5 Top Secrets to Blog Your Way to the Bank

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There are multiple ways of making money online. One cheap effective way is to make use of blogs. Even if most people know what a blog is nowadays, the general view is that they are only used as a fun “diary” to share people’s opinions. If someone makes money it’s a schoolgirl that happened to have luck writing about a popular topic.

Blogging can generate a good stream of income but as any online business the money doesn’t come all by itself. You have to put in some effort and slowly work yourself up the traffic ladder and sometimes you need a bit of luck to find those high performing search terms. It’s often wise to have patience and work for a long term strategy that in the long run will reward you over and over again.

While you can use free blogging platforms, a blog on your own blog is highly recommended since it will give you a lot more flexibility and you are not dependent on a service that could shut you down any second.

I will hereby grant you 5 secret steps to build a money making blog. You need a good mix of research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving in order to make your blog successful.

1. Researching your Niche – First you need to find a Niche to blog about. A good tip is to check out popular magazines in Amazon, popular products in Ebay and most viewed/published articles in Ezinearticles. Don’t go to general but pick a subniche that has at least 10-500 searches a day in Wordtracker and under 10.000 competing pages in google. While doing Niche research also check Clickbank and Commision Junction for good niche specific products to promote as an affiliate.

3. Setting up your Blog – A keyword rich domain name does wonders with Google so choose wisely. For the niche golf swings you could choose a domain name like improvemygolfswings.com. The recommended blogging platform to install is Wordpress. Optimize the blog with at least the following plugins: All-in-One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet, Feedburner, Google Analytics and Auto Social.

3. Populate your Blog – Choose 2-3 main keyword phrases to start optimizing your blog for. Use phrases that you gathered from the research phase to find content for your blog by searching Ezinearticles, technorati, PRweb, forums, magazines and books. You can also use Google Alerts to receive daily keyword specific articles. Make daily posts by rewriting the content you gathered in your own style or just adding your comments under the article. Don’t just copy other peoples work. Include keywords in the title, body and header tags but don’t over optimize the posts.

4. Monetization – Join and search both Clickbank and Commission Junction to find suitable products to promote. You could also find affiliate merchants by searching Google for [main keyword] + affiliates (or affiliate program). Sprinkle affiliate links in your posts and put some banners in the sidebar. Just don’t make it look like a big advertisement blog that will scare away the users. 1-2 products to start with are enough.

5. Start driving Traffic to Your blog. Submit Articles to Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Isnare and other article directories. You can also use an article submission service to automate this. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedage, Feedagg, Feedfury and Feedsubmitter. Bookmark each post you make in sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. Socialmarker is a good service for this. Comment on other People?s blogs and make use of free services like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and Blogger to create article pages that link back to your blog.

To reap the rewards you need to work with the above traffic generating tactics daily, at least for the first months. Be consistent and strive to post helpful quality content that the readers find interesting.

However, even if you followed the instructions and daily worked hard on the traffic tactics, your blog might for some reason not get much response. If you know about the 80/20 rule, the same principles can be applied here. 20% of your blogs will make 80% of you income. So for a blog that isn’t performing well after a month or two of consistent traffic optimization put some Adsense on it and fire up another blog with the same process. Do not delete the old blog since sometimes a blog can suddenly bloom up and attract people. Make some random posts to it now and then. By having a couple of posts, you are spreading your chance of hitting a really good performing blog.

You can learn more about blogging strategies in Rob Benwells latest e-book: Blogging to the Bank 3 and most of the techniques mentioned in this article can be automated or simplified by using the most powerful blogging tool in market called Firepow. If you are at least a little serious about blogging, it would be a sin not to take a look at what you can do with Andrew Hansen’s Firepow.