Disocover how to start your own money making blog with this short guide. A good starting point for beginners who wish to make affiliate commissions with a blog operation. Makes it easy getting your online business into action. We also answer any questions you may have about blogging.

Getting Started on Your First Blog Project

Yes you can make a fortune from simple blogs. For those of you who don\’t know what a blog is, the term is short for \’web log\’, which is basically an online log of your activities and experiences in a certain subject area.

You can use a free service for your blog, such as http://blogger.com. This is a great way to start out, as you get your blog higher up the search engines using this service. However, in the long term, you\’re better to have your own website with blog software installed. A good free one is wordpress. It\’s a PHP script, and most good web hosts provide it free with simple one click installation.

At the start, i recommend using http://blogger.com, and buy your domain name and get hosting at the same time. Reason for this is it takes quite a bit of time building a website and getting ranked well in the search engines. In the meantime, start building a basic website on your chosen subject area, while making your first blog posts on http://blogger.com.

Pick a subject you are knowledgeable of, preferably a hobby that you are passionate about. this way your blog post articles will flow naturally and you will enjoy the process more. you\’ll also likely to find readers for your blog more easily, through personal contact, your friends on Facebook and so on.

Here\’s a quick recommendation when choosing your domain name for your blog site – use the top keywords in your niche, and try to get an older domain that\’s over 5 years old. Search engines such as Google will rank higher for sites that have been around for longer. Sometimes people ditch good domain names not knowing this, maybe had bad marketing results using old style marketing techniques.

Now, for making money from your http://blogger.com blog in the early days, the quickest and simplest way is to use affiliate programs. For those of you who are new here, an affiliate program is where you sell other peoples stuff and get paid a percentage of the final sale price. The easiest place to start out with affiliate programs is http://Clickbank.com. They have thousands of digital products like ebooks, software and audio/video products too. They\’re the easiest to join, with no background checks or long signup process.

So go over to clickbank and select about five products related to your chosen subject area. Get your affilliate links and you\’re all set to go. Now don\’t just go blasting your blog with loads of affiliate links. This comes across as being spammy and your readers won\’t like it. So I advise to first provide quality information and interesting stuff. Then plug in some recommendations for your chosen affiliate programs – about twice a week.

Taking the next Step…

Then once you have some traffic coming to your http://blogger.com blog and making some sales through affiliate program links, then it\’s time to get your WordPress blog up and running on your site. Now you can use the same articles you had on your http://blogger.com blog, but I recommend re-writing them because the search engines will flag your posts as duplicate content.

Now because you\’re having a blog on your own website rather than http://blogger.com, you\’ll have to perform promotional activities to get your blog noticed. The best way to do this is having many backlinks from other sites. So what you do is join the top ranking forums in your subject area, and begin making posts. Now don\’t just go blatantly posting links to your blog. Instead take part in the conversation, answer peoples questions and establish yourself. Create a bio and profile page first. Only after making about 5-10 reply\’s to threads and maybe a few of your own, then post a link or two to your blog page. be careful here as many forum editors hate lots of links on their sites.

Blogging Do Not\’s

Notes on Using Drip Feed Software

Now many of you reading this may have come across software that will post articles to your blog on a drip feed, say making a few posts a day. You know the sort, they offer you a 10,000 articles package and install it on your site with Google Adsense or affiliate adverts and banners programmed into your blog. Now let me tell you that I have tried this and it does not work! Don\’t be fooled by this. Those ten thousand articles are all duplicate content, as the other thousand or so people who bought them will have the exact same content on their blogs. Google are wise to this, and your blog will never show up high in the search engines.

Now, using drip feed software is fine if you\’re using your own original articles, but not with duplicate articles. You can actually get your website banned from the search engines for that, as using such articles can be seen as breach of copyright, so beware.

Providing Out of date, Irrelevant Information

Nobody wants to read about stuff that is no longer relevant and out of date. It\’s ok to reference old stuff if you find it useful to your audience, but keep your blog in tune with current times and your most recent experiences. The search engines want pages with quality information that people are searching for right now.

Blogging About too Many Subjects

Keep your blog posts focussed on just one subject. If you have another subject you wish to blog about, open another http://blogger.com account or a new website. Talking about two different niches from the one blog will confuse the reader and looks unprofessional. Also, only promote about three or so affiliate programs at a time. This way you can maximise your Clickbank paychecks.

Sending Traffic to Crap Affiliate Pages

Before deciding to promote a Clickbank product, don\’t just go with the one with the highest commission. First check out their sales page. Does it look enticing? Is it too hype filled? Check out reviews from previous buyers. Visit sites like http://Alexa.com, or type the name of the product followed by \’reviews\’ into the search engines, and do some research before spending your valuable time promoting something that won\’t sell well.

That sums up this article about starting a blog operation. Thank you for reading.

Best Regards,
Neil Harland – Author
http://www.codewareonline.com

Author Bio: Neil Harland is a Web Site Designer and Programmer, and offers both free and low cost web hosting, as well as site design service at reasonable rates. Click Here for more info.

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