Work-At-Home Success University Course: Blogging For Bucks Lesson 1
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Introduction Welcome to Work-At-Home Success University and Blogging for Bucks! I m excited to have you as a valued student in this four-week training program! While blogging is well known now, many people are skeptical about its moneymaking potential. How can you make money posting stuff for free? It is true that blogs have the potential to make money, but like any other work-at-home venture, whether or not YOU make money will depend on the decisions you make, how you implement what you learn and whether or not you do the work. In this four-week course you are going to learn about blogging; what it is, how it makes money and what steps you need to take to be successful. Before we begin with the lessons, there are three important things that I need to mention to you... 1) Worksheets - The course comes with instructional materials as you see here, but it also includes worksheets. These handouts are crucial to your success so don't skip them. They are designed to help you gather and organize information so that you can use it to be a successful blogger. 2) Audio and Video Materials - When appropriate you'll find audio or video supplements to the instructional materials. These are designed to assist in providing the information in a clear and concise manner. 3) Weekly Lessons - Here is the schedule of lessons for Blogging For Bucks. Week 1 - What is blogging? Blog types Choosing a blog topic Determining if you have enough content to support a blog. Week 2 - Starting Your Blog Three different blog options
Setting up the blog Creating/getting content Making a blog calendar Week 3 - Monetizing Your Blog AdSense - Fast and free Affiliate marketing Advertising Sponsored Reviews Sponsorships Week 4 - Getting people to your blog with little or no advertising (or money) The content in the later lessens may look sparse, but each topic area has a ton of information and step-by-step details. Some of the information will be technical, but every effort has been made to walk you through the steps one-by-one. Now that we ve gotten the housekeeping out of the way, let s get to the reason why you re here the lesson!
What is Blogging? In August 2009, Amy Murphy was an at-home mom with a toddler and newborn baby. Her husband, a law student was laid off from three jobs. Broke and desperate, Amy knew she needed to make money, but she couldn't find a job that would cover child care costs much less household expenses. Amy turned to the Internet and started a blog on a topic she knew about; living on a skimpy budget. Ten months later, Amy's little blog has 16,000 visitors a month, over 3000 Facebook fans, and earns enough to pay the mortgage. The term blog comes from weblog, on that blog historians agree. Beyond that, the definition of a blog is less certain. Is it an online journal or a synthesis of links to other resources? Is it a website and if not, why not? The basic distinction between blogs and traditional websites are that blog provide content that is updated frequently, sometimes several times a day, and are designed to interact with the reader. Because of this interaction, blogs are often lumped in with social media like Twitter and Facebook. But blogs offer more than just an update of what you ate for breakfast, or at least they should. They're like the news or reality TV, but with the ability of the reader to talk back and be heard. Blogs are everywhere. Everyone from celebrities to the average Joe is blogging. They blog about their lives, their hobbies, and their concerns. Others blog to promote their business. For a long time, blogs were seen as hobbies or a compliment to an existing business. But today, blogs can be businesses in and of themselves. They're
affordable and simple to start, easy to monetize, and extremely flexible making them a popular way to make extra money or even a replacement income. Blog Types Blogs are as varied as the people who run them. Here is a general overview of the different types of blogs you can start: A Day In The Life: These blogs provide stories, anecdotes and musings about everyday life. They are very popular with mothers. These blogs can be profitable; however they aren't the quickest way to money since you need to build an audience that is interested in your adventure-du-jour. Quest or "How I did it": Similar to day-in-the-life blogs, quest or "how it did it", blogs share personal stories, however they are in the pursuit of something that can also help others (also similar to expert/informative blogs below). These blogs cover everything from losing weight, paying off debt, dealing with hair loss, finding the love etc. If you've achieved or are working towards a goal, this may be the option for you. Expert/Informative: If you are an expert in anything, an expert/informative blog may be for you. These blogs do well because they provide information that people want and need. They usually have an educational focus with tips and howto's. Work-At-Home Success falls in this category. Reviews: Writing reviews of products and services is a great way to make money blogging, if you have the money to invest in products and services to research. While many bloggers get items for free, they don't get them free until they have a large audience. Further, getting something for free or receiving monetary compensation for reviewing a product may lead your readers to not trust your opinion. Opinions/Editorials: This ideal for the people who love politics and related topics and like to share their opinions about the state of things. These blogs, like day-inthe-life blogs can take some time build the readership needed to make money.
Shopping: Shopping blogs often have stores and reviews, or posting the latest great deal or coupon. If you can get a following, there is good potential in shopping blogs. News: If you can stay on top of news and get it posted fast, this can be a profitable option. You can focus on one type of news such as politics or Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheens legal battles. Niche Blogging: You've probably seen this term all over the net. Any blog you create, you want to focus on a niche, but niche blogging itself is different from traditional blogs. These blogs are geared towards offering solutions to common problems such as acne in teens. Most niche bloggers run 20, 50 or more niche blogs each of which may make $10 to $200 per month, but added together make thousands. With Google in the process of changing it's algorithm again, some of these blogs may not have the success they had previously, because the content is often unoriginal and not very helpful. If your goal is to make money as quickly as possible, you want to focus on expert/informative, reviews, shopping and/or niche blogs. While the other type of blogs can be fun, many people read for entertainment purposes, which means they might not be in a buying mood. Blogs that offer tips and solutions, and provide the product or service to help fix things, can make money more quickly than day-in-the-life blogs. When choosing a blog type, you can have more than one type of post. For example, you can have an expert blog in which you give reviews and even occasionally rant about a difficult day. But you want to focus on one kind of blog, offering the other options on occasion. In the next section when we look at popularity and money-making potential, the focus will be on blogs that provide information, reviews or tools.
Getting Started There are two schools of thought on selecting an idea for your blog. One is to find a market that's making money and create an blog around it. The second is to start with your knowledge and interests and build a blog around them. I believe you should do both. Obviously, you need to pick a market that people spend money in; however, to build a business you need to include your knowledge and interests. For one thing, it speeds up the learning curve. Second, working at home and online can be tedious even when you enjoy your topic. But it can be as horrible as a bad job if you are working on something that don't like. List Your Skills, Knowledge and Interests One of the great things about blogging is that you can make money on just about anything. Do you like read? Create a book review blog or reader's club blog. Do you enjoy traveling? Start a blog about your travels or how to find great travel deals. Are you the queen of budget shopping? Start a blog on budget living. Do love technology or gaming? Start a review blog. Start by listing your skills, interests and hobbies using the form on the next page. Be as exhaustive in your lists as possible. Under job skills, don't just list your job title, but also the tasks you need to know how to do, and the software and equipment required to do it. Do this for all the lists. For example, if you are an accountant, list accounting, list the industries you work with as an accounting (i.e. accounting for doctors) and list the software and tools you use (i.e. Quickbooks). Do the same for volunteer work, hobbies and your passions. If you like to decorate cakes in your free time, include that in hobbies along with the skills and tools required.
Skills, Knowledge and Interests Worksheet Job Skills Volunteer Work Skills Hobbies and Interests Passions
Is There Money In Your Interests? The next step is to find out if there is a market spending money on any of your interests. From your list, identify the top three or four topics that interest. As we take each topic through the process of determining its profitability, you may eliminate some and need to return to your list for new ideas. Step One: How many people are searching on your topic. Visit SEO Book Keyword Tool to find out how many searches are done on your topic area each month. You need to register, but it s free. Enter your keyword to get a list of results like the example below. Keyword: Raw Food Diet
With hundreds of searches a day, this is a popular topic. The list also gives us variations of the topic, which can allow to choose a tighter niche, give you new ideas and article sub-topics for your blog. At this point though, you are looking to see that the topic is popular. Ideally, you want several thousand searches every month. A word about Niches... You've probably come across the niche before, as it's becoming part of the work-at-terminology. A niche is a narrowly defined group within a group. For example, in my market of working at home, women, babyboomers or telecommuters are niches. The reason this is an important concept to understand is that niches tend to earn more than general markets. Think about when you're searching for something online. You're more likely to zero in on the search result that most closely fits all the variables you're looking for. If you want to know about growing tomatoes, a search result that says tomato gardening will probably appeal more than vegetable gardening. The key with selecting a niche is that it needs to be big enough to have a steady stream of interested people (several thousand searches a month) who spend money. Sample niches are "Acne Cures for Teens", "Losing Weight for Moms", etc. When you search your keyword, pay attention to the list of results to identify possible niches. Step Two: What does the market want? In step one, you determined how popular your topic is. The next step is to find out what the people are looking for when they search these terms. Finding a profitable blog topic involves: 1) Identify your target market s problems 2) Find solutions for their problems
3) Give them your solutions to their problems through your blog and monetization strategies. So, the first thing you need to is to research: Who are the people looking for information in your niche? How old? Where do they live? etc. What are they most passionate about and why? What do they spend most of their time talking about (and probably thinking about) in regards to this topic? What are their main concerns/problems? What are they currently doing to solve their problems? What can you do to offer a solution to these problems? The best places to go to find this information is the places where your niche/target market hangs out such as forums, popular websites, social sites etc. Find Forums In Your Niche Do a search on Google for (your niche here) forum". If it's a good niche, there should be many forums. Sign up for a few and interact with your target market. Study the most popular threads to determine the most common concerns or questions. Keep a list of what you discover. The answers and solutions to these questions and concerns will dictate what affiliate products you choose to recommend. In addition, another great thing about forums is that you can find out the other places people in that niche hang out and what websites and resources are
popular to them. You can also find out what kind of products they use and enjoy and what kind of material they read/watch. Social Media/Web 2.0 Sites Social media and community sites are another resource to find groups of people passionate about your niche topic. FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon all have plenty of people constantly discussing and sharing ideas and info on their interests, passions and problems. Of course, I ve only mentioned just a few of the web 2.0 sites you can go to; there are many more. Visit these sites and do a search for your niche or sub niche and you ll get plenty of information and ideas! Get Ideas From Yahoo Answers One of the best places to discover people's burning questions is at Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com). Here you will find people asking all sorts of interesting (and shameless) questions on every topic you can imagine. Not only will you find ideas on what sub-niche you should choose, you will also get ideas
for your blog posts and in the future, you can answer these questions to drive traffic to your blog. Google Alerts: Get Knowledge and News Automatically Google Alerts is a great tool that s designed to alert you automatically to current news and information in your niche. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts to set up your alerts. For example, if I was setting up a blog on raw food diets I d enter it into Google Alerts as the search terms :
Next, select the type of search you want. Select Everything because then every time your search term is mentioned in news, blogs, groups, and videos, you will receive alerts. Now select how often you want these alerts and how many results you want. I suggest selecting to receive alerts daily, but it s up to you. Lastly, enter your email address you want the alerts sent to. Once you ve done some keyword research (we ll get onto that next) you could also enter your keywords into Google Alerts to see what comes up. Step Three: What is the competition? Next, you want to find out how much competition there is and what they are doing. Visit your favorite search engine and type in your keyword. Using an engine like Google will tell you how many websites are ranked for that keyword. Don't worry that there are tons of them. Competition is an indication that it is a profitable market. If there are no or very few websites, it could mean it's a market that doesn't make money. But if there are millions of results, that could be a tough niche to break into. Once you get the results, click on the top few to see what the sites look like and what they offer. Is it a store? Is it a blog? Does it take you to a sales page for a single product? Does it say it will give you more information if you give your email address (a squeeze page)? What sorts of ads are running on the site if any? Does it offer a newsletter? If so, sign up to learn more about the information it sends and how it makes money. Does it sell its own products or someone else's (affiliate)?
Step Four: What are the current trends in the topic? What are the current trends for your topic? Is it a fad that will be gone eventually or is it evergreen and have a long shelf life? Fads are not necessarily bad, but you need to plan to replace the topic with another one when it's time runs out. Take Twilight for example. Each time a new movie comes out or the a DVD is released, there is a lot of fanfare making it a good affiliate topic. However, eventually the excitement will die down and you'll need to find a new topic. Step Five: What money-making options are available? If you added the Average CPC column in your Google Keyword Tool, you have an idea what people are paying for advertising. It may not seem like much 0.25 cents or $1.25, but it can add up if you have a popular blog with great keywords. Do a quick search on a few affiliate network sites to see if there are products or services that you can use as advertising or review. You don't need to sign up or worry about affiliate marketing at this point. You just want to know there are products or services related to your topic that you can promote on your blog. Two places to check are Commission Junction and Clickbank. Search on products and services related to your topic to see what's available. You really only need one good product for your topic, but having several products/services gives you more options.
What to Blog About? The challenge of picking a good blog topic is having a targeted topic that people want to know about, but not so small a topic that you run out of things to write about. Therefore, when you choose topic, make a list of 50 to 100 articles concepts you can write about. To help you come with topic ideas, use the results from your Google Keyword search. You ABSOLUTELY should use well-searched keywords for your articles. People are searching for information on these terms. If you have an article specific to that keyword or phrase, they'll find your blog. Here are some keywords from "weight loss", which suggests that articles that cover "diet", "weight reduction", "how to lose weight", "weight watchers" (I wonder if it has an affiliate program?), "lose weight fast", "healthy diet" etc. Many of these topics are similar, but with a little tweaking you can have articles that are original and yet use all these highly searched keywords. A work about keyword stuffing: Many people try to get good search engine placement by using a keyword over and over. Search engines don't like this and may not list your site. Instead mix your articles with related keywords. The Google Keyword search tool helps with this. For example, I can use "work at home", "at home jobs" and "telecommuting jobs" which all are good, yet different keywords.
Other tips for getting article topic ideas: Search article directories such as EzineArticles to see what others have written about your topic. Read other blogs. Make notes from books or magazines you read. Jot down stories you hear from friends or on the news. Next week... By the next lesson, you should choose a topic and outline article ideas. Next week, we'll get your blog up and running with at least 10 new posts and ready for search engines.