The general
principles of making money from a blog are no different to the way in
which you get an income from any kind of website. Behind all
the detail of the steps you have to take and processes you go through,
the underlying system is invariably the same. You need to get
a lot of visitors to your blog and your income will come from a small
proportion of those visitors who click on adverts you put on your pages
or who follow links to other websites that provide goods or services.
The principle holds good for any kind of website at all. If
you have enough visitors, you will get an income, and the size of your
income will relate directly to the number of visitors your site
attracts. To create a good income your blog needs to be very
busy, which is not always easy to achieve. The alternative
approach to having one fantastically successful blog is to have a lot
of decent blogs, getting a modest income from each of them, producing a
total income which is well worth having.
Your blog or website can be as basic is you like, you definitely do not
need to be able to produce a really flashy looking site, but it does
have to be built in such a way as to be sure of getting
visitors. The visitors you want are from people using search
engines, because they are free and they just keep on coming.
The art of getting your blog to rank well in search engines is known as
search
engine optimization (SEO), and failure to pay attention to
this
can mean your blog may as well not exist.
There are two main aspects to ensuring that you get visitors from
search engines. These are:
- choosing the right subject and key
phrases for your
blog and your posts, and
- getting links to your blog so that the search engines
see it as an important site.(search engines judge a website’s
importance by the number and type of inbound links).
Finding the right niche for your blog is the most important decision
you will make. This needs careful research, so that you can
identify an area where there are plenty of people searching for things
related to your main theme, but not too many other sites in
competition. You also need to factor in whether there is a
high enough demand for advertising and whether there is a demand for
products that you can refer people to.
The
Problem of Scale
The problem with trying to make a decent income from blogging is that
it can take a long time to create even a very small income.
Realistically you might set up a blog to create income, which after a
lot of hard work generates about $10 a day. Clearly this is
not a practical way to make a living. This is where
automation and software tools come in. If instead of one blog
you can find time to create 20, then suddenly your income is $200 a
day. That’s a bit more like it, and if you can create 100,
you’re really in the money.
Blog creation software can make this possible by automating many of the
time consuming things you need to do to build and promote
blogs. It isn’t enough to blog away randomly and hope people
will come. They won’t. You have to research and
select the best niche, you have to create good content, you have to
find different ways of getting good quality links to your site and do
all the other things that will bring traffic to your blog. A
good blogging tool will structure and guide you through all of this,
with tools to automate as many processes as possible. Without
such tools, it is not physically possible to produce and promote enough
blogs to give you a decent income (unless you get very, very lucky).
Blog
Creation Software – Firepow
There are many packages, e-books and software tools out there promising
to make you a fortune. Don’t be fooled – anything that
promises that you can make money without doing any work is not to be
trusted. Most of the cheaper options available are really
training videos or e-books that give you some handy tips and leave you
to get on with it. By far the best option I have seen for
anyone who is serious about making a living at blogging is a system
called Firepow.
This system is the brainchild of an Australian guy called Andrew
Hanson, who has already made himself a nice stash through his
blogs.
Firepow is
based on what Andrew has done in practice
and is a very specific approach which definitely works. It is
not magic and it requires time and effort, but it magnifies your
efforts superbly so that not only will the blogs you create make money,
but you can also create enough of them to really make it financially
worthwhile.
I am a great believer in the need to produce blogs and websites that
actually have interesting and useful content on them, rather than
adding to the pile of worthless junk blogs full of second hand content
and adverts. I favour this approach not least because it is
the only way to ensure long term success – you can’t fool the search
engines for long – and they hate junk. I like Firepow because
it is based on the principle that good content is the foundation for a
successful blog.
The system is based on the tried and tested principles of making sure
you find the right niche in the first place (they will even do this for
you if you have problems), then taking you through a step by step
process that involves all the actions you have to take to get your blog
to rank high in the search engines. Not only is the process
structured and logical, but you are guaranteed live help and support 24
hours a day. Just see if you can find that with any other
blog creation software.
Because of the degree of automation and the step by step guidance, you
do not need any knowledge of website design, search engine optimization
or any other technical stuff at all. Firepow certainly isn’t
the cheapest thing on the market, but then it isn’t like any of the
alternatives either. As well as 24 hour support and free
web
hosting for up to 10 blogs, they have a money back offer
which still
makes me smile. If after two months you have followed all the
instructions but not generated at least 3 blogs and attracted 1000
visitors, you get your money back plus 10%. That’s what I
call faith in your product. The best bit is – no one has ever
claimed it.
Blog To
Create Income - Conclusions
If you are specifically interested in learning how to blog to create
income, and are serious about making a proper living at it, you can
find out more about
Firepow here.
If you are more interested
in creating an online business through one or more information
websites, please read my page on
how websites make money.