Class #3
Starting Your Blog, Getting traffic,
And Making YOU Money
Blogging 101 Introduction:
Blogs are a great platform for promoting products, branding, creating awareness and creating transparency. All
of which lead to more sales and more money for you!
So how do people make money off of blogs?
Once you get website traffic to your blog you can make money in several ways. The easiest way is to place
Google Adsense on your site. You will get paid every time someone clicks on an ad. Pretty cool way to make
money, you don’t have to manage or worry about anything.
The other option is registering at a Network (remember last class) and find related affiliate offers. Place these
offers on your site and watch your visitors start filling out the offers. The key here is to make sure they are
related in some way, and make it seem like you are helping them (which you are) if they fill out the offers!
The best thing about blogs is they are easy to set up, easy to manage and the search engines like Google,
Yahoo and Bing love how they are built. You can set up a great looking blog in less than 20 minutes (after some
practise) and you don’t need to know any computer programming.
Starting Your Blog Today:
Starting blogs is very easy. We are not going to write a step-by-step guide here since so many for free already
exist. Just go to www.wordpress.com and you will find everything you need to set up a basic blog in under 30
minutes (that’ right your own website that the search engines love in 30 minutes)!
So for today, just get a blog set-up using Hostgator from yesterdays class and buying a domain from
www.NameCheap.com do a quick Google search and you will find a discount code to save a few dollars on your
first domain name.
Tip: You may want to wait to buy the domain until you read the ‘Choosing a Niche’ class. Believe it or not, if
your domain name has the keyword you want to rank for in it, you get bonus points from Google and Yahoo!
Custom Wordpress Settings For Huge SEO Success:
- Under Settings/General, I suggest you put in a blog title and keyword rich tag line.
- Under Settings/Privacy, make sure that the “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone…” is
checked.
-Under Settings/Permalinks, for SEO purposes use this as your custom setting: /%category/%postname%/,
The Plugins You Must Add to Your Blog:
Akismet – This is installed by default. I highly recommend you activate this one, as it deletes spam
comments automatically. You’ll need to get a free API‐key from wordpress.org, so go there and create
an account and get the key.
Advertising Manager – Unless you have a wordpress theme that is pre‐configured for ads, I suggest
using this plugin. Advertising Manager manages your Google Adsense and other ad network accounts,
and allows you to easily place the ads either within your Wordpress blog posts, or within your
Wordpress theme.
All In One SEO Pack – One of the best SEO‐plugins for WordPress. Many features.
Contact Form 7 – Very easy to use contact form. You can set up multiple contact forms as well. Very
handy.
Feedburner Feedsmith ‐ this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and
redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. Just go to
feedburner.com and register for an account.
Google Analytics For WordPress – Integrates Google Analytics to your blog, so that you can track visitors
and get tons of data about them. Register for an account at google.com/analytics.
Simple Google Sitemap ‐ This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress
blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
Wordpress Database Backup ‐ On‐demand backup of your WordPress database.
And beyond that, there are hundreds, if not thousands of different plugins that can do whatever you
need them to do. Popular pages, slideshows, integrated media, automatic posts, your own shortened
URLs, ratings etc, the possibilities are endless!
Tips On Wordpress Appearance
Your blog needs to look professional, no doubt about that. Just google “wordpress themes” or
“wordpress templates”, and you’ll find thousands of free themes, some better looking than
others. If you have some money to invest, you can buy a premium theme, they usually range from about
$40‐$90, or let a designer custom design one, which will be a bit more expensive.
Secrets to Posting Great Content & Building a Huge Business
Assuming that you have done your research on what you want to blog about, or what you want to sell, it’s time
to start posting! Here are some things to consider to make your post more interesting:
1. Interesting and catchy headline. This is the first thing people see, and if you can’t catch their
attention with it, they won’t read the rest of the post either. Some professional bloggers insist you
should spend at least the same amount of time on the headline as you do on your actual blog post.
Remember to squeeze in your keyword(s) in the headline as well.
2. Interesting content that doesn’t sound like it’s selling something. People want to read honest
opinions, facts and blog posts, not a sales copy letter. If you’re trying to sell something, don’t make it
too obvious. Books have been written on the different selling techniques for blogs, so it’s impossible to
cover them in one article, and it also depends on what you are blogging about.
3. Don’t make it too long. One mistake many amateurs do is that it seems like they’re trying to write a
novel with every blog post. Short posts with valuable content works way better than long posts. Also
remember to not have more than 2‐3 sentences per paragraph. It makes it a lot easier to read. We will
cover different sales techniques for blogs in other articles, videos and posts, and also on the forum, so
feel free to ask all your questions there!
How to Get FREE Traffic to Your Blog (Build Backlinks)
For blogs, and depending on what kind of blog you have, I’d recommend doing the following if you want free
quality traffic:
Social bookmarking – I personally use OnlyWire.com to automatically bookmark on many sites, but at
least bookmark on the big ones like Delicous, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc.
Articles – Write articles and submit them to article directories. Use the resource box to link to your
blog.
Comments on other blogs – Post comments with valuable information on other similar blogs.
Forums – Join forums and discussions, and use your blog link in your signature. Never spam forums, it’ll
get you banned and flamed.
Social media – Use your Twitter, MySpace and Facebook accounts to drive traffic to your blog.
Videos – Create videos, or videos of slideshows, and put them on YouTube, MetaCafe and all the
other big sites. Register at tubemogul.com to upload to several sites at the same time.
SEO – Create linkwheels, backlinks etc to rank for your keyword(s).
What is a Linkwheel?
This is a term used to describe creating web 2.0 properties and inter-linking them to each other while having
links also pointing to your own blog. Search engines love this.
This is more than enough information to get your blog up, get free website visitors, and start making money
right away. Get started now!