Microniche blogging is a good way to earn extra income on the side. In fact, over time, it can turn into a full-time income if you pick the right niche market. There are many tools that can help you select the most profitable niche markets which also have low competition. However, unless you are a hardcore blogger, you’re going to want to pick a niche that is something you enjoy writing about. Creating a professional looking blog is much easier than it seems. From here on out, we’ll discuss the main components of blogging for money and how you can begin earning extra income.
I want to divulge that you can make money blogging for free. At the same time, many of the products and tools that are mentioned here do come with a cost, but will also start to pay for themselves within a matter of months. Throughout this article, I will do my best to offer at least one free tool per step so that you can find a pathway to earn money from blogging without spending a dime.
***Note that if you are only interested in the specific ways that show how you can make money blogging, skip down to Step 8 where this is further described. For those of you that are new to blogging, please continue reading.***
The first thing is what the heck is a niche and how is it pronounced? Well, I’ve heard it pronounced many ways, but most dictionaries include the pronunciations of “neesh” like geesh and “nitch” like hitch. Pick one and go with it or, if you prefer, stay non-committal and use both. A niche is simply a very specific sub-market that is focused on a particular audience. For example, take my blog fantasydraftstrategy.com which focuses on a very specific target audience that I enjoy writing about. The base market is fantasy sports. The sub-market is fantasy sports drafts. I dug a little deeper for the sub-sub-market and chose to focus on fantasy draft strategy.
Step 1: Some tools of the trade to select a target market niche are Google Adwords Keyword Search Tool, Market Samurai, and Long Tail Pro. Google Adwords is completely free to use and does provide a slew of information to find out what keywords have high search results with low competition. Market Samurai does offer a free seven day trial, but requires purchase to use beyond that time period. However, the market research that this tool provides is the most complete and detailed that I’ve found on the web. Lastly, is Long Tail Pro which you can buy for a one-time fee and hasn’t been around as long as Market Samurai, but appears to be a little easier to navigate for those not used to researching the niche blog market.
Step 2: Please note that there is not a free option listed in this step and it is not a requirement in order to eventually make money blogging. However, creating a official domain for your blog will give it credibility and make its appearance much more professional to visitors. If you have no desire to have your own domain, then you can skip this step and not miss a beat.
When you are delving through your possible niche markets, you want to also see if the domain name is still available in that exact phrase. A domain is simply the website, like this one which is blogideas.co. If the exact search term that you chose is not available, my suggestion is that you keep searching for one that is. You can check to see what domains are open by searching for them at a website such as godaddy.com. Just enter in the domain you want and click enter. If it is available, then great! If not, then it will give you some alternative selections or you can continue your search on your own. The great thing about GoDaddy is that they offer .co domains which can be a good alternative to .com domains. I have quite a few .co domains myself and believe they are very professional.
Expect to pay anywhere from $2 up to $15 annually for ownership of a domain. Of course, there are premium domains that sites such as GoDaddy auction off for hundreds or thousands of dollars, but I don’t feel that would be a wise use of money. Purchasing a domain will also involve hosting the domain. You can do this through GoDaddy Hosting since you’re already buying your domain there.
However, I have always used Bluehost.com to host my blogs and I don’t have a bad word to say about them. I love their live chat help system and the ease of use of their control panel. Also, right now they are giving you one free domain if you sign up for hosting with them. If you do buy your domain at GoDaddy and want to host it on Bluehost, it only takes a few minutes to point your domain towards Bluehost and they are happy to give you the step-by-step instructions.
Step 3: So once you’ve selected your microniche market, it is now time to set up your blog. Whether or not you chose to include Step 2, you still need to set up an account on a blogging platform. There are dozens and dozens of sites that allow you to create a blog for free. A couple of the top sites are wordpress.com and blogger.com. If you chose to skip step 2 which would provide your own domain, then you will have a domain that includes your blog host’s domain. Let’s say that your niche blog is called “Example” and you opened your account on Wordpress. You’re domain would be wwwdotexampledotwordpressdotcom. If you bought the domain exampledotcom, then your domain (or web address) would be wwwdotexampledotcom.
I’ve always used Wordpress as the platform for my blogs. Being the first platform I ever used and I’m very familiar with the layout, the features, plugins, and general feel of the site. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of ways to customize your site with Wordpress with themes and plugins to make your site unlike any other out there.
Step 4: Okay, now that your blog is registered, it is time to begin the customization process. Now, there are hundreds, more like thousands, of templates that are available. Many are free and many have an associated cost. Picking out the theme that is right for you is definitely a trial and error process. Aesthetics play a large role in return visitors and it is important to have a theme that looks well-designed, but also functions properly. I’ve settled on the HeatMap Theme for all of my blogs. The reason is that it’s main focus is complete integration with Google Adsense which is how you will generate a significant portion of your site’s income. There is a very basic version of this theme which can be found here. I have sampled more themes than I can count and not to knock on most of the free ones, but they just aren’t designed for AdSense. If you want to create a blog just to blog, then many of the free themes will work perfectly for you. However, if you want to make money, then you need a product that works right and comes with solid support and tutorials.
Step 5: Hopefully your still enthused although this information can be taxing. While everything above is very important, it isn’t exactly riveting material to read through. By this point, you’ve found your topic, decided on a domain and host (if applicable), and have got your theme squared away. I’m going to skip over all of the additional modifications that you can make to your site as much of it depends on your target market, the direction you want to head, and your own style. I constantly play with widgets, plugins, and rearrange data on my site to give the reader the best experience possible as well as maximizing my own revenue. I will say that if you stick with Wordpress, that you will have an amazing assortment of plugins to choose from which you can locate for free here. And to clear up any confusion on what plugins are versus what widgets are, it is pretty simple. They are both applications that you download onto your computer and then upload into your blog through your control panel. The difference is that widgets are typically features that the visitors to your site will see such as widgets showing YouTube videos, pictures, a live Twitter feed, etc. I think of plugins as applications that are just beneficial to you on the control panel (backend) of the site. These would be applications such as site stat trackers, SEO optimization programs, and Cache programs. The visitors looking at your webpage don’t see these items.
Step 6: Yeah okay, Step 5 wasn’t really a Step. Or was it? I wanted to put a brief synopsis somewhere in there so that when you start playing around with your blog, you’ll have some sort of a clue as to what is going on. So, now it’s time to add your content. While it will take another article to explain the best methods of creating articles that be optimized for search engine results, it is important to focus on keeping your blog on topic. In order to create more articles, try to break down each topic into a 500-600 word count. Creating multi-part series is a great way to do this. You don’t have to post multiple articles a day, or even one a day, but providing regular content will go a long ways in building the reputation of your site.
Step 7: Marketing and backlinking your blog. This is a very involved topic and one that will eventually encompass it’s own specific post. Until then, I’ll try to give you a crash course. Search engines rank sites. This ranking is based on many methods that are unknown, but many guru’s have figured out several of the key ways that this is done. We are going to base everything off of the Google search engine since it is the largest in the world. First, you can’t expect to open a blog and have it show up on the first page of search results right away. This will typically take months and months, all though I’ve ready many stories of people who’ve got their sites ranked #1 within a matter of days or weeks. You want to get on the first page of the google search results. This drives your site traffic sky high which in turn will drive your AdSense revenue sky high.
So, how can you get ranked #1 or at least on the first page of search results? By backlinking. A backlink is when your website is mentioned on other websites without you mentioning their website on yours. These are called one-way links. However, if you mention another website on your blog and they reciprocate the favor, that is called a two-way or reciprocal link. This doesn’t have as much importance in Google’s analysis.
How do you create backlinks? There are many ways and some of them are free, but time consuming while others come at a cost, but will take care of the process of submitting to hundreds of sites for you. You can google “Article Directories” and start signing up and creating accounts for each one. Each time you write a new article, you’ll have to manually go to each site and upload it. However, it would take you hours to do this for even 50-100 directories. I use two different article submission websites on a regular basis. The first is UniqueArticleWizard.com. The website looks gimmicky, but once you get to the control panel side of things, it looks much more professional. This site works fantastic and saves me so much time considering I tend to put out at least one article a day across all of my blogs. The other site is JetSubmitter.com. I have just started using them to see how they compare. So far, I like what I see. The great thing about JetSubmitter is that they also have an article spinning service which I discuss below. They take care of automatically signing you up for hundreds of different directories and you just need to upload your content and go through the submission process. Also, both of these sites offer free trial periods so you can check them out and then back out if you don’t like it. However, if you’re serious about making money, then you are going to want some sort of automatic article submitter in your arsenal.
Additionally, each submittal needs to be unique. Research has shown that Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Therefore, you need to rewrite portions of the articles or change out many, many keywords each time in order to make this unique. However, some independent researchers say that article uniqueness is overblown and that Google won’t shun your article because the exact same thing is all over the web. So far, I’ve leaned to the side of caution and created unique versions each time I create a new article. Article spinning is not something that is much fun to do yourself. Even if you have loads of extra time, I just don’t see how it can be an efficient use of time. Right now, I’m using JetSubmitter.com to spin all of my articles as well. However, I just signed up for TheBestSpinner.com as I’ve heard great things about this site and I wanted to try it out.
Step 8: I had thought about putting this topic at the beginning of the post, but I wanted to really keep things in a chronological order. Also, I think it’s important to develop blogs that you enjoy writing about and not to create blogs simply to earn money. You’ll get very tired of checking back to that site if it isn’t something you like doing. So what is this Step about? Here we’ll discuss how you will actually making money with your blog. There are several main ways and you utilize each of them on the same blog.
The first method is Google Adsense. As we discussed earlier, this is a very common method of revenue generation and the HeatMap Theme is built specifically for Adsense. Every blogger that I know of uses Adsense as it is easy to set up, pays well, and offers a wide variety of customization.
However, an even higher paying source of income is called Affiliate Marketing. For full disclosure, many of the links in this article, although not all, are affiliate links. This means that if you click on the link and sign up for their service, I will get paid. At the same time, there are thousands of links that I could plug in this article and I’ve only chosen the tools that I’ve personally used and would recommend to others. I could go on and on about tools I’ve tried that are worthless, but I’d rather not. Start visiting other websites that are in your industry or broad topic. You will see links on their websites for affiliate programs.
The last method to increase your blog’s income is to write an eBook about your topic. Writing an eBook tends to make you an authority figure on the topic, even if you aren’t an expert. Now, I have yet to complete any of the three eBooks that are currently in process. Also, I don’t consider myself the be all, end all of any of the topics. What am doing is writing from my perspective in regards to my specific site topic that I’ve done a ton of research on and generally have quite a bit of experience. To be honest, I haven’t yet determined the price level of the books and I’m considering giving away one of them with a subscription registration.
In closing, I hope you’ve found this guide useful. I’ve tried to keep this as short as possible, while also covering all of the main points in getting a blog up and running. I could spend a lot more time and go into a lot more detail about each particular step, but this knowledge will get the ball rolling. I always enjoy reading feedback from my readers and would appreciate any comments (good or bad) that you have to say. If you like what you’ve read, then please subscribe to my blog at blogideas.co or follow me on Twitter @thefreetaco.
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