Blog For Profit

Sooner or later, you will be faced with the decision of whether to use advertising on your blog or not. Advertising isn’t mandatory for keeping your blog interesting; in fact, it’s merely an optional tool you can use in case you want to take advantage of your blog’s popularity. But once you’ve decided on placing ads on your site, there’s one more issue you need to consider: setting your blog’s advertising rates. So how much can you expect to charge or be charged?

With blog advertising, there are no set rates. It is up to the blogger to design the correct ad payment scheme that attracts advertisers and allow him to generate a reasonable income at the same time.

To help you determine the right advertising rates for your blog, it’s important to consider doing some research first, particularly about similar blogs and to consider your traffic and perform some simple experimentation using your site.

Playing with figures If you think that setting your ad rates at low prices will attract more advertisers, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Your $300 a month rate may not stand against another blogger’s $600 a month rate if you only have 50,000 page views monthly and he enjoys 600,000 page views.

An advertiser will look at the ratio between the cost of advertising on your blog against the amount of traffic that your site generates, the same traffic that will potentially click on the ads.

A good ‘constant’ to consider when determining ad rates is the CPM or Cost-Per-Mille - mille being equivalent to 1,000. Let’s say a blog receives 150,000 page views monthly. For a 125×125 sidebar ad (usually the most common), the blog charges $250 monthly. Divide $250 by 150 (that’s 150,000 divided by 1,000 to come up with the CPM) and you’ll get $1.66 CPM.

The same arithmetic is used by some of the most popular blogs, including JohnChow and Copyblogger. For your blog, you might want to consider how much traffic you generate and the number of genuine page views you get. These figures will help you evaluate your blog and come up with the appropriate ad rate.

Since these blogs are well established, you could start at far lower rates if you’re still building traffic. Consider a starting figure of about $0.5 CPM, which is friendly enough to your advertisers and good enough for you. Raise this rate gradually as your blog becomes more popular and as more advertisers and sponsors buy ad space from you.

Size and location Advertising rates also vary depending on the size of the ad and where it will appear. Larger ads and those that will be placed in prime locations or ‘hotspots’ will cost more. Ads will also be more expensive if they will appear along with content or on your blog’s header. Cheaper locations will be those found on the page’s footer and the area located after the fold.

Factors that influence ad rates Not every blog can enjoy strong advertising support. That’s mainly because not every blog has the right amount of site traffic, the right visitors, market demographics or niche. These are just some of the factors that affect your eligibility for ad placement and the rate you can charge on your blog.

Blogs, by the way, do not pass through the same channels as traditional print media. The cost of providing information in blogs is low enough that bloggers can offer low advertising rates and still earn a profit.

Professional blogging is a very new idea with a lot of potential for entrepreneurs who have insight, drive, and a basic understanding of today’s innovative web technology. The ranks of so-called pro bloggers are still quite small, and there are very few people who make their living entirely off of their blogs. However, every day there are more and more people who have managed to turn their weblogs into cash cows that supplement their income. The number of pro bloggers is growing by leaps and bounds, but it is difficult to say whether this trend will continue.

Many bloggers dream of entering the sphere of professional blogging. There are very few people who happily devote an hour or more each day to their blog without at least occasionally wishing that they could earn some kind of financial reward for all of their work. Several models exist for making money with a blog, the most popular being to sell advertising space through Google’s AdSense program or directly to a company that wishes to reach the demographic that your blog appeals to. However, there are very few people indeed who can make a comfortable living just by selling space on their blog sidebars.

A lot of the people who read weblogs are bloggers themselves, in part because of the fact that the people who use blogging technology on a daily basis are most likely to be interested in what other writers are doing with the medium. This fact begins to explain why the people who succeed in the world of professional blogging are mostly people who have devoted themselves almost entirely to learning about, talking about, and writing about blogging. More than any other topic, pro bloggers turn their attention to the phenomenon of blogging itself. A lot of pro bloggers make the topic of blogging the stunningly self-reflexive ongoing focus of their blogs.

Of course, professional blogging is destined to become much more complicated in the future than it is today. In the current moment, pro bloggers who attract the largest audiences and make the most money are mostly concerned with investigating the blogging movement and with offering advice to amateur bloggers. However, as the kinds of people who regularly read blogs changes, and the demographics of bloggers expand and diversify as blogging software becomes more user friendly, it is very likely indeed that the world of pro blogging will begin to reflect these changes. Indeed, it is very difficult to predict exactly what kinds of blogs will be reaping the greatest financial rewards five or ten years down the road. The world of pro blogging is one of constant change and flux, which is part of what makes it so exciting.

Easy Link Exchanging With your Wordpress Blogs

If you didn’t already know it, one thing which can help your blog get more traffic is backlinks. Backlinks are any link which points to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site the better, not just in the hope someone will click on the link from someone elses site, but also for Search Engine rankings.

Search engines (some of the major ones anyway) use the amount of links going to a site as part of the algorithm for deciding its position. That oversimplifies it somewhat as they also take into account many other factors but for the benefit of brevity and staying on topic we’ll just say that more backlinks will help your ranking in the search engines.

There are lots of ways to get links back to your site, such as writing and submitting articles, which is highly recommended as it gives you one way inbound links which count more towards your score. Another way which can help is by exchanging links with other site owners.

As the phrase “link exchange” implies, you will be exchanging a link for a link. So in other words you find someone with a similar site to yours, link to them and they in turn put a link on their site back to yours. With a blog this can seem a difficult and time consuming occupation, as you’d need to post a new page for your link exchange partners, and edit it each time you add a new link.

Wordpress comes with a built in link system called a Blogroll, which shows the links you add to it on your site. Obviously this could become unsightly and take up a lot of space in the sidebar as you start getting more and more link exchanges made. Because Wordpress blogs are easily upgraded to perform new tasks with “plugins” it isn’t as hard as it may seem to deal with link exchanges using the Blogroll.

You can download the Blogroll Page Plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogroll-links which turns your blogroll sidebar widget into a full blown links page. Each time you add a link to your blogroll it will be added to the page. It even allows categories to be used to segregate the links however you wish.

Increase your sites visibility start your link exchange process today, it’s easy now you know how to make Wordpress Blogroll work for you.

Article by Douglas Titchmarsh (c)

Learning How to Make Money Blogging

There are two major types of business models that entrepreneurs use to make money blogging. The first and most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising to different companies and brands who want to reach that blog’s readers. The second kind of money making blog is one that helps a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing.

If you are blogging with the goal of selling advertising, there are two basic ways that you can go about recruiting sponsors who want to put ads on your site;
you can let someone else do all of the legwork, or you can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue. Within the first group, many people make money blogging by selling space through Google’s AdSense program. The advantages of this program are numerous, as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger or webmaster to begin raking in profits. However, most people discover that they make less money through this method than they had hoped that their blog would earn.

Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route. People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies. The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action. One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a weblog designed specifically to appeal to that company’s customers and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers’ minds. More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging technology. However, very few people manage to reap the profits they want from their blog. Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons.

Often, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.

The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.  

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you. However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in order to make a profit isnt easy. As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.  

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. To be certain, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati, and once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so dont skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors by setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in the blog community, and following other established modes of winning traffic. 

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

   Because there are so many blogs and web sites about blogs on the internet, it can be tough to distinguish your blogging web site from all of the others. Whether you are starting up a new web site aimed at bloggers or whether you are looking to make your existing blogging site more distinctive, the key to building and maintaining a site that will capture the interest and attention of the blogging community is finding your niche. If you can fill a unique need in a way that no other web site does, you’ll be able to build a lasting readership among web surfers.

Once you have discovered a niche, you will still have a lot to do, but finding your place in the blogosphere is the place to begin.   Every great blogging web site starts with a great idea, and you can’t build a successful site that will last without one.

There are many great sites aimed at today’s bloggers, and competition for the attention of this growing demographic is fierce. To make your blogging web site stand out from the pack, you will need to offer something that no other site is currently offering, or you will need to do the same thing that an already popular site does but in a more impressive or valuable way.  

One way to discover an ideal model for your blogging web site is to look at the sites that have successfully captured a blogging audience already to determine if you can appropriate some of their strategies to help realize your vision. Of course, you will also need to add a unique flair to your project in order to stand apart from your competition. Many people agree that the web sites that do the best in today’s market are the sites that have the most personality. The fiercely individual surfers who are bloggers are a demographic that responds especially strongly to personality, so consider how you can give your site a unique and attractive feeling by lending your own voice and sensibility to your site’s design and content.  

Once you have a great idea for your site, have pinpointed a special niche that you are well equipped to fill, and have infused the site with personality, the next step is figuring out how to get the word out to bloggers. In the long run, a great idea just isn’t enough to propel your blogging web site to success. You will need to draft a smart and realistic marketing plan in order to draw readers to your site. Once you hook a blogger, your great content will keep them coming back, but it is vital to get that first glance or your site won’t have a chance to shine.

We have just added the “7 Days To Profitable Blogging “ e-book to our discount E-book store

This book is a useful guide to starting, and running a blog for profit, because there’s no reason internet marketers shouldn’t have the most successful, high trafficked blogs on the Internet. No reason except no one has ever bothered to explain HOW to set it all up. So we’ve done that and put it all in the book.

Discover how to quickly and easily set up your first blog, and turn it into a money maker. Follow the instructions and you’ll have a foundation that can’t be beaten, and is strong enough to support anything you choose to do! More than that though, you’ll find that anything you add will be effortlessly easy to promote.
“Ditch The Wannabe Experts and Grab Our Seven Day Master Plan!”
With our seven day master plan, we answer everything from:

• What the four best bookmarking sites are for driving incredible traffic in your direction
• How best to build your blog
• THE single best platform to blog from
• How to choose a the keywords you’re building your blog around
• How to implement those keywords in a way that HELPS your readers and YOUR income
• AND MORE

7 Days To Blogging Profit is a great book, but it is made even better because of the low price which we offer it for, see for yourself just how low at “7 Days To Profitable Blogging “ .

By Joel Comm

Whether you’re just starting out with AdSense or whether you’ve been using it for years, the success of your ads will depend on knowing five absolutely essential pieces of information about AdSense:

1. AdSense Can Make You A Huge Heap Of Cash Lots of people make the mistake of believing that AdSense is only good for bringing a site a few extra pennies a month. Wrong! AdSense can fund your lifestyle - if you get it right.

2. Junk Sites Get Junk Income But just because it’s possible for a site to make a lot of money with AdSense, it doesn’t mean that any site can make a lot of money with AdSense. Your site must have good content that can attract users on its own merit. There are a lot of different strategies available for producing good content for your site. You’ll need to use them if you want to create the sort of site that makes real money.

3. Your Choice Of Ads Matter One of the first things that you’ll have to do when you join AdSense is to pick the types of ads you want to display. Success relies on following certain principles that encourage users to click and persuades them that they’ve got a reason to do so. You’ll need to know those principles.

4. You Can Influence The Ads You Receive! Here’s a little known AdSense secret: you do have some control over the ads that get served on your site. That control isn’t unlimited - but it is worth exercising. It’s also a little complicated but it’s got a lot do with keyword hotspots located in each Web page. (I explain it all in my book, Google AdSense Secrets.) That’s definitely something you need to know!

5. Your Stats Are Your Best Friend The stats you get with your AdSense account might look complicated and well, a bit dull… but they’re packed with useful information that can have a massive effect on your revenues. To make real money with AdSense, you need to know what your stats are telling, what they’re not telling you and where you can find out more.

There’s a lot you need to know to make serious money with AdSense. If you’re missing that information, you’re just throwing money away.

For more Google AdSense tips, visit AdSense Secrets v4.0

Copyright © 2005 Joel Comm. All rights reserved

There are many money making opportunities online but there are also those who simply use the internet’s power for fun and for their hobbies. One of the many innovations today online is blogging. Blogging can be defined in many different ways depending on the blogger intentions.

Bloggers post blogs for many different reasons and this is how they define blogging. If you want to improve the search rankings of your blogs, increase your profits, and your readers or subscribers, you can make use of SEO blogging software.

Whenever you post a new blog, it is full of fresh ideas and information. In order to get high rankings in search engines, the contents of your blog should always be fresh and so you need to update often. How can you optimize the blog contents and get high rankings?

You can do this by putting the right key-phrase or keyword in your blog’s title and scatter them all throughout the blog post. You mustn’t forget about internal linking as well because this plays an important role in the rankings. These things can attract more readers and subscribers and the coolest thing about it is that it won’t cost you anything.

Optimizing your blogs is just like optimizing a certain website; the techniques used are all the same. There is another thing that you shouldn’t forget. Your main site must be linked with your key-phrase or keyword. You can boost your page rank or PR by posting many interesting blogs especially for theme-based sites. This is the surface of SEO blogging software.

In choosing SEO blogging software, there are some things that you need to check:

The first is to check the Meta data. As mentioned earlier, you must choose appropriate key-phrase or keywords. By doing so, you can attract more traffic. Meta data will be converted into tags. Separate pages are created by ping services for every tag. The pages are indexed by the major search engines and your blog posts will be published on the search engine’s page under the tag examples.

Another is the sexy URLs. The URL of the blog posts should contain the essential keywords – this is the meaning of sexy URLs. Your post’s title will be added automatically to the URL. By simply using the keywords in your post’s title, it can find its way to the URL.

Successful blogs will often receive comments and some may contain URLs in them. The SEO blogging software can decide whether your linking power is leaked to the comments. Tags will be placed on every comment – whether ‘do follow’ or ‘no follow’.

SEO blogging software is sometimes integrated to the blog platforms. Google sitemaps are also important and if you do it automatically, it’s really great.

So there you have it; these are the things that you need to look into when choosing your SEO blogging software. If you want to become a successful blogger, you need to give importance to the contents of your blog posts. By using SEO blogging software, you can also optimize your rankings in search engines.

If you’re a new blogger, you should look for the right SEO blogging software in the market. There are many blogging softwares that you can choose from and so you must be able to choose the right one for your blog posts. Now, you can look forward to a successful blogging career.
 

Some basic guidelines on blogging, if you use a service such as blogger.com they have their own terms and conditions for posting content. You can’t just post anything, so always read the t&c’s. If you don’t follow their rules, your blog will probably get deleted.

If you host a blog on your own hosting account, using software like WordPress. You have full control over the content you post, so your blog won’t get deleted.

What are the DOs and DON’Ts of blogging?
 
First the DOs:

• Do put pictures and multimedia sources to enhance the content. Could either be a vlog, photoblog, etc.

• Do base your posts with a good category structure to make it easy to find content for a particular topic.
 
• Do put paragraphs and sub-ideas. It’s not entertaining to read one block of manuscript. Digest it into pieces.

• Do create mutual communication between you and your readers. Answer queries without leaving your readers hanging for an answer.

• Do make your article as simple and as understandable as possible. Avoid beating around the bush. Not unless you wanted to captivate your readers with your literary prowess. Write like your talking to a friend.

• Do respect your reader’s opinions. That’s the essence of being a blogger. Accept truths. Do away with the insults.

• Do update. If you make blogging a part of your life, post as often as possible with fresh content.

 
Second the DON’Ts:

• Don’t go against your host’s legal boundaries. Respect their terms and conditions.

• Don’t ignore the quality of your content. Be specific with posting information.

• Don’t provoke fights. Sometimes comments can be a pain. And sometimes, none of it is true. Let it go and don’t waste your energy.

• Don’t waste a post with inappropriate details that would just confuse your audience.

• Don’t copy the works of others. They might sue you for plagiarism for this. Produce something original. Imitations trigger criticisms.

• Don’t be afraid to advertise. It’s one way to make your blog famous among the masses. Go to other sites and leave your blog address. It’s a matter of give and take.

• Don’t attack individuals, companies or fellow bloggers. Show respect. If you disagree with an opinion, tell it with caution.
 
• Don’t disregard your responsibilities. Journalism still has its price. Being able to write in a liberated way doesn’t erase you of your obligations.

Most internet sites like Yahoo! and IBM publish their guidelines on blogging. It is intended to be read, understood, and accepted by the blogger. Obey certain rules and policies. It won’t do you wrong. Libelous materials could cause you problems, so better follow the rules.