Making Money with your first blog!
Perhaps one of the most powerful tools in the world SEO is the blog, a well branded blog can craft hundreds if not thousands of indexed pages over the years, allows for excellent social interaction, and can quickly grow to be seen as an authority in Google not only solidifying your place in the SEO rankings but also increasing client conversions while maintaining a positive corporate image.
Many people out there have the ambition to start a blog, whether it be to promote themselves, their services, their company or just to make money online; and to many people this doesn’t mean going out and working with a nyc seo company but rather heading over to wordpress.com and starting their own little project.
Yet, these little projects can quickly grow big if the right steps are taken, but you have to understand the type of market place you are getting into:
1. Know your market
You should never write about anything you don’t know inside and out. Figure out something you are passionate about and could spend a great deal of time discussing at length and write about that topic and related topics. Maybe for you that’s something like gardening, or home repair. There is a common principle in the business world, that no matter what you do, if you do it better than anyone else you will be successful, so don’t be afraid that your niche could be a small one, there are bloggers who blog about vintage action figures and manage to pull down a six-figure a year income. Write from your heart, write something you know and something you are going to enjoy.
[Image not Mine]
2. Locate your market
Your market is already online, somewhere at least. It’s all a matter of pin pointing where your market currently resides, whether this is on niche related forums, on youtube, on social networks. It’s your job to hunt them down and make them aware of your blog; this doesn’t mean expensive advertising (although if you have some budget the pay-per-click advertising on Facebook and Reddit works wonders), but rather it could be as simple as making a post on a gardening forum advertising your new blog (be sure to read the forum rules to see if they allow such ads first!)
3. Monetize your blog
For many people the simplest and most effective way to monetize their blog is through Google Adwords, who pay you a portion of the profits from every user click received, however for more advanced webmasters something like affiliate links (reviewing and selling someone else’s product for commission) or paid product placement may be a way to increase the profit margins of your blog
4. Socialize your blog
The beautiful thing about passionate people is they become advocates. If you like gardening enough to write about it and share it with the world then it’s safe to assume that there are other people out there who enjoying gardening enough to discuss it with their friends, to share ideas and concepts. These users are often referred to as advocates and they are a huge asset in marketing your blog to new users. Be sure your blog includes facebook and twitter share buttons to encourage these users to spread the word. Also consider asking questions in your posts so that users can engage you in the comments.
