Make Money Blogging

Trust me, this is a wrong question.
Why?
Because you can’t make money blogging! Yes, you read that correctly and I mean every ounce of that statement.
The truth is that every successful blogger you know didn’t make money blogging; they earn their income from monetizing their blog.
In other words, they provided what their audience needs in form of e-books, video courses, membership access, affiliate offers and so on.
If you’re wondering why you’re not making money with your blog, it could be possible that you’ve missed the objective.
The right step to take is to review what you’ve done so far with your blog, what type of content you produce regularly and how satisfied your readers are.

It’s so pathetic that a lot of bloggers today don’t even understand the concept behind blogging. They think that waking up every morning to write a new post is the recipe for raking in cool dollars online. I see a blog as the tool which my business needs to reach its target audience. What about you?
As you’re reading this post, please remember that thousands if not millions of people are desperately searching for you – what you’ve to say and the solution you provide. The web is primarily powered by content and with it you can easily share your opinions and provide answers.
There is nothing fancy about blogging. The caveat is this: provide the answers to the questions of your ideal readers.
Day in and day out people visit blogs not because they’ve extra time added to their 168-hour/week, but because they’ve pressing needs that must be met. The earlier you start using your blog for what it’s meant for – a business tool, the better and faster you will start making your money.
Your accounting software is a tool, YouTube is a tool, Twitter is a tool and a blog is not different, except in the way we use it.
The question above is from one of my readers. I’ve sent this post link to him already. I’m sure that after he reads this, he’ll understand blogging better. You too!
I’ll try to make it simple for you, even though it’s totally impossible to give all the answers to making money online in a single post. Before you can make a dime online, you’ve to know what people (your readers) are struggling with.
Money doesn’t fall from the sky. It’s the byproduct of a solved problem. In other words, when you help someone become better, or add a cubit to their knowledge they’ll have no other option than to exchange their money with you. Therefore, stop looking for some magic means to earn $10k blogging because it doesn’t exist.

Get to know your target audience.

That’s where market research comes in. Remember that market research is quite different from keyword research.
When you study the market, you can interpret what’s going on with your reader even though he or she is not physically present. Once you can know their intent for coming to your blog in the first place, keyword research will help you to get list of words and phrases they’re using to express what they feel on the inside.
The product doesn’t have to be yours. In fact, I started out as an affiliate marketer promoting other people’s product to my readers. I still do. Guess what? I love doing it.
It works because I only recommend products which can help my prospects/readers get closer to achieving their goals. This product doesn’t have to solve all their problems and that’s ok – just make it viable and that would be fine.
If the product is yours, make sure you offer it at a reasonable price.
Then expose the product to thousands of people who are highly targeted if you can. I’ve a niche site that sells physical product. My niche site is not saturated (less competition). I get 15 – 20 targeted organic visitors daily and I’ve sold items worth $5905.88 in the past 2 months.
Your blog may not be getting thousands of readers per day, but that doesn’t matter provided they’re interested in your product and have money to buy.
I believe you can make enough money to support your life and family through blogging, but don’t take shortcuts because it could turn out to be the long route.
Find out what your readers/prospects are struggling with and then offer a viable product at a reasonable price.
You already know how to drive traffic to your blog. Maybe not in the thousands, but a few hundred could get you started on your road to internet success. Work smarter and don’t give up no matter the pressure from family and friends.
How do you make money with your blog? I dare you to share your strategy in the comment box below. See you at the top!
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5 Ways to Find Out What People Really Want From Your Blog

This is a guest contribution from Sabina Stoiciu, blogger, photographer and traveller. 

While it can be quite redundant to pose this question, here it goes: Why blog? Let’s have a look at a few key stats that’ll convince you to set up a blog in the next two seconds, if you haven’t already got one:

77% of Internet users read blogsnearly one quarter (23%) of the time spent on the Internet is directed towards blogs and social networkssmall businesses that run blogs increase their leads number by 126%offering valuable content is one of three reasons why people follow your brand on social networks81% of US customers give credit to recommendations coming from blogs they’re fond of

(see the full stats on socialmediatoday)

One thing that happens to many fresh bloggers is not knowing what to write about or what would best benefit their audience, in order to convince them to subscribe to that blog and to make them desperately wait for another post to be published.

Supposing this little problem of not knowing exactly what to blog about might occur to anyone, not only to blogging rookies, it’s a good idea to think about what people want from your blog.

By not knowing this, you make yourself a disservice because:

a) you can fail at attracting new readers if you’re not aware of what they seek and

b) you might lose some of your current readers if you don’t meet or keep up with their expectations.

When talking about blogs, it’s important to know how readers see them. Some people read blogs to live other people’s experiences. Others look for tips they can apply to themselves. Several people look for business information, while there are many others who seek entertainment material. As Darren wrote, a good question is also what your content is centred upon – information, inspiration or interaction.

Generally people find a blog, like it and become a reader because they value the content and the way in which it’s written, but wouldn’t it be great to actually know what your visitors want and to use this knowledge to attract them towards your blog for converting them into full-time readers?

Below you will find 5 ways that can help you in the quest of finding out what people really want from your blog.

You can do so by offering them a way to express their content related desires and by actually reading what they tell you.

Two places where readers can share what they would like to find are the comments section of every blog post and the “contact me” form you can embed into your blog. A form like this provides people a short and easy way to get in touch with you and to keep discussions private, in comparison to the comments section. 123ContactForm is an online form and survey builder that could help you in several ways. For example, it offers a free plugin for WordPress based blogs that can help you create a customisable contact form with almost no effort – you can access one here.

You can also run a survey in which you kindly encourage them to tell you what they would most love to see on your blog.

The benefit of a survey is that it can help you in two ways: with your current readers and with potential readers. Why is that? Because you can publish it on your blog, where you’re addressing it to your current readers, but you can also publish it on other websites, partner blogs or social media channels, where you can reach a whole bunch of other people that aren’t necessarily your readers yet.

A free survey tool like the one from the already mentioned 123ContactForm can help you publish your survey on any of the above channels and personalise it as you wish, if you want people to recognise your brand.

While point 1 and 2 refer to the “ask the readers what they want” part, points 3 to 5 handle the more technical aspect of the user vs. content research, that is letting the data speak about what topics you should cover.

Get to know what is trending by doing some keyword research on Google, as well as on your blog. Both types of search can help you.

Here’s how: if you find out what people are looking for right now, you can start covering those topics (supposing you haven’t already) and drive organic traffic to your blog. On the other hand, knowing what people have been looking for on your blog can point you towards popular topics which you can afterwards choose to cover more in-depth.

As of the free tools that can help you do the research, you may want to try out Google Trends, the already popular Google Analytics and your blog’s stats. Again, this tool works for current and future visitors.

Another indicator of what drives your visitor’s interest is the post traffic. Articles that readers find relevant and valuable will show an increased traffic volume compared to ones that are not so appealing.Thus, keeping an eye on your blog’s traffic data from Google Analytics or the blog stats is always a good idea that might also define or at least improve your content strategy.

One thing to bare in mind when talking about post traffic is also how well you optimise your posts for search engines. By using relevant and targeted keywords, clearly expressing your ideas, using a friendly, yet catchy headline, setting helpful tags and image descriptions, you allow visitors to find more easily what they’re looking for. And Google will love you for that.

You can also check out Darren’s post on how to optimise a blog post that performed well in terms of traffic.

The last point on our list (but definitely not one that should be neglected) is to analyse the engagement around your blog posts and around their reverberance in social media.

To be more specific, take a look at the number of likes, shares and comments a post received directly on your blog, as well as on the social media channels where you shared it. Naturally, posts that sum up a lot of engagement have always proved themselves to be a hot topic for those engaging with them. Hence, why not consider exploring more of these topics that your readers were so keen on?

These are some ideas on how to find out what your blog visitors are looking for. Remember, you can always test to see what works out best and let the results point you towards the direction worth following.

Sabina Stoiciu enjoys blogging, photography, traveling and finding ways of gathering and sharing relevant business knowledge. You can follow her on Twitter. She also writes for 123ContactForm, the online form and survey builder – try it for free.

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Not on Instagram? Your Blog Could be Missing Out

This post is from ProBlogger Team member Stacey Roberts.
You could be forgiven for thinking Instagram is just for celebrity selfies and sharing pictures of what you ate for lunch. And while that’s exactly what Instagram is, it’s also so much more. For a start, it’s a network of totally engaged online creatures – exactly the kind of people who love to read blogs, and probably would love yours too, if you let them know you have one.
So many of us are visual creatures, and we love pretty pictures. In the last few years, Instagram has been the place to be for that – many of my blogging friends now call it their favourite form of social media. It is invaluable for interacting with readers (especially ones who don’t have a blog), and for finding new ones that aren’t coming to you through the usual channels.
It takes two seconds to upload a snippet of your day and check in with what’s happening. Instagram routinely gets plenty of interaction and engagement from fellow users, and while a tweet can sit in the ether feeling sorry for itself, an image is far more evocative. It also doesn’t take much for your followers to “like” your image, and you’re always in their feed as it’s not based on algorithms only Einstein could understand.
Instagram doesn’t take much brainpower to engage with – it’s not a tweet to be read, it’s not a Facebook status to understand – so people check in on it much more than they do other forms of social media. You can flick through while waiting in the doctor’s office, in the car at school pick-up, before a meeting, or even while waiting at the checkout. So the more you pop up in people’s feeds, the more your name and brand begin to get familiar. And because it takes one tap to engage – people are more likely to.
Folks love to share, and are often found snapping a picture of their freshly-made bed, a beautiful blue sky, or even their kids who painted their face instead of their paper. And they don’t just share and run, often they scroll through for a bit as well to see what everyone else is up to. Then they check back to see if anyone has chatted to them, which results in more scrolling. It would be silly not to capitalize on this, and be where the people are.
If you’re looking for 150 million monthly active users globally, you can’t go past Instagram. The 65 million photos uploaded by users every day result in a billion likes – and some of those could be on your content. Instagram says users spend three times as long on Instagram as they do on Pinterest and twice as long as on Twitter.
You don’t have to be funny or clever, you can just snap a picture of something intriguing and share that. There is always the lure of the “behind the scenes” images, so if you’re a business, upload some shots of what you all get up to in a day’s work. You might think it’s just for the young, but you’ll be surprised how useful it is to find new readers of any age, and how easy it is do do.
Less effort for more readers? You’d be crazy not to do it.
Stacey Roberts is the content ninja at ProBlogger.net, and the blogger behind Veggie Mama. Can be found making play-dough, reading The Cat in the Hat for the eleventh time, and avoiding the laundry. See evidence on Instagram here, on Facebook here, and twitter @veggie_mama.

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How To Get More Traffic Using SEO Tips

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Small Business Digital Policy Guide Free Ebook

What's inside

Smart phones and social media have changed our lives in ways no one could dream of a decade ago. Technology is also blurring the traditional divide between a worker’s home life and their career. They bring their personal tech to work – and take work calls and emails on the same device that has photos of their family and social comments, likes and shares from their friends. It’s vital that businesses understand the risks and have the right policies and infrastructure in place to deal with this ever-connected world.

But with some key safety advice - from how to manage your firm’s social activity to employees’ use of personal smart mobile tech, business can make the most of business life online.

 

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How to Make / Create Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide (Online Hussle)

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com
This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning. It makes very few assumptions about what you know (other than the fact that you know how to surf the Internet, since you're already reading this article on the Internet). As some steps are more involved, this guide also links to selected relevant articles on thesitewizard.com that you will need to click through to read for more information.
The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. This is the name you want to give to your website. For example, the domain name of the website you're reading is "thesitewizard.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with it.
A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is comparable to renting office or shop premises for your business.
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain to that account on your web host. Information on how to do this can be found in the guide How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website (Or What to Do After Buying Your Domain Name).
Once you have settled your domain name and web host, the next step is to design the web site itself. In this article, I will assume that you will be doing this yourself. If you are hiring a web designer to do it for you, you can probably skip this step, since that person will handle it on your behalf.
Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. One way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without having to muck around with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.
There are many commercial and free web editors around. For those who don't mind spending money on a commercial program, Dreamweaver comes highly recommended by many webmasters. If you are planning to use this editor, thesitewizard.com has an online tutorial called Dreamweaver CS5.5 Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Dreamweaver CS5.5. The tutorial takes you through all the steps of creating a fully-functional website with multiple pages and a feedback form, and provides you with the theoretical and practical foundation that will help you create and maintain your site.
If you prefer to use free software, you can find a complete tutorial on using KompoZer, a free WYSIWYG web editor, in the article How to Design and Publish Your Website with KompoZer. Like my Dreamweaver tutorial, this one also guides you through the process of creating a website from scratch. In addition, it shows you some of the main features of the KompoZer software so that you can go on improving and updating your site on your own.
There are many other web design software around. If you prefer not to use either of the above, you can find some others listed on thefreecountry.com's Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page. I also have tutorials for a few other WYSIWYG web editors here.
After you have followed my tutorial, and are on the way to designing your website, you might want to read the article Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design as well. It takes a brief look at some of the real world issues that every web designer must deal with.
An integral part of web design is search engine readiness. Search engine promotion does not start after the web site is made. It starts at the web design stage. The article 6 Tips on How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website is a must-read. Moreover, How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google is also important for the simple reason that Google is the most popular search engine around, at least at the time this page was written.
There are many other issues regarding the design of web pages. The above will get you started. However, if you have the time after you get something out onto the web, you may want to read my other articles on Web Design and Website Promotion and Search Engine Ranking.
Although I list this step separately, this should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: the latest versions of Internet Explorer (version 11 at the time of this writing), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site in all these browsers is the only way you can really be sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines.
Optional: If you have the time, you may want to read my article on how to test your website in multiple versions of Internet Explorer and check your site under earlier versions of Internet Explorer ("IE"). This is not strictly necessary nowadays, since the main culprit causing website problems, IE 6, is disappearing from the Internet, with IE 7 following in its heels. In fact, chances are that the number of people using IE 6 will be too insignificant to bother with come 8 April 2014, the date that Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP (the system that includes IE 6). IE 8 and later are generally considered to be standards-compliant, although, like all browsers, earlier versions don't support the latest versions of the web standards.
If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called "HTML" and "CSS", has no syntax errors. You don't actually need technical knowledge of HTML and CSS to validate the page, since you can use one of the numerous free web page validators around to do the hard work. On the other hand, if the validator tells you that your page has errors, it may sometimes be hard to figure out what's wrong (and whether the error is actually a serious one) if you don't have the requisite knowledge. Having said that, some validators actually give concrete suggestions on how to fix your code, and one of them, called "HTML Tidy", is even supposed to be able to fix errors for you.
If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information. If so, take a look at How to Accept Credit Cards on Your Website. I also have a step by step guide on How to Add an Order Form or a "Buy Now" button using PayPal to a Website for those using PayPal.
If you need advertisers for your website, you might want to read How to Make Money From Your Website and the follow-up article How to Increase Your Website Revenue from Affiliate Programs. A list of advertisers and affiliate programs can be found on Affiliate Programs: Free Sponsors and Advertisers. Those companies are on the constant lookout for new web publishers to display their advertisements.
When your site is ready, you will need to submit it to search engines like Google and Bing. You can use the links below to do this.
In general, if your site is already linked to by other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines. They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.
Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. There are even companies on the Internet, like PRWeb, that can help you create press releases, which may get your site noticed by news sites and blogs. As mentioned in my article on More Tips on Google Search Engine Results Placement, you can also advertise in the various search engines. Although I only mentioned Google in that article, since that was the topic of that discussion, you can also advertise in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo!. This has the potential of putting your advertisement near the top of the search engine results page, and possibly even on other websites.
There are also less obvious ways of promoting your website, which you might want to look into.
Naturally the above guide is not exhaustive. It is a distillation of some of the essential steps in getting started with your site. If you want more information, you should read the other articles on thesitewizard.com. However, the above tutorial should be enough to help you put your website on the Internet.
Copyright © 2006-2014 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from http://www.thesitewizard.com/.
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This article is copyrighted. Please do not reproduce this article in whole or part, in any form, without obtaining my written permission.
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How to Make / Create Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide

Copyright © 2006-2014 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
thesitewizard™, thefreecountry™ and HowToHaven™ are trademarks of Christopher Heng.
This page was last updated on 19 January 2014.

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How to Improve Search Engine Ranking (Online Hussle)

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

When I first started as a webmaster, there were numerous search engines around. Nowadays, though, we are, for the most part, left with only Google and Bing, with Google providing the majority of visitors to most websites, including thesitewizard.com. This article provides some tips on how you can improve the position of your site in the search engine results on Google.

Google ranks a page according to a large number of factors. Exactly what these factors are is apparently a trade secret, although there are number of well-known things that contribute to the ranking of a page.

One of the factors that contribute to a web page being considered "important" is the number of links pointing to that page. For example, if your page has 100 quality links leading to it, it will be ranked higher (in Google's estimation) than one that only has 20.

But what are "quality" links"? These are links from other popular pages, that is, pages that have, themselves, many (quality) links pointing to them. (Yeah, I know. My definition is circular. And it's possible that the search engine has other factors that determine the quality of a link.)
Anyway, in general, since Google ranks your pages according to the number of links pointing at your page, your site will do better if it has more links pointing to it.

Google seems to give weight to the title of your page. By title, I mean the text that is sandwiched between the HTML

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