The blogosphere, made up of countless blogs from around the world, is among the most popular faces of the Internet. It's not just for teenagers anymore. Several years ago, most blogs were run by kids who just wanted to keep in touch with their friends, or individuals who just wanted to discuss their daily life.
These days, everyone online has a blog.
Chances are, you have one - and when you don't, you should.
Stay at home moms like to blog about their daily lives and raising children. CEOs of major corporations own blogs concerning the latest happenings at their company. Many celebrities run blogs, plus they blog about their upcoming events, movies, and roles (not forgetting scandals).
And marketers have blogs about every niche imaginable!
I'm confident to say I myself am part of the blogging culture.
Blogging is an excellent way to get in touch with the people on the Internet. They can touch an incredible number of lives, and spread your message like no other medium. It is possible to say almost anything you want, and you will have an audience for almost every niche!
You can run a blog just for fun. If you want to discuss parties you attend, restaurants you eat at, places you go shopping, or where you continue vacation, someone should probably read about it.
Even if the only real audience you have can be your close friends and relatives, you'll have fun and manage to say whatever's in your thoughts.
More and more people are embracing blogging as a way to make money. Some people just want to create a few extra dollars for extra cash, but others are actually making a full-time income making use of their blogs.
Several prominent bloggers even feature making hundreds of thousands of dollars with their blogs (a la Perez Hilton, who parlayed his blogging fun into thousands in ad money each month, which delivered him their own TV show, podcast, and clothing line)!
There are plenty of ways to earn money blogging. Whether you're a scholar who just really wants to make a little extra cash for pizza and clothes, or you're a serious marketer who would like to make a small fortune, it's totally possible with blogging.
Blogs are big, even if they're small. Some blogs get millions of hits per month. Blog traffic has been growing steadily for several years as consumers gain confidence from peers instead of trusting hard hitting sales pitches they find on the web.
With more and more people jumping onto the blogosphere bandwagon, it probably won't slow down within the near future. If you're considering getting into blogging, it's a good idea to get started now.
It generally requires a few months to begin building up a following. And you really need regular visitors to be able to make money with your blog. You should work to get subscribers to your RSS feed, because those people should come back often to learn your new posts.
And remember to lend your personal unique voice to your posts. One of the most important nuances in regards to why blogging is this type of major global phenomenon is the fact that people enjoy reading unique voices on certain topics.
They crave the differences in personalities. It's refreshing to learn information that has personality and isn't stale or stuffy, which means it's been translated by a single editor so that every voice is uniform. For this reason columnist pages in local newspapers are so popular.
Your unique voice is the most important section of getting regular people to your blog. If you want to see types of this, visit some of the most popular blogs you will discover. You'll see that certain thing these blogs have as a common factor is the fact that the bloggers make engaging, funny, or original posts.
That's your key to making it big in the blogosphere!
Before You Blog, Create a Blueprint
A lot of bloggers put together a blog without any real arrange for how they will promote it or monetize it. Putting a blog together without a plan is like attempting to build a house without a blueprint.
It's possible, yes. But the end result is most likely likely to be shoddy, and the whole lot could break apart at any minute.
You should develop a solid course of action before you even buy the domain. You need to create a strong blueprint before you ever get started. Waiting until after you've already arrange it and are getting traffic could mean a lot of extra work moving in to correct mistakes.
Changing themes and adding plugins after you're already traffic generation could interrupt your traffic. Sometimes new plugins and themes can temporarily break your blog, which could mean a lack of traffic (and money) until you're able to fix everything.
The first section of your plan should be choosing a niche, needless to say. Part of selecting a niche is finding products it is possible to promote. If a niche does not have any products available, you could create your own.
But if there are no affiliate products available, it may be because there isn't enough demand there for a product. In cases like this, you'd want to do some careful general market trends to be able to determine whether or not a niche is truly viable.
What's your purpose for blogging?
Do you have your own product you intend to promote?
Do you wish to promote affiliate products?
Do you wish to just put AdSense or CPA offers on your site?
You need to ask yourself questions like these so that you'll know how you intend to monetize the site. If you intend to promote affiliate products, you should test the products yourself before you promote them.
If you don't, these potential customers could end up being very upset in the event that you promoted something of really poor quality and they bought it since they trusted you. Even worse, what if you end up promoting something that actually is a scam?
You don't necessarily need to purchase every product you intend to promote. If you can prove you have a decent level of traffic (and sometimes in the event that you just ask), you could be in a position to get free review copies of some of the products you would like to promote.
It doesn't hurt to ask. Even if you haven't any existing traffic yet, it is possible to write to who owns a particular affiliate program, inform them what you're planning to accomplish, and ask if you could get a review copy.
Some people won't provide you with a review copy. Plenty of marketers get requests for review copies from those that just want to get a copy of their product for free. If you come across a skeptic, or someone who's been burned before, you may get turned down.
In cases like this, it's probably best to just go ahead and buy the product if you actually want to promote it. If it's a scam or perhaps a really crappy product, just ask for a refund.
You can also contemplate using a donation button on your blog. If you cannot find any good products to promote, and you don't have the time, money, or ability to create your personal product, you can still put up a donation button. If your site is very good, you can find donations.
Or, it is possible to always sell ad space on your blog. If you start getting a large amount of traffic or you get a very high PageRank in Google, you could charge lots of money for a link on your blog. You can even get paid to make posts on your own blog that review other sites.
Should a Blog Topic Be Broad or Narrow?
You can find two schools of thought regarding blog topics. Some individuals believe your topic ought to be very focused, because you may bring in a flurry of laser-targeted visitors. Plus, you have less competition in smaller market segments.
Another group of people believe that anything worth doing will probably be worth doing big. They believe that the only way blogging can truly be worthwhile is if you're bringing in massive traffic, and the only way you can make that happen level of traffic is by being very broad - casting a broad net, as they say.
For example, you might have a sports blog that has broad appeal. You could discuss baseball, football, basketball, soccer, tennis, and golf. This might give you a a lot more broad appeal, and the prospect of larger traffic.
But since there will be so much competition, it might take a lot longer to obtain additional traffic to arrive. Plus, just how I view it is, if I'm thinking about golf, I must say i won't care about the other parts of your blog, therefore the value of it plummets in my own eyes.
But let's say you choose golf as your broad topic. Even this is broad, although you just segregated it from the other sports in existence. There are plenty of things you could reveal golf - vacations, apparel, clubs, courses, techniques, etc.
You could choose an even more targeted niche like women's golf or senior golf. This is a smaller segment of a little niche. This means you can get traffic faster, because there will be less competition.
Less competition means you have the potential to go up faster in the search engine rankings. Needless to say, women's golf would get much less traffic from the number one spot of Google than the combined traffic out of all the other sports niches, however the likelihood of that traffic converting right into a sale will soar.
So basically, it boils right down to how you feel about your abilities. If you were to think you have the opportunity to get one large blog to the top of the search engines rather quickly, you then might be able to handle an easy topic blog.
Unless you believe your abilities are up-to-snuff, then you might want to stick with a smaller niche at first. Remember, it is possible to always start other blogs later. You could either build a network of small niche blogs, or you might start out with one broad blog and start multiple sub-niche blogs later. You could then link to all your smaller blogs from your large blog.
You could also start with the smaller blogs, get them to gain some popularity, and then start a large, broad blog later. Once https://blogging.org start the larger blog, you'll have several smaller blogs already traffic generation and already having PR that may link to the larger blog to get it started.
If you already have plenty of SEO experience and you're confident in your capability to pull off some great search engine ranking positions quickly, then you start with a more broad blog might be a better option.
You can still get some good of the advantages of having an inferior blog by having categories for each of small niches on your broad topic blog. One very last thing to keep in mind is your traffic will undoubtedly be less targeted if you run an easy blog.
If you have a site about skin care, you may get plenty of traffic that's just searching for information about the very best lotions or skin creams. But in the event that you take up a blog about something specific, like acne, you're more likely to get people who are ready and ready to buy something.
Where DO YOU WANT TO Host Your Blog?
Many people start out by hosting their blog free of charge at one of many common blog serves. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is a much better idea to host your site all on your own domain if possible.
Let's check out WordPress. WordPress is an extremely popular blogging platform. It is possible to host your blog on the servers, or it is possible to download the software and host your blog by yourself domain.
There are some reasons why you should host your personal blog, instead of hosting your blog on WordPress.com. To begin with, WordPress doesn't let you promote affiliate links on the domain.
So if you want to make any money together with your blog, you can't host it on the server, you'll have to host it yourself. Another reason why you shouldn't host your blog on WordPress is the proven fact that you can't use the selection of plugins and themes you could use on your own domain.
WordPress is quite limited as far as the functionality, so don't have a much anything really cool on your own blog in the event that you host it there. You can get free WordPress tutorials to help you get started with your blog.
Now let's look at Blogger. They do allow commercial blogs, in order to post affiliate links there if you want. But they're also against what they deem as "spam blogs" or "splogs." Should they decide your blog is spam, or they decide it's "too" commercial, or they just can't stand it, they can delete it for any reason.
There goes all that hard work you placed into it!
You have to consent to those terms and conditions when you subscribe. That means that even though you don't actually break any rules, they might still delete your site if they chose. That's a pretty powerful motivator.
It certainly wouldn't be considered a very pleasant thing to build a blog up to several thousand hits per day, only to own it deleted (and believe me, I've heard these horror stories). You'd lose all of that traffic, all of those backlinks, all of your reputation and your search engine rankings.
Imagine everything being destroyed overnight. That's not a good thing.
It's like having a fire rip through your brick and mortar store and you haven't any insurance to rebuild.
Another very important reason to host your site by yourself domain is that it gives you credibility. If you host your blog on your own domain, you'll appear more professional, and more as an authority figure in your niche.
People will automatically assume you're much more serious if you're hosting your site by yourself domain, rather than putting it up somewhere for free. If you do decide to host your own domain, the initial thing you'll need to do is choose a domain that contains several keywords related to your niche.
If your blog is approximately house cleaning tips, then make an effort to get housecleaningtips.com. If that's not available, decrease your keyword list and find the next most sensible thing. Then register the domain.
Next you have to find a host for your blog. You might like to choose a host that has Fantastico, that is a program that sits on the server and lets you quickly install WordPress (along with other scripts) without needing to create and manage MySQL databases yourself.
Once you have hosting, you just need to visit your domain registrar and setup the name servers to indicate your new host. Your hosting company's support will be able to help you with this particular.
Blogging Is Big Business
A growing number of companies are starting blogs, and several people are even forming their entire companies around blogging. Customers really love blogs because they're generally filled with great (free) information, they provide a personal touch that generally isn't entirely on a standard corporate website, and they're not usually full of a great deal of hype and hard sell tactics.
Another reason customers love blogs is they offer a great medium for interaction. Visitors can leave comments and receive responses to their comments. This can help build loyalty to your site and your company, and readers enjoy this level of interaction with someone they consider an authority figure.
It helps them feel just like they're really being paid attention to, and just like the company really cares about what they have to say - even if that "company" can be an entrepreneur as if you! Blogs certainly are a fantastic solution to build loyalty.
You can reach your audience in a very personal way, must way more than with a typical, stuffy stagnant website. Readers be prepared to see some personality developing in a blog. In the event that you really let your personality shine through, it is possible to build a following that will subscribe to your RSS feed and keep coming back often, eagerly waiting to listen to more of everything you have to say.
This is a smart way to brand yourself as well as your business. Since you can get more personal with a blog, people begin to become familiar with you a bit as a person. This makes you seem more real, and people commence to trust you and your messages more.
For reasons uknown, people trust websites with identifiable people behind them.
Remember, if you are blogging for business you need to stay somewhat professional. It's probably best not to post about your aunt's cataract surgery or your grandma's cat that died. You can get a little personal - after all, that's what really makes you stand out.
But most individuals who are reading your blog are there to find out information about the niche, seeking solutions to their needs. Keep your posts on topic, but get personal by providing your own voice within those entries.
Provide valuable information inside your blogs. People aren't going to keep returning to your blog again and again just to read about the brand new products you're releasing, unless you're releasing some really revolutionary stuff.
They're going to desire to read industry news, tips and tricks, special strategies, along with other important information for free. While it's perfectly fine to blog about new product releases, you'll want to keep providing helpful tips to keep your readers returning.
Don't ever lose sight of the fact that your readers are real people. You know what you enjoy reading in a blog, right? You need solid information - something useful. You probably don't mind the casual sales pitch on a blog filled with great information, but you would be pretty annoyed to reading nothing but pitch after pitch.
If you're in operation blog, it is important to keep your readers in mind. Give them the sort of quality information they're hungry for, and they'll keep coming back for more. In fact, the more you provide them with for free, the more loyal they'll become, and the more likely they'll be to get from you in the foreseeable future.
Blogging is all about informing and educating. If you can do that, these potential customers will form a bond with you and they'll be sure you spread the term about your blog so that your URL goes viral and it attracts a straight bigger following within your niche.
Blogging can be extremely lucrative, not to mention it enhances your current branding and networking on the 'net. Here are the steps you will need to take to get started RIGHT NOW:
1.) Select a niche topic (my advice would be to go narrow).
2.) Look for a domain and buy it.
3.) Set up your WordPress blog making use of your Fantastico host.
4.) Pick a theme online - Google free WordPress themes and you will find millions you can upload.
5.) Set up your blog for categories, ad space, and stick an opt-in box in it to begin building a list.
6.) Start posting to your blog using keyword relevant titles and entries.
7.) Start bookmarking your blog and sharing that connect to get it relocating the viral direction.
8.) Test the conversion of various products you promote on your blog and replace the ones that aren't working well for you personally.