It is almost finished! Yes, this series that talks about building an online business using blogs is almost done. This is the last article which talks about something really important and something skipped in the previews lessons, making money! If you are building “a business” you should want to see money flowing through it, so let’s talk about some useful ways to earn profits from your blog.

5. Make Money

First of all, remember when I said in the preview lessons that you can promote your own products or services on the blog, well it’s time to do it! You can build banners in order to let your visitors know about what can they find in your blog.

Depending of your product or service, you can offer some basic features for free and then charge for some “premium features” which the users can get a better experience of your service. This is usually a good way to get money, once the users are familiarized with your product they will pay to get a complete version of it (if they need those features).

Besides by selling your product or service, you can also get money directly from your blog by using other services like the following ones:

• Google Adsense: This is may be the most common way to earn money on Internet. With Adsense you can display relevant ads on your website or blog and get paid for each click the people make on that links. The minimum payout is $100.
• Bidvertiser: This service is very similar than Adsense, you can display banners which you can personalize to make them look similar than your blog’s theme. The advantage of using this program is its minimum payout of $10.
• SponsoredReviews: With this service you can earn money by writing reviews about services or products on your blog. This is a perfect way to make money just by writing an article of a product or service related with yours.
• Text-Link-Ads: This is an excellent way to make money passively. With TLA you can earn money by selling text links on your blog’s articles. It works completely automatized and you don’t need to contact anyone to sell links. You only need to install a plugin on your blog and when someone buy a link on your blog it will be displayed automatically.
• Market Leverage, NeverBlueAds and PepperJam: These three services are affiliate networks which you can find many products and services that you can promote on your blog. Excellent way to get checks with good amounts.

There are many other ways to make money with your blog, for example you can sell banners and keep 100% of your earnings with the awesome OIOPublisher plugin for wordpress. There should be many undiscovered ways to make money and it’s up to you to discover them.

We are almost done with this series! Until now, I have covered some points which you will able to plan your business, selecting your brand, keywords, logo, strategies and other interesting things. So then, congratulations! You have successfully created your blog, but now you need to write content on it.

Once you have posted some good articles on your blog, you need to start promoting your content with people who use social networks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit etc etc…

4. Socialize

Besides all those communities I mentioned in the preview line, there are many other communities which you can use to interact with people, but I highly recommend you to check those ones.

There are people who use social media networks basically to spam, they submit and send to all their friends every single article they write, but you cannot adapt that strategy or you could get banned. Now, let’s talk about some techniques you could use to promote your products and content without spamming those networks:

• Adding People: I have seen several people adding me at BlogCatalog, but after adding them back, I check their profile looking for something like the following picture in its recent activities:

   

  

That’s completely crazy! How can you add so many people so fast? Obviously, this user was adding every single user it was seeing in other profiles. Tip number one, you should never do this, that’s spammy, and that’s not the worst part. If you visit those recently added users, you will see in their shout boxes the same welcome message! If you add someone and you want to give a good impression, at least you should personalize the message. So the important thing of this point is that you should add people who share the same interests than yours.

• Voting and Commenting: If you vote just to get karma points or to boost your profile’s statistics, you are wasting your time. It’s better to vote with property, vote up an entry only if its content is related to the category where it was published. Also, by leaving legitimate comments you will gain popularity and you will impose your authority on the other users.
• Submitting Content: If a user submit its own content consecutively, it will be suspicious. That could be considered as spam, so the other users could report you and you could get banned by admins. So, to avoid this kind of issues, I recommend you to submit your very best content, in addition to submit other’s people content too. This way, when you share your own content with other users it will be seen natural.

So then, being a good user of a network is more than submitting content, reporting spammers, giving your feedbacks and inviting people to join is a good way to contribute with any community.

In the previews lessons of this series I talked about the importance of Selecting a Niche and Planning your Strategies. In this third part, I’m going to talk about everything you need to know when you are creating the blog. I wanted to write this post earlier but I couldn’t because of its dense content. I will cover this part with sub-chapters, to make it easier to understand.

3. Create A Blog

3.1 Choose a Brand Name

Before thinking in the hosting or theme for your blog, you need to think about your brand. This is not an easy step, because sometimes it’s hard to decide something, specially because there are a lot of blogs over there and the brand you are thinking to adopt could be in use.

So, think well about the name you want to be represented by, because once you start promoting yourself with a brand, you should not change it. Catchy and short names are perfect for your selection. Once you have selected a brand name, you can use it as the title of your blog.

3.2 Choose your Keywords and Taglines

This is a very important step because the keywords will determine your ranking on the search engines such Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc… There are a couple of free tools which you can use to select your keywords:

- Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools.

- Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.

- Google Keyword SandBox: Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. You need to give a few descriptive words or phrases to get the keywords.

- Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.

- Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

I recommend you to use all those tools to get your keywords, and after then start merging the results. This way you will get a more accurate result.

3.3 Choose a Logo

The logo it’s very related to the Brand. In this case, it’s not 100% up to you, at least you are a designer. If it’s not your case, you can pay for a logo. There are many people (including me) willing to design a logo for your website or blog for a cheap price at DigitalPoint Forums. So you need to describe what do you want, the colors you want to have in your logo and the designer will do the hard work for you.

3.4 Choose a Theme

You can get a free theme to start, but I recommend you to get a personalized design specially for you. There are many companies which you can contact to create your theme: Unique Blog Designs, Weborithm, Reality Hosting etc… Also, if you have web design skills, you can create your own WP-Theme. If it’s the case, I highly recommend you to check the guides of WPDesignder, he has a very useful material there.

3.5 Get a Domain & Hosting

This step supposes to be easy, but it’s not. Getting a good domain could be a very hard task, specially if you looking for a domain which includes some of your keywords. There are many good domains already taken, and when you think you have found a good one, you notice it’s taken too. I usually use Godaddy to verify domain names, also you can use their Bulk Register tool to search domains based in the keywords you want.

Then, talking about the hosting I don’t recommend you to use GoDaddy. It seems to be cheap, but it’s really not. It’s truth that you can get a hosting for $6 a month, but when you start adding more services like php support, infinite subdomains and that kind of things, the bill flies like a rocket. So, I recommend you to use BlueHost, you pay $7 a month with no hidden fees, and by joining them you get a $50 coupon to advertise on Google, and a $25 coupon to advertise on Yahoo.

Wow what a large article, it has over 700 words! Well, I hope this lesson can help you to create your blog. I tried to cover everything but may be I missed something, so if you think I need to add something else to this phase, don’t be afraid to leave your comment .

In the first part of this series, I talked about the importance of selecting a niche before to start your own blog, in addition to some tips to do it successfully.

After that important step, many people are not sure about what they should do next. Some of them, start looking for the hosting and others for a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agent to help them with their blog’s configuration… I recommend you to plan some strategies after selecting a niche, this way, you will know what to do next.

2. Plan Strategies

What for? Well, I recommend you to investigate and create a list of things which you can use when you start your blog to attract traffic to it. As you may know, traffic is the most important thing in this business. You can have a great blog with many rich content, but if you don’t have readers to enjoy that content you are wasting your time.

To attract traffic to your blog, there are a lot of strategies that you can implement. The following one is a list of things which you can do to attract readers to your blog… All them are common but effective, and may be they could be obvious if you are familiarized with blogging:

• Sponsor a Contest: In your blog or in another one, if you sponsor a blog contest where you give away banners or reviews, you will attract many bloggers to see your stuff. Remember that people love to get things for free. I highly recommend you to try to find a contest held by good bloggers and try to take part in by sponsoring something in their contest. This way, you will get a good part of the traffic they get, which could be a lot.
• Offer an Ebook: Offering an ebook to your readers could be a great idea to attract more visitors to your blog. The problem here is that you will need to write and to review it first before the launching of your blog. However, it is a good way to get more visitors or subscribers.
• Buy Advertising: Buying advertising in other blogs related to your niche could be a way to get more visitors. Banners of 125×125 pixels, text links or reviews are the most common ways of advertising, and something you need to know is where to advertise on. It’s better to advertise in a few expensive blogs or in a lot of cheap blogs? The decision is up to you, but be sure not to waste your money. Remember, if you are going to advertise on a blog, you need to be offering something to the people driven through the banner or textlink.
• Plan Your Business: Some months ago, I wrote a review about an internet marketer who created a blog to sell keywords. His system is pretty cool, very ordered and well designed. Obviously, he planned his business before the launching, something you need to do if you want to be successful. Think well about what do you want to provide to the people who visit your blog and develop that idea.

Besides these, there are some other things which you need to plan and configure, such the keywords of your blog, the description and the logo, but they will be studied in the next chapter of this series.

To conclude, the second phase of building a business through blogs is about planning everything you will do in a future, to buzz your blog. May be the first weeks of your business could be discouraging but you don’t have to worry about it, many bloggers expect something bigger in their beginning.

Nowadays blogs are one of the most common websites on Internet. Due to that, many companies are using this platforms to promote their products or services, attracting many customers and increasing their sales.

Certainly blogging can be perfectly used to grow up a business, but that’s not an easy task. You need to plan everything step by step if you want to be successful in your business. In the next days, I’m going to write about building a business through blogs step by step, this way you could learn everything you need to know from zero, without having doubts in the middle of the journey.

1. Select A Niche

First of all, if you want to create a business with or without using blogs, you need to set a starting point. Selecting a niche is may be the most important thing, this will be the base of your business and from this point everything is going to be focused in that selected topic.

Selecting a niche could be a difficult task if you are not familiarized with this procedure, but don’t worry, every blogger or marketer have successfully passed for this. With a little of help, you will be able to select a niche and to build your business without problems. The following one is a list of characteristics which you should look for in a niche:

• Demand: On Internet, there are many available niches to start a business. Try to select a demanded one, this will increase the chance to succeed in your business. But something you need to know is that selecting a demanded niche, you will need to do a bigger effort to be an authority on Internet due to all the existing competition.
• Potential Services/Products: You need to make a study of what kind of services and products you can provide with the wanted niche. By selecting a good niche with a fan of possibilities in the services or products area, you can improve considerably the chances to get more customers and this way, increase your online earnings.
• A Known One: I highly recommend to choose a well known niche instead experimenting with an unknown one. The reason I recommend that is because with a well known niche, you will write your articles with more passion and dedication. You will know how to answer with property the questions made by your readers, creating a good relationship between you and them.
• A Growing One: The ideal thing is to select a niche which is growing up in the web, an undeveloped topic which you can establish your business and impose your authority, getting several followers in few months. It’s not bad to choose a developed niche because the information, techniques and resources changes with the time, but probably the majority of the people interested in that niche will be already following another bloggers…

I hope those tips can help you to select a niche to start your online business. Remember that only you can take the decision and you should think well before to choose something. A very loved niche is the ideal to write about, so think about your likes together with the tips listed above and you will be able to select a niche without problems. If you have any doubt about this, or if you think that I miss something, leave your reply to help this article to grow up.

As you know, the posts are conformed by 3 parts: Title, Content and Comments. Specially, the title and the content are which makes a post more or less popular. When you are trying to get new readers, no matter if you are doing it through social media networks or through search engines, you have one chance to attract the reader’s attention. What is that thing which makes you click on a post when you are surfing by the web, The Title!

The title is the first impression of the post, and because of that, you need to learn how to write a title correctly. I have read several blogs with good content, but they are not read by many people due to the way the blogger writes the titles of his posts. This is really sad because they are working so hard to being read, but the people don’t come! May be they are looking the way to improve this, but they can’t notice that it’s all about the titles.

So to attract people to your posts, you need to write catchy titles. In the title, you need to give the people a hint, about what they will find once they click the link to your post. But it is not enough, because you can tell them a hint by writing anything there… For example, in this post I could write The Post’s Title, but If I did, probably you won’t be here reading this. You need to do it interesting or controversial, this way you will catch more readers just by reading the title of your post.

In addition to writing catchy titles, also you can write a question. Writing a question as the title of a post, you will make the readers feel that you are talking directly with them. So, it’s possible to get even more readers with interrogative titles, because it means that automatically they will comment in the post to share their opinion, making the post a little interactive and creating a discussion, which will give you several comments to moderate .

What do you think? Feel free to use the comment box below, to share your ideas about this important point of a post.