an online tool to determine the size of the audience that’s looking for information. The tool shows you how many people are searching for things in Google. By entering ‘digital photography’ into the tool, I can see how many people are searching for it each month. By comparing the results against those from other topics, I can get an idea of how large the audiences for each are.

How To Develop A Popular Blog

There are two keys to developing a popular blog. The first is bringing traffic to the blog and the second is providing solid information that people look for. The Keyword Academy is full of information on developing traffic. We help people to learn to bring steady traffic from Google.

How To Make Money With Your Blog

Once you have a blog that gets a lot of traffic, it’s pretty easy to make money. Some people use advertising programs like Google Adsense and others sell their own ads. Adsense is by far the easiest way to make money and it can be used to make money on most blogs that get traffic.

Further down the road you can consider using more advanced forms of making money like affiliate marketing (selling the products of other people and companies) and even selling your own products. This of course is optional and is something that you should only consider when you are already producing income with your blog.

As you can probably see, there is quite a bit to learn. We have already created a lot of material here at The Keyword Academy that can help. There are a lot of people who have used that material to get started and have already been producing significant incomes. It takes some time to learn but it’s honestly a great way to make money.

Make Money Online With 100 Blog Posts Update

August 3rd, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Keyword Research, SEO  |  32 Comments

For the last week, I have been working as much as possible on my new make money experiment. The point of this experiment is to create 100 targeted blog posts within a 30 day period while tracking my earnings.

The first step in the process was to plan out the posts. That actually took almost a full week in itself. After I had everything ready I started writing.

Results July 27 – August 2

So far I have been able to write 25 posts and they’ve been absolutely killing it. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that they would produce $371.98:

As you can see, I’m monetizing with Google Adsense and am using two ad units on the posts. One of the ads is placed within the post and the other is placed under it.

Obviously anyone would be happy with these results. Assuming that I don’t improve over the next three weeks, this experiment will put an extra $1594.20 in my pocket.

Planning Is Everything

Honestly I couldn’t have done this without a lot of planning. You can’t just throw up any 25 posts and expect this to happen. Before I even started writing posts I found 100 keywords with two important characteristics:

  • They had the potential to make a lot of money.
  • They were somewhat easy to rank for.

In order to make good money with Google Adsense, you have to have a solid foundation of keyword research and SEO. If you can’t pick the right keywords, you’re not going to be able to make it work with Adsense. The days of throwing up content and making a lot of money are over. You have to be a lot more put together than you did in the past. Choosing the right keywords to go after is crucial.

You can use the Adwords keyword tool to check both search volume and CPC and with these numbers, the higher the better. I use a formula to calculate exactly how much I think I can produce with a keyword in a month and these 25 keywords are worth $7366.47 per month. I honestly didn’t think that they would start producing this quickly but if you consider the potential of the keywords, it isn’t too, too crazy.

We talk about using this formula in our members area to decide which keywords will be worthwhile.

The Next Week

During the next week, I’m going to try to finish at least 25 more posts. The strategy is obviously working and I don’t see any reason to change it. I’m secretly hoping that I’ll be able to finish more like 35 posts but we’ll see how much time I have. Life is pretty busy right now!

Note to TKA members – watch for an update in the forums within the next two hours.

Add A Blog To Your Site

May 7th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Link Building, SEO  |  6 Comments

A few years ago I created my first website. I didn’t know HTML and I certainly didn’t know about blogging (even though it already existed at the time). Since I had no idea how to put a website together, I fired up Microsoft Frontpage (it was already on my computer) and started fiddling around. A few months later I had a functional, 5-page site.

I put the site online and started trying to figure out how to get links. I understood at least partially that links were the key to success with an online business.

The huge disadvantage that I had was that my little site didn’t get any links for itself. I could have left it online for 100 years and it never would have been found. It wasn’t in Google, wasn’t listed anywhere, and most definitely wasn’t being visited.

I worked on getting links for about six months before anything significant started happening. I didn’t understand most of the methods that could be used to get links so I had to do some really monotonous stuff. I had a job back then and I spent most of my free time searching sites like Linkmarket.net for link partnerships. I didn’t know of any other ways to get links so that was the only choice I had. They were mostly low quality links BUT they still worked and I made a lot of money with that site ($3,500+ per month at its peak).

While I owned that site, it did really well for me. However, getting links for the site was extremely difficult. It was really ugly first of all and it didn’t generate any links on its own.

Blogs have a ton of advantages over static HTML sites and I firmly believe that any site that’s serious about getting traffic with search engine optimization should be a blog or add a blog to their site. If you already have a static HTML site and you don’t want to change it to a blog, add a blog in a subdirectory, i.e. yoursite.com/blog. Here are some of the advantages you can get with a blog:

  • Blogs literally create their own links. When you hit publish on a blog you can expect to get links from blog search engines and other sites. WordPress, Blogger, and most other blog platforms notifiy search engines and other sites that you have published something new and they will link to it. Other sites also find you on blog search engines and will link to you if they like what they see. I sometimes talk to bloggers who complain because their sites get a small amount of search traffic. What they don’t know is that there are people who complain in the static HTML community because they haven’t had a search visitor EVER and that can go on for years with static sites because they don’t create their own links. The owner is on their own to get every single link.
  • Blogs are a lot easier to update than static sites so you can easily focus on producing more content. When I had my static sites I would spend all day trying to figure out how to create a link structure and that was ridiculously frustrating. Looking back I can’t believe I did all that work when I could have been focusing on the content for the site.
  • Bloggers are by far the most generous group of online entrepreneurs. When people complain to me about how hard it is to get links to their blogs I just have to laugh. I would love for everyone to have to work on a static site for a year or two so that they can appreciate all of the advantages that come from blogging. Bloggers are very generous and will help you out if you know how to ask the right questions with respect.

People ask me all the time how much they need to post on their blogs. You need to post as much as you can. Everytime you post you get new links that will help you to get more search traffic. You will also be adding content that will help you to get more search traffic.

What some of you are really asking is for me to set the bare minimum of work that can be done and I would urge you to shift the way you’re approaching it. I would start to think of ways to get as much done as possible and try to figure out how to get satisfaction out of the work itself.

A few years ago I had a partner that I was working on a site with. He would ask almost every day how much more we had to do until the site made a lot of money. All day long it was, “How many articles do we have to write for the site?” or “How many people do we have to email?”. He was thinking about things the wrong way and wasn’t willing to change. I had to walk away from that partnership because I could see that my partner wasn’t willing to pay the price. You can’t expect to make money if you aren’t willing to put in the time.

I have always tried to figure out how to do more and have tried to focus every day on making things better.

Whether you have a site that’s a blog or a site that you have a blog on, your focus should be the same. Post as much as you can or hire someone to do it for you. In the long run, the link juice you gain will pay off nicely.

We’ll be covering more and more ways to get links over the next few weeks as we continue the 30 Days To Better SEO.