There are 5 major items to creating a profitable blog. Miss any of these and you will struggle to get going.
This is why there are 5 sections to WordPress Lessons. the first section will be open to everyone for free. See I feel it is important for you to know that my teaching method will work for you. So step 1 will be given live on Saturday at 2 pm edt. More details later in the week but mark your calendar now.
The steps are
Niche research
Setting up your blog
Posting to your blog
Generating traffic
Testing and tweaking
Each of these are important but on Saturday we will discuss the first step which in my opinion is the one most often overlooked and kills most blogs before you even get started.
Make sure you are on the email update list to get the details later this week for the call on Saturday.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Today is day 4 of the 5 steps to a profitable blog. We have already covered finding your niche, setting up your blog and how to post your blog. Today we will work on generating visitors.
The first thing I do with any new blog is to submit my feed to as many RSS directories as I can. To do this I use a FireFox plugin called Submit Em Now. It is easy to use and the payback for the hour or so of effort is huge as it is one time effort.
Start bookmarking your posts to various bookmarking sites. I use a service called OnlyWire which allows me to bookmark once and have it submitted to various services.
Now while on the subject of bookmarking make sure that you bookmark other sites too. If all you ever bookmark is your own sites you stand the chance of losing your account at some sites. Bookmarking is supposed to help others find quality information. When you find it bookmark it.
Comment on blog posts. This allows you to generate not only links back to your site if they allow do follow it allows you to get traffic from others if…
Here is the big if on commenting on blog posts. Take part in the conversation. Add value to the blog where you comment. Don’t just go in and say “I agree” or “I like your post”.
If you like it say why and what it has done for you. If you don’t agree make a cogent argument for why you feel the way you do. Now that adds value.
A couple more items that will help you generate traffic. Submit articles to the directories especially two part articles where part one goes in the directory and part two is on your blog.
Use your blog link in forums where you are active. Note don’t spam forums to get your link in any more than you spam blog comments.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Saturday at 2pm edt I will have a free teleseminar on Step One that will expand what has been offered here. You can call in or listen on the web. Details are available at Profitable Blogging – Step One.
Now we have discussed how to find your niche and do keyword research, how to set up your blog it is time to start posting.
Above is a look at the writing area of WordPress. Now lets talk about creating your post. You want each post to be targeting one of your keywords you developed in the first step.
Blog posts don’t have to be as long as an article so if you want to talk about 3 topics create 3 posts not one long post with three sub topics.
The more tightly targeted the posts the easier it will be to rank high for the specific keyword you are targeting. This is the first step in generating traffic.
Next at the bottom of the writing area is a section for your tags. Tag the specific topics you are posting about.
Below that you will find the category section. Create categories for you top level keywords. For example if you have a blog about dogs you can have a category about labrador’s, poodles, etc.
Then when you do a post about training your lab it would go in the labrador category.
Now to using the All In One SEO Pack. The biggest piece is to use your title tags properly. Here is an example -
I write a post about Askimet the spam plugin. That is the keyword I am looking to rank for in the search engines. My tile of the blog post is “Why you should use Askimet”.
This is a good title to get someone to read but as the search engine gives a higher weighting to the words in the beginning of the title tag for the title tag I would use – “Askimet – Why you should use it”.
This isn’t a comfortable title for the reader but it does tell the spiders the primary topic of this post is Askimet.
Having a search engine friendly title tag is the biggest thing you can do to help your ranking in the serps.
This plugin will also allow you to add a description meta tag and your keywords and these will help you but no where near as much as the title tag.
These steps when posting will help you to create a profitable blog.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Saturday at 2pm edt I will have a free teleseminar on Step One that will expand what has been offered here. You can call in or listen on the web. Details are available at Profitable Blogging – Step One.
Yesterday we discussed how to find your niche or topic for a profitable blog. The next step is to get your blog up and running.
Now there are a variety of choices to get a blog some free some paid but if you are serious you really need to have a blog on your own domain. If you have a Cpanel server hosting account with Fantastico this is a point and click set up.
The problem is that if you stop there you would be better using a free service like MyCCBlog with the proper plugins already installed.
At the very least you will need the following plugins if you are using WordPress.
All In One SEO
Google Sitemap
Google Analyticator
Smart RSS Pinger
Now there are a ton of others but these are the absolute minimum that you need to make your blog friendly for the search engines.
There are a few other things you need to do to improve your blogs effectiveness. Next is to use custom permalinks.
This gives you more places to have keywords to get you ranked for the keywords that you generated for your blog posts.
Next you will want to change and tweak out your theme. This way you can customize the look of your blog. Appearance counts. If you go to a site and it is the standard Kubrick theme .
Compare that to the look of this blog. There are thousands of Kubrick’s floating around and when I see one I am usually gone.
Now there are a lot of other plugins that you can add to your blog to make it do just about anything that you might want.
For example – podcast, video, contact forms etc.
If you need help doing things like installing WordPress, upgrading WordPress, adding plugins and adding themes check out WordPress Made Easy.
Next step is creating your posts.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Saturday at 2pm edt I will have a free teleseminar on Step One that will expand what has been offered here. You can call in or listen on the web. Details are available at Profitable Blogging – Step One.
This is probably the step that most people leave out when deciding to start a profitable blog. They just randomly pick a topic and run with it.
My feeling is that first you need a topic that is a passion for you at least for a blog that you are going to write. Now if you are out sourcing everything this doesn’t apply. Writing a blog can be a problem if you are using a topic that isn’t of interest to you.
Now this doesn’t mean you need to be an expert but it should be a topic that you at least want to learn more about. Being a gate keeper can be a very good position to be in.
What do I mean by gate keeper?
Lets take an example. I want to learn about a topic. I can write a blog about that topic and reference the various resources I find that are teaching me. Now if I am sending people other places why would they come back to me?
The reason is simple because I keep finding good places for them and they know that I am acting as a sorting house for what is worthwhile or not. Eventually through your research you will become the expert. A bit of research every day can make you an expert in very little time.
You can also use an area that you have a good knowledge of as your topic. This is ideal and an easy way to show off your expertise.
No matter what area you pick you need to check profitability first.
You need to find out if the area you want to blog about is profitable. How can we do that?
First type some of your keywords into Google and look for how many ads show. If people aren’t advertising on the topic it probably doesn’t have the potential to generate a profit on the topic.
Just the number of searches doesn’t help. There are a reasonable number of searches for ufo and extraterrestrial but there aren’t any advertisers. Now you could get traffic on these topics but you wouldn’t be able to monetize it easily.
So pick your topic with care. Doing the research first will help you to be able to create a profitable blog.
Next you will want to find the keywords that fit your topic. You will need this to find the terms you want to post about. We’ll talk more about why when we get into the actual posting to your blog.
The best place to start will be the free service at word tracker. Now this will only give you the top 100 and lacks some of the information you will want but it is a good starting point.
Once you have found your niche then it pays to spend a few dollars and do one of the paid services. My favorite is Keyword Country simply because of their sorting functions. There is a free video showing you how to use it in Videos For Beginners.
This is the basics and this will be covered in more detail in a free teleseminar on Saturday.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Saturday at 2pm edt I will have a free teleseminar on Step One that will expand what has been offered here. You can call in or listen on the web. Details are available at Profitable Blogging – Step One.
