In the beginning…

Blogging really gained massive popularity in the mid 1990s, mainly as a way for people to share their personal observations about the world, in a journal format, with the world at large . As is the case today, many of these “weblogs” were read only by the blogger’s family, friends, and maybe a few random web-voyeurs. However, a few of these blogs slowly started to be appreciated by a more broad audience. As with anything on the Web, a handful of these bloggers started to ask if there were any options to make money with their blogs.

Then, upon the scene came Google AdSense. I’m assuming that you’ve heard of Adsense, but if not, it’s a Google product that lets you sign up to have advertisements of varying size placed on your website or blog wherever you choose. Before long, anyone who wanted to  make money with their blogs was throwing Adsense ads all over their pages.

Some bloggers actually made a bit of money from this. However, there are some large problems with using Adsense on a blog.

• Denizens of the blogosphere are more savvy now than they were just a few years ago. Click through rates are VERY low, and you need to generate massive amounts of traffic or you will perish.
• You have no say over what ads are displayed. Do you really want to take a chance on having R or X-rated advertisements displayed on the website that is your bread and butter?
• Ads make a blog look sketchy. They turn off your readers and make them question your motivations.
• Every time someone does click on an ad, they are being directed away from your blog. Is this what you really want?

There are much better ways to make money with a blog.

You could always try the product launch method, which involves creating high quality information products such as e-books, webinars, and web courses. There are a lot of bloggers who are making a lot of money this way. It requires a lot of time investment, but the results can be extraordinary.

Another method of making money with a blog is to put together a subscription site. This is amazing in that people are actually paying YOU to log on to your site every month. Again, though, there is a large investment of time required, and your readers are going to expect an extremely high value level from you.

Finally, there are methods where you can  make cash with their blogs for a third party website. In these types of setups, you are usually a so-called corporate blogger, writing on behalf of a ncompany on the topics that you are assigned.

All of these have their good points and their drawbacks. However, they are all much more effective than plastering ads all over your precious blog. If you are serious about learning how to make money with a blog, I urge you to look further into each of these possibilities.

In this Wordpress How To Article I am going to be covering some of the basic strategies which can be carried out to help improve your blogs speed and traffic.

It is of great importance that your Wordpress blog is optimized and optimized well when it is first installed. It is important to make sure your blog is optimized for its purpose and not lose sight of that. You need to be attracting the right visitors to your blog and have your blog loading as fast as possible so as not to lose them and have the search engines find you as quickly as possible.

Before you can start installing your Wordpress blog it is best to write a list of purpose’s your blog is going to serve and the type of visitor you expect, as you will use some of this information before you get started. You are going to need to setup a keyword specific domain name before you can install Wordpress. Whether you intend blogging for business or personal, you will need to know what market and the type of people you are going to be targeting. Before you can start installing Wordpress you will need to signup for a hosting service a register a domain name. This is why it is so important to do your research and know who you will be marketing to.

Once your Wordpress blog is install, now is the time to optimize it for its purpose and for speed. Don’t get me wrong optimizing your blog to the fullest is not a difficult task, you just need to put in a little time and effort, but it will pay of in the end.

There are a few simple tasks you can do to help the search engines find you quicker and easier. First you can install the ‘All In One SEO Pack’ plugin, enter your site details in the main settings and fill in the details every time you make a new post – you can also change the ‘Permalink Structure’ from the default setting to the custom settings /%category%/%postname%, this will all help with your rankings.

Latest information now tells us that one of Google’s ranking factors is site load time, so as a consequence you need to make your site load as fast as possible. Some of the things to consider are plugins, as having to many installed whether they are active or not can slow your blogs load time down, so analyze your plugins and only have installed what you are using and consider whether you need them at all. Pictures and graphics can also slow your site down, so check your image file size, you may be able to increase the compression on a jpg file or reduce the actual image size, you could also upload your images to an image service like EZS3 or Flickr, this will reduce your site load time. Changing the number of posts which show up on your blogs homepage or only showing an excerpt of each post can improve your blogs load time and increase speed. Cleanup your database and changing the autosave function in the PHP will also help with speeding up your blog.

I hope I have given you something to think about. As you can see, it is good practice to think and plan what you are doing before you get started and by applying a few simple strategies it can make all the difference to the quality of your Wordpress Blog and will be loved by one and all.

There are of course may other Wordpress How To strategies which can improve your blogs speed and search engine rankings, but I hope the few I have laid out here will give you a head start.

Alester Fox
Wordpress How To

I believe that there are plenty of angles by which I could conduct a review on Andrew Hansen’s most recent blogging software known as Firepow.

I thought I might focus here on one particular element of the program which I consider to be particularly intregal to the success of a blogger, namely, the ability to drive traffic to their blog. If you have ever had your own website or blog for making money, you understand that it isn’t just a sort of “if you build it they will come” scenario. Even a really good blog won’t necessarily be a promise for high traffic, and a critical aspect of a blogger’s concentration needs to be in telling others about their blogsite with various techniques to persistently bring in money and traffic.

By all means, I could have discussed the process of creating and managing the blog with Firepow, which is something I know that a lot of online industrialists would simply love. In may case, however, I am more worried about how the program makes bringing in more money and traffic for users an easier process. Anyway, that said – I thought I’d make a brief mention of some such features of the program in order to open your eyes to the ways this program might be as much a benefit to you as I predict it will be for me. The first feature I admired (or rather, the category of the feature I liked) is that the user is provided with the capacity for producing backlinks to their blog effortlessly after it has been put into operation.

When initiating a new blogsite, you will need ample amounts of search engine spider juice for your website to get high rankings for long tail, ineffective keywords through just page optimization, within several days of its launch. Aside from providing you with formidable website optimization proficiencies (such as permitting users to set the meta data & h1h2 tag date for all pages and entries), Firepow allows users to speedily produce the required spider juice for indexing and prospectively ranking for a reciprocal term. For instance, once you have launched your site, you will be able to click a button to send your RSS feed to numerous RSS directories. You will receive invaluable back links, along with some immediate, excellent spider activity. Another thing is the pings you’ll be getting from the post.

What’s more, if you’d like to, you could utilize the BlogLove Builder tool to incorporate a trackback to a widely held blog entry withing your first blog post; you would receive higher amounts of link juice right away, along with several blog guests to start off with! Moreover, by concentrating on search engine traffic, you will understand the significance of link building in order to hem in permanent rankings. Initial spider juice can get you a quick ranking, but for a LASTING ranking, you need an assortment of relevant quality backlinks establishing your page as an authority on that keyword.

Firepow goes even deeper by offering users with the means to acquire links from blog comments, social networking sites and within content links from Firepow’s exclusive network on high PageRank blog sites. I stress that even what I’ve mentioned here isn’t close to all of the tools Firepow gives you to drive traffic to your site. It is for this reason alone, amongst other numerous reasons, that I highly advise looking into this program to all of my subscribers.

It’s only logical that I write about how to make money with a blog by using my own blog. I have to point out that this blog is relatively new and may or may not be seen as the best example to illustrate making money with a blog. That’s for you to decide after reading this post. However, I must also point that I’ve had enough experience with other blogs in the past to write about this topic.

There is no doubt that this topic is fairly comprehensive and it’s only made worse by the many conflicting opinions out there on the Web. I will give my own opinion but I will do it in such a way that it is concise and easy to understand. Of course, there will be sections which I will not cover in depth but rest assured because I will cover them in the future on this very blog.

The one thing I want to make very clear before I start to talk about the topic of blogging is the following:

Blogging is just a vehicle to making money online.

The reason why I say this is that 99% of people do not make a full time living directly from their blogs. Of course, there is that small 1% which end up doing so but that’s the tiny minority. The vast majority use blogs as a tool to make money online. I have no intention in stopping you from being part of that 1% of people who make a full time income with a blog, however, your time and effort would be better used if you used blogging a vehicle to making online income. And it’s a very powerful vehicle if used correctly.

Why Blog?

The number one reason why you should blog is because the search engines (especially Google) love them!

And the reason why they love them is because blogs tend to have the freshest and most up to date content on the Web. Search engines thrive on relevancy and indexing new and fresh content is up there.

As a result, blogging can allow you to achieve high rankings for certain target keywords as long as your on page SEO is done correctly.

Content Is King

Because the search engines love indexing new and fresh content on blogs, it is suffice to say that content is king!

You have to continuously add new content to your blog, whether it be daily, weekly or fortnightly. The more often the better, however, keep it to a maximum of 1 new post per day.

If you want to see the benefits of posting new content frequently, take a look at Problogger. It was started by Australian Darren Rowse back in 2002 and he has posted something new everyday since. In the process, he makes a full time living from his blog as well as being the biggest blogger in Australia and one of the biggest in the world.

This should be enough to show you the power of blogging.

You Pitch, You Lose

I have to point out that posting new content does NOT refer to finding a new product to promote and blatantly pitching it on a blog post.

That’s not what blogging is about.

Blogging is about giving visitors valuable content and information about a certain topic so that they come back and revisit your blog for more in the future.

If you blatantly pitch a product, the only thing that it’s going to do is turn away visitors (and potential future customers). And given that they barely know you, what chances are there that they will buy from you right away? Would you buy something from someone you’ve just met?

On the other hand, you need to be intelligent and use blogging as a way for online visitors to get to know you better and understand what you are all about. Use a blog to build rapport and trust with them.

Build A List

In the previous section, I did not say that you shouldn’t promote your products or services on a blog. In fact, you should and I encourage it. However, you need to do it in a more intelligent manner.

This is where list building comes into play.

You should use your blog to build a list of subscribers or, in other words, a list of people interested in what you are all about. This involves grabbing people’s first names and email addresses using what is commonly called an opt in form. Nevertheless, you have to give people something enticing in return for their personal details.

Here are a couple of ideas:

• access to a weekly newsletter
• a free video
• a free report
• a free ebook
• a free audio recording

Once people enter your list, then you can start sending them information about your products and services and potentially make sales and get customers.

The Key To Making Money With A Blog

At the end of the day, the key to a powerful money making blog is great regular content. Think about it the following way.

The better quality and the more regularly you post new content, the higher your blog will end up ranking on the search engines. And the higher your rankings, the more traffic your blog will get. And the more traffic it gets, the more people opt into your list. And the more that you have on your list, the more sales and customers you can make.

It really couldn’t get simpler than that!

To conclude, I would like to say that if you could not understand some of the terminology used and topics covered in this post, don’t worry. As I said at the beginning, I will covering them in greater detail in the future. The one thing you need to understand is the general concept around how to use a blog to make money.

In order to make money online, you need to have backlinks and target traffic to your web site which means you have to have traffic.  Getting the traffic is only half the battle though, you also need to convert that traffic to buyers. So let’s take a minute and look at a few methods for building traffic.

Use Press Releases to Get Traffic

You’ll have no problems at all finding places to distribute a press release. As with most everything else, you can find sites that charge for premium distribution, and others are free to use. If your press release is well written, and the products you are offering are top notch, your press releases could get picked up by media outlets like Google News. This could send your traffic through the roof. Imagine how many sales you could get if you had thousands of new visitors!

Become a Guest Writer on Blogs

You’ll be able to tap into traffic from other blogs and sites if your content and name are published. You will get traffic if people read your content, like it, and it’s well done. All the better if you can approach highly trafficked and respected sites/blogs and convince them to publish your content. If you take the time and establish a positive relationship with these site owners, it will help a great deal to get published.

Focus Your Meta Tags

You should always provide Meta tag information in your site or blog, of course. If you have a blog, you will also want to learn how to use them in blog posts. It’s good on-page SEO factors if you use the page title and description Meta tags. You can cause some SEO confusion if your meta title/description tags are different from your page content. Meta tags are not difficult to use, and there are certain benefits to using them.

It can be challenging to choose which techniques of traffic generation to use, as there are so many. If you confine yourself to using one single method to build traffic on any given day, you’ll get the best results. Work at each method for a few months and, if it isn’t working, move on to another method.

Then when you find something that works well, you can increase your efforts in that direction to get even better results. When you have a website, you want to bring as much traffic to it as possible; you really can’t have too much. In order to make sales, you need people coming to your site; more visitors means more customers!