Be Clear On How To Start, Build, Promote and Monetize Your Blog
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog by DB
Over the past two days on Website Hosting, I’ve been talking about blog monetization and why it is important that you identify your monetization strategy even before you begin blogging. Yesterday I talked about the first category of bloggers that make money indirectly, using their blogs as a means to gain exposure, build a name and even a brand for themselves.
If you haven’t read my previous post I would suggest you do so before going any further. Today let’s look at the other category of bloggers that make money directly from their blogs.
Making Money directly from your blog
Now in my first post I further divided this into two sub categories.
- People that make most of their money running affiliates ads and
- People that make most of their money running ads.
Just to be clear about it, I classify running affiliate links and Adsense together. To me, from a categorization perspective they both are pretty much the same. Why? Because the goal is the same. At the end of the day you are doing your best to get your website traffic to click on your affiliate links or Adsense links.
Let’s take a close look at the first category. Remember the goal here is to make money period!! We are not talking about folks that blog for the love of it or for any other reason. Money is the only priority, the only goal, no popularity contests to win, no bonding with your readers and fellow bloggers, absolutely no distractions.
Now obviously you need to have your niche picked out and selecting a niche is a process best explained in another series of posts. Assuming you have your niche picked out, what should your focus be? Is it Content? Traffic? Let’s answer these questions.
What should you focus on?
I’ve listed the most important points below. Oh, the list by the way is ordered based on priority.
SEO
Your entire focus right from selecting your niche, to picking out your domain name, hosting, blog design and content must be done with search engines in mind. This and only this will ensure you make money. Once you have your blog setup it is crucial that you rank high for the keywords that you target. Folks, search engine optimization is something all bloggers have to learn if you ever want to make serious money online.
Every single SEO out there (all shades, black, grey, white) that’s worth mentioning is now spending a bulk if not most of their time and their company’s time not in helping or consulting for big firms but in running their own affiliate and Adsense sites. There is simply too much money to be made. Why consult for a firm when you can apply all the SEO techniques you know into building Affiliate and Adsense sites and generate 10 times the income. Bloggers, this is your competition. Simply writing good content is not enough, hell you don’t even need good content, you need to rank high and you can do it with crappy content.
Spend your time learning SEO, spend your time building links, end of the day this is what you will be doing once your website is established.
Blog Design
Next in terms of priority is your Blog design. Why? Because if you have a good design then you will not get any clicks. This is a very subjective topic but the point is that the design should be optimized to get you more clicks. If that means a lousy design with 20 pt font sizes and red font color to boot all over the place then so be it.  Ever wondered why so many of those high ranking sites on Google take you to a landing page that will seem like your 10 year old kid designed it blindfolded? Your first impulse would be to click on the nearest link and get the hell out of the site. Guess what? That is precisely the intent.
Many of the websites that are really focused on this model do not even look like a blog. They will appear to be a normal website. No RSS, no blog roll, no seemingly obvious categories. The links, the navigation will be structured to look like an everyday website.
Blog Content
Do I need good content? If you are running affiliate links then yes you do. You need to engage the audience enough to point him or her in the right direction. If you are running Adsense I would go so far to say you don’t need good content. Just enough to satisfy the search engine algorithms.
How much content would you need? This would depend on the niche you are targeting. You need to have enough content to rank highly for all the keywords and long tail keywords you plan on targeting. Remember you don’t plan to engage a reader beyond a certain point or churn out value driven content that people seek.
Blog Promotion
The only promotion you will do is to build links. Social media is to be used to build links. Networking is to done to build links. I hope you are starting to see the pattern. Everything you do with your blog is to be done with search engines in mind.
This category has tremendous potential but can and will work only if you are conscious of what is to be done and disciplined. If not you would end up with a mix of the two sub categories and your earnings will only amount to so much. There will always be an odd exception and aiming to be that exception is strangely the most common route that all bloggers choose.Â
Folks, I’m going to have to stop it here for today and pick up the other sub category under blogs that make money directly tomorrow. Enjoy your day.
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April 2nd, 2008 at 2:45 am
Yes, its good to have a mix of good keywords for the search engines and valuable information for the readers. On the other hand I see people like Steve Pavlina and Joe Vitale concentrate more on the human element. There’s nothing wrong with that approach; as their blogs will get exposure through Word-of-Mouth.