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.

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Building A Business Through Blogs – Part Five

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.

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Building A Business Through Blogs – Part Four

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 .

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Building A Business Through Blogs – Part Three