By John Yeo Author of Bloggers Paycheck Copyright John Yeo All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
After You re Done Reading This Report, Here s Something That Will Make Creating Your Own Profitable Blog a Snap If you ve thought about setting up your own blog or managed to get started only to give up because it seemed too complicated, you re really not alone. Or if you ve been blogging, but can t figure out why your blog isn t earning money you re in the same boat as tons of bloggers out there. But it really doesn t have to be that way. If you ve been sold the dream of making a killing blogging, it can be terribly frustrating when things don t pan out that way. You and I have both seen the hype out there and it can be downright disheartening. Bloggers Paycheck is a complete 5-volume self-study course that takes you through: - Getting your blog set up easily and cost-effectively - Building traffic and marketing your blog - How to monetize your blog and a bunch more. If you re really ready to get started with PROFITABLE blogging with step-by-step help, you NEED to grab your copy of John s guide. Click here to learn more and get yours. Here s to profitable blogging made simple! And now onto your blueprint Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 1
Table of Contents 1. Is Blogging Best for You?... 3 a. What do you want really?... 3 i. Herd mentality.. 3 ii. The Right Mindset 4 2. Niche Research 5 a. Google... 7 b. Technorati.com. 8 c. Alexa.com.. 9 3. Blogging Platform. 12 a. Blogger... 12 b. WordPress. 13 4. Blog Themes. 16 a. Getting a Free Blogging Template. 16 5. How to Write a Blog Post. 18 a. Common ranting 18 b. Intro-Body-Conclusion (IBC)... 18 c. Intro-Experience-Point-Conclusion (IEPC)... 19 d. Blog Readers Love To Read About Tips and Secrets 20 6. Get Your Blog On Google (Basic Search Engine Optimisation) 22 a. Keywords 22 b. Title.. 23 c. Post Title. 23 d. Post Body... 24 e. Blogroll Linkback... 24 7. 5 Most Common WordPress Plugins. 26 a. Adsense Plugin.... 26 b. Subscribe to Comments.. 27 Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 2
c. Akismet... 27 d. Backup 27 e. Photodropper. 28 8. 5 Blog Traffic Quick Tips.. 29 a. Social Networking Sites 29 b. Email Signatures 29 c. MyBlogLog.. 30 d. Comments in Other Blogs. 31 9. Money Making Methods 32 a. Text-link-ads.com... 32 b. Sponsoredreviews.com. 32 c. Adsense 32 d. Clickbank.. 32 e. Own Your Product.. 32 10. Conclusion.. 32 Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 3
1. Is Blogging Best for You? Hi, my name is John Yeo and thank you for getting this book. Now, a little bit about my story I started my wedding blog (Romance-Fire.com) as a wedding gift for my wife. I was using my wedding blog to digitally pen down all my wedding thoughts and experience so that I can share them with other wedding couples. But little did I expect it to become one of my main income stream, bringing in me US$2000 to 3000 of passive income each month. What a thrilling and exciting experience it was! In fact it still is especially when I see money rolling into my bank account every month. Now you can achieve the same results as me What you re holding now is the exact blueprint I ve used to achieve the level of success I m having now. You can instantly follow my footprints, copy my strategies and develop a new income stream for yourself. If you follow every step diligently, you can even outshine me and earn many times the income I m earning now. Now, before you start to reap what you have put in, I always like to ask my readers Is this what you really want? a. What do you want really? i. Herd mentality Many a times, we ve heard about a breakthrough online money-making opportunity and would jump into it without much consideration. Some might just be following the crowd, and unsure of what they re getting themselves into. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 4
Now, I m pretty sure this is not the first Internet Marketing related book you re reading. There may be tons of others you have come across and even bought, but end up leaving them on the shelves. To tell you the truth, I m guilty of doing this too some time back. Don t get me wrong, I mean it s good to read up more and expand your online marketing knowledge. But if you re buying the books just because the whole crowd are buying them, I suggest you put this book back onto the bookshelf and only come back when you re equipped with the right mindset. I ve come across many of my students who just kept on buying Internet Marketing books, only to realise later that he has only read less than 10% of them before moving on to other stuffs. The distraction in the internet marketing world is indeed unavoidable. So are you buying something just because all the others are doing it? ii. The Right Mindset If you have this mindset I m going to succeed online, no matter what it takes or what other people says! Congrats! You ve actually placed yourself among the top 10% of the world s population determined to succeed. In other words, you have what it takes to succeed online! You have made up your mind to succeed online no matter what the obstacles are. Give yourself a pat on the back and you re all set to move on to the next chapter. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 5
2. Niche Research Now, you must be thinking of how what you should be blogging about. Should you blog about a particular hot topic just because it s the in thing right now and all the others are doing the same thing? Or should you blog about your own expertise or hobby? Or should you blog about your own personal life? There are in fact a million and one topics you can blog about. Let me tell you my own experience. When I started my wedding blog, many people laughed at me. They said that wedding niche was pretty saturated and I must be a dummy to jump into this highly competitive area. They were eager to see me fail. But my mind was set and I was determined to prove them wrong. You know what? I succeeded. As of today, my wedding blog is ranked 169,329 in the world beating the millions of other blogs out there (according to alexa.com on 2 August 08) You can see the traffic details in print screen below. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 6
So what I m trying to say is that any niche (even those very competitive ones) can make you money, as long as you are determined to succeed. It doesn t matter if you re in the wedding niche, scrap booking niche, hamster niche or Internet marketing niche. You can make money if you have the right mindset and attitude and you are willing to learn the strategy. I m always a strong believer of life-long learning. So even if you don t know how to do it now, you can always learn later and apply them at the right time. What I m gonna do now is to bring you through doing research online so that you can roughly know how your money-making online path looks like. So are you ready? I am sure you are! To be fair to you, I ll touch on a non-wedding niche and something I m not the least expert in. I m trying to place myself in a new blogger s shoes and start afresh like everyone else. I want to prove to you anything is possible and you can start off a pretty decent blog just by spending some effort and time researching online. Now let s get started. We all know that iphone is a pretty popular tech toy and there are a lot of income opportunities in it. Let s first do some keyword research using Google, Technorati.com and Alexa.com. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 7
a. Google A search in Google produces about 162 million results. Another reliable research place is Google Blogsearch. A search with the keyword iphone brings about 27 million blog posts related to iphone. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 8
It s not necessary to look at each and every of the results, as it will be a waste of time. All you need to do is to find the top 3 popular blogs which you want to model after and develop a blog which is just a step ahead of them. That s basically it! A simple guideline to have a neat blog is: 1. 2 or at most 3 columns for your theme template 2. Clean white background 3. Always abide by the rule Less is More (Avoid cluttering) 4. Readable text of at least font size 12 and black font color for easy reading 5. At most 10 blog posts per page for easy and fast loading b. Technorati.com Another great place to do blogging research is Technorati. Technorati is one of the best Internet search engine for searching blogs. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs. So you can really find some really neat blog related to your niche. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 9
Below is an example of a search in Technorati using the keyword iphone. c. Alexa.com Alexa ranks sites based on the number of visits from users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 10
I did a search using the keyword iphone blog and the picture below shows the results. What I love about Alexa is that it shows the thumbnails of the sites or blogs in the search results and I can just browse through them as I scroll down. This helps save me lots of time and effort in looking for a well designed blog. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 11
You notice that for every site mentioned, there is also the Rank statistics (the smaller the number, the better it is ranked) So while doing your research, you can ask yourself which site is more popular and why. Could it be due to its simplicity, the immense amount of free info for the readers or the design of the blog? Do a little analyzing, pick up the features you like and come up with a blog which suits you the most. Find all this stuff too mind boggling? Worry not. In my ebook Blogger s Paycheck, I ll teach you everything you need to know about Wordpress blogging - from purchasing of domain names, to setting up a WordPress blog in your domain to customizing your blog. And yes, you ll also learn the secrets of how I make a 4-figure income by just blogging. Click BELOW: Blogger s Paycheck Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 12
3. Blogging Platform A blogging platform offers a control panel for you to manage your blog and publish your posts. The admin dashboard allows you to write your blog posts, publish them, add pictures, organise the layouts and so on. Personally, I prefer these 2 platforms as they are easy to use for beginners as well as intermediate level users. a. Blogger Blogger.com is a blog publishing platform bought by Google in 2003. I personally started blogging with this because it is easy for beginner. To get started, you just need to have a Google account to use this. In my ebook Bloggers Paycheck, we do explain every step in details on how to create your first blog. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 13
b. WordPress WordPress.org is another blog publishing software you should seriously consider. It has more features and more versatile to use than blogger. I used it personally for my wedding blog at http://romance-fire.com and personally vouch by it. Below is a comparison of the pros and cons of both platforms: i. Set-up and Usability In terms of set-up and usability, it s much easier to set-up a blogging account with Blogspot.com. Once you re set-up you can start posting immediately. Installing Wordpress is a tad more troublesome, but if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation of your Wordpress platform. The good thing about using wordpress is that there re tons of great looking templates (much more than for Blogger in my own opinion) for you to choose from at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes. And you can have your own domain name, e.g. http://yourblog.com for your wordpress blog (instead of using http://yourblog.blogspot.com as in the case of blogger.com) ii. Customization & Advanced Usage Blogger doesn t allow you to group your blog posts into categories, but Wordpress does. Wordpress not only lets you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. Publishing with Blogger can be a painfully slow process because you are under the mercy of Google s servers. Sometimes, during peak hours, the servers slow down so dramatically that you might not even be able to log into your blogger account. With Wordpress however, publishing is much faster as you are using your own web host server s speed. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 14
Another thing I like about Wordpress is that it s much more customizable than Blogger. You can easily download and install additional themes, plugins and other advanced tools. iii. Copyrights and Ownership of Content I started with Blogger and I won t say that it s bad. But there s one thing you need to be clear on. Google owns your content. What does that mean? It means that Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don t like what you re blogging about. You don t have absolute control over your own blog. It s different with Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account, so you have full control over your content. With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don t forget that! iv. Search Engine Optimization and Traffic There s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favour Blogger accounts. I won t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there s no such favouritism. I ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 15
When you post in Blogger, you can only ping a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting traffic to your blog. v. Money-Making Potential There s no doubt that it s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company. With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there s even Adsense revenue sharing plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog. When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you ll soon discover what I mean. It s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though when you go Wordpress, you don t go back. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 16
4. Themes Design a. Getting a Free Blogging Template If you re using Blogger platform, you can get free blog skins from blogskins.com If you re using WordPress, you can visit Themes.Wordpress.Net to download free WordPress themes. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 17
For my iphone blog, I checked the following boxes in the Sorting Options panel on the left hand side panel 2 columns, Blue and Widgets Ready. You can choose any style of templates which you like. Here are my results: Do feel free to spend some time to find the best wordpress template for your niche and personality. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 18
5. How To Write A Blog Post There are many ways that you can create a blog post and there s no one fixed structure you must follow. Below are some guidelines for you: a. Common ranting Ranting can be a very good way to start blogging. We just type whatever we want to say or whatever that has happened in our lives. Treat it like a casual conversation, without using any conscious effort to phrase it in a formal tone. Ranting can be a good start to get you into the momentum of typing. It s just like sharing something about yourself when meeting up with you good friend (the blog) and saying whatever that comes into your mind. A tip for you: Just set your mind free and share whatever you like within your comfort level. b. Intro-Body-Conclusion (IBC) If we want to create a blog that will capture loyal readers, we need to focus on what s in it for them. After all, the readers are reading your blog because of its enticing content. They are reading it because they want to find answers to their problems. So we must create a proper structure for our blog post that is easy and pleasant for our readers to read so that they will return. A common structure to start with is having a short introduction paragraph to catch hold of the readers eyes and make it attractive enough for the readers to click on the <Click here to read more> tag. It can be a summary of what the post is about and what the readers can learn by reading the rest of the blog post. Then, create a BODY which contains the gist of the story. You can share with your readers what happened, how did it happened, why did it Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 19
happened and who were involved. Write about 200 words for the body and be straight to the point. End off with an insightful CONCLUSION with about 30 to 50 words to share from your point of view, what the readers can learn and how they can apply back to their own lives. Here s a tip for you: To make it really easy for anyone to read, you can always use the numbered list format. For example, Here are the 3 tips you should know before buying a iphone. 1. Know your budget 2. Buy from a reliable retailer 3. Take good care of your iphone And go on to elaborate each point in greater details. c. Intro-Experience-Point-Conclusion (IEPC) For this blog post structure, it s similar to the structure of a diary entry. You first share a short paragraph of roughly what happened. Then, after the MORE tag, you can share about your experience by following the 5 W s - Who, where, why, what and when. End off with a conclusion you want to leave an impression on your readers. Remember to keep it short and straight-to-the-point. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 20
d. Blog Readers Love to Read About Tips and Secrets This is a common structure which I am used to writing and it works for me everytime. It s a method I like to use to develop relatively long posts with lots of good value information for my readers. In the post shown on the next page, there re a total of 37 tips on teaching brides on how to choose their wedding gowns. This is also good for link-baiting. What s that? You might ask. Well, let s put it this way. Assume some lady reads my blog post and finds it interesting. She s so impressed by the content that she wants to share these 37 tips with her friends. As the post is too long for them to copy, they will take the easy way to either email her friends the whole link or do a linkback from her blog. Either way, I ll get free traffic to my wedding blog. That s call link baiting. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 21
For a start, it s not necessary to come up with such a big post. You can start off with articles with 3 to 9 tips. Here s an example. Learn the SECRETS of how I make a 4-figure income online by blogging Click BELOW: Bloggers Paycheck Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 22
6. Get Your Blog On Google (Basic Search Engine Optimisation) I will just keep this section simple and short. (In one of the free bonuses of Blogger s Paycheck, I will touch on SEO in greater detail.) So what is SEO? It s actually an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimisation and it means making your blog highly ranked by the search engine such as Google by placing some highly searched keywords in your blog posts. Let s say there are 3000 searches on the keyword iphone blog. The search engine bots or spiders will do a search in the world wide web finding blogs and sites with this keywords iphone blog. Now, the tricky part is to help your blog rank as high as possible in the search engine results for this keyword. a. Keywords You can find related keywords in Google Keyword tool and it is free. Just key in a general keyword related to your niche and you ll be provided a list of other keywords which matches that niche. You then choose a less competitive keyword with a lot of searches and do your best to dominate it in the search engine rankings. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 23
b. Title You can optimise your website title for the search engines by filling it with keyword rich terms that users might key in the search engines to find your blog. Keep it related to your blog content. c. Post Title Again, insert a good keyword in your post title for search engines. But do not go overboard by placing too many keywords just for the sake of doing it. This would make your title too confusiing and turns off your reader. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 24
d. Post Body As a general guide, I would recommend inserting the keyword you re targetting in the first and last paragraph. Again, do not overdo it by placing the same keywords all over the post, Google is clever enough to detect that you re trying to stuff keywords and would penalize you by offering a lower ranking in search engine results. e. Blogroll Linkback If you visit my blog http://romance-fire.com, you would notice that in my right sidebar, there s this section call My Favorites. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 25
It s a section where I place all my favourite blogs and sites, and it s also call a blogroll. Sometimes, there might be special requests from other bloggers or webmasters for you to link their sites using a specific keyword or phrase. Why would they want to do this? Here s the reason why. If Google finds that there are many linkback to a blog through the text wedding favors, it will very likely be ranked highly for wedding favors in a Google search and be more visible to internet users who search for wedding favors. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 26
7. 5 Most Common WordPress Plugins A plugin for WordPress is an add-on software to the WordPress blogging platform. Different plugins have different specific function, adding on to the functionality of WordPress. In Blogger s Paycheck, we did touch on the specific steps on how to install the plugins in your WordPress admin panel. a. Adsense Plugin Adsense plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows automatic insertion of Google Adsense ads to your blog posts. You can download it here: http://www.philhord.com/phord/adsense-inline-withwordpress-blog-posts/ Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 27
b. Subscribe to Comments Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows anyone who commented on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. Yo can download it here: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/ c. Akismet This is a plugin which intelligently blocks spam comments. There are many spammers out there who just spam blog comments to either advertise their sites or get a link back. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not. If they are spams, they will not be approved and get filtered off. By default, it is residing in your wordpress dashboard when you first set it up. If it s not, you can download it here: http://akismet.com/ d. Backup This is a plugin for on-demand backup of your WordPress database. Start the habit of backing up your blog once every week. You can download it here: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 28
e. Photodropper This plugin allows you add photos from photo sharing sites (Flickr / Creative Commons) to your blog posts without leaving WordPress. You can download it here: http://www.photodropper.com/wordpress-plugin/ Learn the SECRETS of how I make a 4-figure income online by blogging Click BELOW: Bloggers Paycheck Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 29
8. 5 Blog Traffic Quick Tips a. Social networking sites A social network site or portal focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. You can find a list of social networking sites in wikipedia.com b. Email signatures You do send emails to your friends every once in a while, don t you? Do you know you can end off with a signature of your blog address? It can be very effective in telling all your friends and relatives about your blog, and can bring in a decent amount of free traffic to your blog. You can refer to the example next page on how to structure your signature. An example can be: Yours sincerely, John Get free wedding planning tips at www.romance-fire.com c. MyBlogLog MyBlogLog is an online meeting place for bloggers. Here s how you can gather some traffic using this neat trick If you have an account in MyBlogLog, whenever you visit someone s else blog installed with MyBlogLog widget, your avatar picture will appear in the blog. So if their readers Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 30
are interested in knowing you, they will click on your profile picture and visit your blog. This way, you get free traffic to your site. An example of a MyBlogLog widget is shown below: d. Comments One of the fastest ways to get relevant traffic is to leave a relevant comment in other people s blogs. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 31
Let s say this person by the name of lavender left a comment in one of the post for newlywedbride.com. It is in fact linked back to her blog. So anyone interested in finding out more about lavender will click on the link which is back to her site. The golden rule of leaving comment is to leave those related to the blog post. Do not just leave gibberish comments for the sake of getting linkbacks to your blog. It will be considered as spam and would get deleted really fast by spam filters or the blog owner. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 32
9. Making Money Instant Methods I know you re eager to know how to make money from your blog. So I shall not withhold the info from you any further, Here are 5 money making methods you must know: a. Text-link-ads.com paid link marketplace where you get 50% commission for every text-link sold. b. Sponsoredreviews.com paid sponsored post in your blog. c. Google Adsense Pay-per-click advertising campaign offered by Google d. Clickbank.com start selling other people s products and earn a commission for every product sold e. Own Your Product - I highly recommend this even though it may take slightly longer for you to develop your own product. You can start off with a $7 report of about 30 pages and sell it off at Warrior Forum Special Offers forum. Just remember to read the forums rules first. 10. Conclusion Blogging is a life long journey and the payoff can be huge with some effort put in. I ve personally experienced it for myself and I want to sincerely help you succeed too. For the fact you invested in my blogger s blueprint, it means you are determined to make a difference to your own life. I will see you at the top! If you need more help, please go to the next page Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 33
Get The Help You Need, Step-by-Step One of the most common questions I hear about blogging for profit is, Is it really possible? For some it seems hard to imagine that something as enjoyable as blogging could be so lucrative. For others, they are frustrated because they ve been trying to get this blogging thing right for so long. The guide you ve just read gives you plenty of guidance on what you need to get started, but if you feel you still need more step-by-step guidance through each step of creating a profitable blog, be sure to pick up the Blogger s Paycheck course. You ll learn every single step for setting up your blog to building traffic to monetizing your traffic. It will finally give you that headstart you ve been looking for. Learn more and instantly download yours here. Put an end to the blogging guesswork and grab the plan that has already been laid out for you. Copyright John Yeo BloggersPaycheck.com 34