White Hat Blogging Techniques
Introduction So, why have I decided to create this white hat blogging report? Earlier this year I launched my Blogging to the Bank ebook which was taken in two ways. One group people that loved the whole system including the black hat stuff. The other group were outraged that I and other well known Guru s were telling the public about black hat techniques and showing that they work. Now I didn t encourage everyone to go out and start using all the black hat stuff. I left it up to the individual to choose but the people who are just 100% white hat didn t believe that money could be made without the black hat techniques. This is absolutely wrong as a good number of my profitable blogs use no black hat techniques what so ever. I just wanted to share the 100% white hat system I use to create money making niche blog networks. Now even the most ethical internet marketer should feel cool about using this system. So let s get started.
Step 1 Research A Profitable Niche Market The first thing you should ever do when creating a blog or launching any website is look into the market and find out if money can be made. The main idea of creating niche blogs is to earn money from affiliate programs and adsense while giving quality content to your visitors. With this is mind you need to first find a well converting affiliate program to promote through your blogs. To do this just head on over to www.clickbank.com and click on the bottom link. Then go into the different categories of products. In these you will see various products and the higher they are ranked the more income that product is getting. You can see from the stats below each program the amount you will earn per sale in both percentage and dollar amount. You ll also see the percentage of sales generated by affiliates and the number of affiliates that have made a sale in the last 8 weeks.
From these stats you will be able to see if the program will be profitable. You need to aim for affiliate programs paying over 50%. I d even go after the ones that pay 75% first and work your way down. You ll also want to select a product that has at least 50% of its sales generated by affiliates. The gravity isn t as important as when starting I recommend selecting products in small markets. Then once you have the hang of the system go after the larger markets with high gravities. Once you ve selected 3 to 5 suitable products that you would be interested in promoting you need to find out weather or not you ll be able to drive traffic to those sites for free. To do this you need to find out the number of people searching for the key phrases in your market. This is easily done by using a free piece of software called Goodkeywords which can be downloaded from www.goodkeywords.com Once installed search for your primary keyword e.g. if the product is about improving your golf swing then search for just the word GOLF. Then you are looking for suitable phrases of two to four words that have over 1,000 searches per month. You should create a blog on each of these phrases.
Now from doing just these two stages you have a product that can sell in a market you can get visitors to your blog.
Step 2 Creating & Tuning Your Blogs So, you have a profitable market. Now you need to create your blogs. I recommend creating 5 to 10 blogs in your network. Now before you go thinking you re creating useless blogs that offer no content think again. All of these blogs will have quality content on them. You ll see where you can get this good content for free in step 3. So let s create some blogs. Now to create your blogs you can use wordpress or blogger, both work well but I like blogger as it s free and I ve found that that MSN and Yahoo will rank these blogs higher than Wordpress ones. First you need to go to www.blogger.com and create an account. Then you need to create your blog by following the simple steps.
Now you ve created your blog you need to do some fine tuning in order to increase your search engine rankings. To do this you need to just go to the settings section and replicate the following screens.
Now you need to create your other blogs in your network following the same steps. I recommend having no more than 5 blogs per account as when you have tens or even a hundred Blogger may think you are misusing there service.
Step 3 Posting Free Valuable Content Your Readers Will Love So to make real blogs that add value to the web you need quality content that the readers in your market will love and even come back to your blog for. There are a few different options when wanting content. The first one is that if the blog is in a market which you are passionate about then you can write a few articles yourself. This way is quick, free and the content is unique but it does take a little work. Another way is to use private label rights articles which you are free to change and make into your own. You can get these from memberships like www.plrpro.com which will give you plenty of content for your niche blogs. The other way is to get on topic articles for free using article directories like goarticles and ezinearticles to name two but there are hundreds of directories to chose from. All you need to do is go to www.goarticles.com and browse through the category related to your market. Then you can copy and paste these articles to your blog so long as you keep the links in them. This is OK to give the author a link as you are getting free content. So now you can go to the directories or look through your article collection and select a few articles you can post to your blog over the coming days or weeks. After every post you should go over to www.pingoat.com and ping your blog. This let s the search engines know you have updated your blog. Just place your url and atom feed and select all the English speaking readers at pingoat.
Step 4 Interlinking Your Blogs Now you need to take you individual blogs and make them into a network. Let s say you have 5 blogs. 1 may be the main two word blog and the other 4 maybe 2 or 3 word sub blogs e.g. Main blog -- Puppy Training Sub Blogs Puppy Training Tip Potty Puppy Training Puppy house training Crate training puppy Here you need to link all the blogs to the main blog and them the sub blogs in a circle.
To do this the easiest way is to link using posting articles and in the title field place the keyword and the link field the link to the appropriate blog.
Step 5 Monetizing Your Blogs So you ve set up a few blogs around a niche and have some quality content on there isn t it about time to set your blogs up to make money. On your blog and easiest way to make money is by promoting affiliate programs and displaying Google Adsense. From having these on your blog you will be able to make money by sending your traffic to other sites. Placing a Banner Ad The first thing to do is find out if the affiliate program you are promoting has a ready made banner. If not you can create one in photoshop or paint. It doesn t have to be fancy just text like a headline. E.g. You need to then upload this banner to some web space you own. If you don t have any you can get some free space from www.geocities.com Once uploaded you then need to implement the following code into your blog <a href= TARGET URL > <img src= IMAGE URL width= height= border= 0 ></a> This needs to be placed below the description.
Placing Adsense on Your Blog Now you have your affiliate banner you need to fill the remaining spare space on your blog with adsense ads. I recommend having Adsense down the side of your blog and a bar along the top as well. So the code you need is for a skyscraper ad and either a 468 banner or 720 leaderboard. Once you have the code the horizontal adsense bar goes just under your affiliate banner.
And the vertical bar goes under your profile.
Once you have made these changes to your blog template you need to republish your entire blog. This will then display the affiliate banner and adsense ads on your blog for visitors to see.
Step 6 Search Engine Optimization Now you have your blog set up and ready for a flood of visitors it s time to optimize your blog for the search engines. You need to do this in two ways. On page optimization and off page optimization. Now the on page optimization is already done if you have posted key phrase specific content to your blogs and added the keyword to the title and description of your blog in the settings. This leaves you with the off page optimization which is basically the incoming links to your blog. These need to be key phrase specific e.g. You link should be like below Puppy training As this is a link to your blog for the phrase you are trying to rank well for in the search engines. Most people make the mistake of linking to their blogs like below. http://puppytraining1.blogspot.com Now this link could be on the exact same page as the key phrase specific one but it is of far less quality as it would be very little good to rank number 1 for your URL. Now you know how to link to your blog you need to go and get hundreds of backlinks. This will be sure to get your blog ranked high. Now for your sub blogs it will take less links but in large markets I have seen that it can take thousands of incoming links before ranking on the first page which is why the research phase is so important. So how do you get hundreds or even thousands of links without using any black hat techniques or risky software. There are a few white hat ways to get incoming links which are 1 Links on your other blogs By following this system you will have already have links on your blogs to you main blog by posting articles with the keyword in the title field and blog url in the link field.
Now if you want to add links to other blogs you can either use this method or you can place anchor text code in the template code. Here s the code you need to use: <a href= Blog URL title= Keyword >Keyword</a> And you can place this either in the side bar or at the bottom of the blog. 2 Links from submitting articles The best way to get outside links from hundreds of different websites is by submitting articles. Now this can be done manually or semi automatically using software www.articleassistance.com Using the software allows you to submit to over 150 directories in around an hour which is excellent considering it would take you at least 5 hours to do it manually. Once your article is in the directory people like yourself can place these articles on their blogs or websites for free so long as they keep the links to the author s site or blog. This means that within a few weeks you can have hundreds of extra links coming into your blog from people who are displaying your content on there sites. Now writing an article is really easy and it only has to be 350 to 400 words long. You can simply research and read a couple of articles in around 30 minutes and re word that information into a unique article in another 30 minutes. Remember to make sure the links in your author box are keyword specific using anchor text like when linking from blog to blog. 3 Links from link exchanges Another excellent way to get links from hundreds of on topic websites is by joining link exchange websites. The one I recommend and use is www.linkmetro.com This has over 20,000 members wanting to exchange links and makes it really easy to exchange links.
You just find a site you want to link to. Place some code they give you on your blog and then that site is notified and asked to link back. Link metro even has videos showing you step-by-step how to use their free service so even that a total newbie can do this with ease. Now you have a blog which is optimized for the search engines and you are starting to get incoming links which in turn is moving you up the search engine rankings.
Step 7 Update and move into other markets Now you have one blog network set up you can keep posting articles and news to those blogs giving regular content to your readers. This will keep your visitors coming back to your blog. You can also set up another blog network in a different market. You could go for a totally new market with nothing in common with the one just created or you could go for one linked closely to your existing network. Doing the second will mean you can interlink your blogs and share traffic between the networks. By using these white hat steps you will be able to create real blogs that add value to the internet and keep readers coming back while monetizing your blogs to make profit from adsense and related affiliate products.