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.

Yesterday I was thinking that would be fine if I tell you how I process the blogs. Like you, I also read constantly many blogs, and others eventually when I visited them through entrecard. Many people have congratulated me for my dedication and sincerity. I really appreciate all those comments, but I consider I’m just being honest.

How I process that information?

There are many great blogs with excellent content over there. So I analyze the information to learn how I can improve my blogging skills, applying all the acquired knowledge to write my future posts or to improve my SEO, for example.

But eventually, when I read a post’s title, it sounds as a great one, but sometimes the blogger is not clear expressing the ideas, ending in a waste of time. And I said waste of time because the complexity of the posts, and when you finished to read it you don’t know what to say, you stay like shocked and you didn’t learn anything.

In these cases, after read a post with a potential title and unclear content, I organize the main idea of the post, and think about how can be improve it. Then, I write a little essay with that idea, to be developed and posted in the future, to give you the same idea but with a big difference in the content, the clarity of the information.

Usually, I do this kind of things with program’s reviews and some blogging tips. Some bloggers don’t know their reader’s wants, and that is something that should be fixed. Writing detailed and clear information, your readers will catch your posts, returning over and over time to read your content.

Nowadays, the blogs are one of the bigger sources of information on Internet. There are many facilities that services like WordPress, Blogger and Typepad provides, giving all the basic resources to create and manage a blog, for free. Due to this, many people over the Internet have given themselves the opportunity to create a blog and experience its managing, writing about their hobbies, day to day activities or whatever their want. Now, the question is: why the blogs became so popular?

What Make Them So Attractive?

You never asked you this question? Me neither, until now. The blog is a great way to communicate many things such information, experiences and news. Many people who use their blog to write about their daily experiences, commonly do it to share all that information with their family and friends, without monetary aims, just for fun. Other people use their blog to share tutorials, giving away all their knowledge. The reasons can be many, they can feel good just doing it, others do it because their content is limited on Internet, or just because they are getting paid.

In any case, the reason why the blogs are so attractive is because they are readily accessible. Being on Internet there are several opportunities, because it can be consulted by everybody whenever they want, from any place of the world. This propriety of popularity is what has made the blogs so attractive for everybody. In addition of that, the opportunity to edit your blog easily by writing new posts and keep informed to the people who read your content.

Their Presence On Internet

Wherever you look, there is a blog. If you type anything on Google, whatever the topic, at least a half of the results will be linked to a blog. It seems like the blog became more easy to create and edit than a standard website. If you check a company’s website, you will see that they will have a section reserved to their blog, where they announce their latest products or offers.

Of the way in the blogs were established on the Web, they caused the birth of communities which offer all the support the blogs need. Communities like BlogCatalog can provide you thousand of blogs related to any topic. Something curious that I noticed is that all the communities are getting connected with the others, for example if you are a BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog user, now you can see the activities of your friends on the others networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter and more.

Something amazing is happening there. If you noticed it, everything is getting connected, even more than ever. When it happens, the blogs will be the most popular method of socializing on the web, altogether with the social media networks.

Pinging is a very important action that every blogger should do everyday. Refreshing the concept of ping provided in the last post, ping is a computer’s network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. When you ping a service, it means that you are sending a signal and it will answer with a “pong”, taking a look on your blog for new content and update it in the server.

As you can see, pinging is very important for us, the bloggers. With this tool you can refresh your content or feed across the web: search engines, technorati, social media networks and may be another service like web profiles, and you can use it to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. This gives you a big SEO advantage, it ensures that your content will be seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help you to rank your posts for less-competitive keywords.

How To Ping ?

Pinging your blog is a really easy task and you can do it in different ways. When I started blogging the past year, I used the service provided by Ping-o-Matic!. It lets you ping your blog on many services like Technorati, Weblogs, FeedBurner, Blogrolling etc etc… You just need to put your blog URL and feed URL (optional), check the services which you want to ping and press the ping button. Then, Ping-o-Matic will send pings to all those services and your blog/feed content will be updated instantaneously on these sites!

That is a good way to do it, but it is boring because it’s manual. For our luck, there is a way to do it automatically with wordpress ( I’m don’t know about blogger or other platforms but probably is something similar ). WordPress automatically notifies to all those popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now, people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

WordPress makes easy the manual task of checking all your services at ping-o-matic, by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server (rpc.pingomatic.com) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you!

Where to add or remove pings on wordpress?

By following this steps you will be able to add or remove pings to your wordpress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress weblog.
2. Select “Options” from the top menu.
3. 
4. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
5. The last option on the page is “Update Services.” You will see a text box with probably the ping-o-matic ping by default "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping", but you can add more pings if you want.

Is recommendable to ping each service separately instead using Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping. For example, I recommend you to ping Technorati directly with every new post and update, instead waiting for ping-o-matic to ping our blog. The following is a list of english blog pinging services:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

If you use one of thus services, place the related link into your Update Services text box to ping automatically your blog on it . If you are not using wordpress as blog platform, search in your panel of a pinging tool, I pretty sure it must be there, the only thing that you need to do is to add the url of your service and start to ping your blog across the web!.