Money Making Blogs

There are two major ways to get traffic to your blog:

Pay Per Click (PPC):
Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are the big 3) where you pay for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.

In either case, you’ll have to pay. It is a quick way to get listed (albeit not in the organic listings) in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing – but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Resources to check out:
Google AdWords
Yahoo Search Marketing
MSN AdCenter

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
There are a lot of companies working ‘behind the scenes’ to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase. The nice thing about SEO is that it’s free (meaning you don’t have to pay to get the traffic). The downside is that getting your site listed on the first page of search results can take a long time and lots of work!

Resources:
Search Engine Relationship chart - who’s serving who?

Good news for those of you who want to blog but don’t want the hassle of setting one up with your own hosting account. Now you can host your blog on WordPress.com. You can customize the templates and posting is as easy as typing into a form and clicking on a button. Just head over there and grab a subdomain.

Your blog will be named [something].wordpress.com. “Something” is whatever name you choose.

The thing I like about WordPress vs. Blogger is that with WordPress you can set up categories to sort your posts and that makes your blog more organized. It also helps your readers find stuff on your blog.

At this time, you can’t manually tweak the template yet but I expect that will be a feature added in the future. If you would like to earn affiliate income, here’s one suggestion.

Get an account at Commission Junction or LinkShare if you don’t already have one. You can then set up a product blog and post product items to your blog. Make it more interesting. Write your own reviews. If you own the product yourself, tell people how you’re using it. Then encourage them to buy.

There is a tradeoff between promoting high-priced and low-priced item. The tradeoff is between volume and the amount of commission that you’ll make. Let’s say you’re promoting a book off Amazon. You may make a few more sales than promoting a massage chair. But one sale of the massage chair makes you a much bigger commission. You’ll have to test out what works best for you.