Earn Money Blogging

Would you like to make money blogging? There are a lot of people earning extra cash and even making a living blogging, and you can too. First, you need to come up with a topic people are interested it. The topic has to be one you know a lot about or enjoy. To become a successful blogger, you must provide useful content and update the blog regularly. You can either start your own blog, join a blog community or join a blog network.

Your Own Blog
If you want to start your own blog, there are many places to host your blog for free such as blogger.com. You can also buy your own domain from sites like godaddy.com and pay for hosting. I use hostgator.com and can highly recommend them. After setting up your blog, you can monetize traffic through Adsense, an advertising program by Google or other affiliate programs such as maxbounty or primaryads. You can also earn money by discussing advertiser products and services within blog posts through sites like payperpost.com, bloggingads.com and blogitive.com. To send traffic to your blog, you should submit it to directories, post on other people's blogs, post on forums with your blog address in the signature, and exchange links with similar sites.

Blog Communities
The advantage of joining blog communities is that you can start getting traffic right away. Members of the blog communities will visit your blog if it appeals to them. You will be able to make money through Adsense. Your ads will be rotated 50% or more of the time while the owner's Adsense ads rotate the other half or less. Some blog communities include blogfeast.com, bloggerparty.com, and blogcharm.com.

Blog Networks
There are many advantages of joining a blog network. The blog network pays for your domain name and hosting. They setup/design the blog for you. You don't have to work for traffic and are usually paid a specific amount each month. You can also earn a percentage of advertising revenue each month. You mainly have to focus on posting great content.

Blog Networks Currently Hiring
If you join a blog network, you'll be able to earn a specific amount each month or a percentage of revenue generated from the blog. The following are blog networks currently hiring:
1. Weblogs, Inc. is a large network with about 90 blogs. You may apply to blog on a pre-existing blog or suggest a topic for a new blog. There current blog categories include consumer, technology, travel, wireless, video games, media & entertainment, finance, and life sciences.
2. Creative Weblogging is also a large network with over 90 blogs. Their current blog categories include business, economy & finance, digital media, ecommerce & internet, dreams & celebrities, technology, family & home, recreation & sports, wireless, education, life sciences, and gaming.
3. b5media is a network to over 170 blogs. Their current blog categories include arts & crafts, beauty & style, business, celebrities, entertainment, family & relationships, home & dining, science & health, sports, team blogs, technology, travel & culture, video games, and writing & literature.
You can also check out 451press.com, knowmoremedia.com and blog-republic.com.

Nikki Que is the owner of PCMoneyMaker.Net, resource for those looking to earn money online; Find work at home opportunities as well as various ways to earn extra money online. For free samples, visit FreeSamplesBlog.com.

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Blogs - Powerful search engine optimisation tools

Today, blogs can be useful for many purposes. The first blogs were almost exclusively used as personal online journals, documenting the author's opinion on various issues i.e. politics, hobbies, etc. and life in general, though many webmasters are now using blogs to generate targeted traffic to their website, and attract potential customers. Some are even used in conjunction with advertisement programs such as Google Adsense, making the blog itself profitable.

Search engines recognize blogs as valuable websites, providing regularly updated, original content. Because of these factors, good blogs usually enjoy a higher ranking than other sites with static content.

Fortunately, obtaining a blog is very simple: anyone can do it. There are many blog-publishing sites to choose from, the two major ones being Wordpress and Blogger. It is worth noting that Google now owns Blogger, and therefore its pages are indexed very quickly.

Creating and a search engine-friendly blog is very easy. When it comes to SEO, blogs are very similar to normal web pages. You must choose an interesting title that engages your blog's visitors. It should also contain some of your strongest keywords. Another good idea is using heading tags, and including keywords in them as the search engine spiders will recognize these tags and assign a higher importance to the text between them; (the same rule applies to bold text, and links).
Remember also to submit to directories, and ask for links from sites that have a similar theme as your blog to increase your backlinks. Also submit to social bookmarking sites to increase your traffic.

Now you have optimised your blog structure, you must blog frequently. The posts need not be very long, but it is very important that the blog is updated regularly with relevant information. The search engine spiders will crawl your blog more if the content is changed often, and all of this will result in a higher page rank on search engines. You should keep archives of all your blogging activity, as someone searching for a topic mentioned in one of your posts may "stumble" across your blog.

Try to keep your blog interesting, maximising the number of posts will not always have a positive effect if these posts are superfluous. A well-written blog will make your visitors want to come back again will build a familiarity between you and your potential clients. What's more, the hits these return visitors create will improve your page rank, attracting even more visitors to your blog. Try to maintain a good keyword density, without repeating yourself too much, as this will all help to be ranked higher in search engines.

Then, all you have to do is link your blog to your site, and you should get lots of organic traffic.

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Good for You, Bad for Others

A recent debate started me thinking about how some marketing strategies can be right for one Web site, but wrong for another depending on the owner's purpose and the underlying reasoning behind the action.

If an action doesn't directly and logically plug into site goals, then there are likely more profitable ways to spend that time and effort.

Publishing third-party articles on a Web site is one of those marketing strategies that can be right for one site, yet wrong for another.

Publishing Guest Articles as a Strategy

Publishing guest articles as one of your Web site marketing strategies can help broaden the amount and quality of content on a site, which in turn can lead to a more solid, stronger reputation. James Edwards of Umbrella-Consultancy, http://www.umbrella-consultancy.co.uk, explains:

\"IMO having quality articles on your site will show that you are...someone who embraces the industry and respects the work of others. Most research scientists post links to other respected scientists work. I think it can only be good to have quality material by other people in your field posted on your site.\"

Helping Web Site Visitors

Another situation where adding others articles to your site can make strategic sense is when a lot of visitors arrive looking for a solution other than the one you provide on your site. Rather than have them wander off, no closer to an answer to their problem, you can build goodwill and credibility by having articles on the Web site that give them more information.

For example, several types of people arrive at my site through the search engines:

- Some are people researching marketing consulting services.

- Some are students looking to write a paper or finish an assigned project for school.

- Some are looking for marketing software.

- Others are looking to buy printed material (e-books, templates, workbooks, etc.) in order to proceed, step-by-step, on their own.

- some are looking for software, porn, date.
The only ones that are going to be interested in what I have to sell are those in the last group. Instead of letting the majority of visitors go without a fight, I have articles on the site from handpicked individuals or companies.

Those articles are chosen according to how good the quality is, how well the subject matter fits, and whether I think the information will help site visitors.

Information Sites

If a site (or section of a site) is informational in nature, guest articles can be a viable Web site marketing strategy, for several reasons:

- Repeat, purchase-related visits. A good information library can help potential customers through the decision-making process. If they find the information on your site especially helpful, they will be predisposed to coming back later, when they are ready to purchase.

- Increased Web site revenue. Publishing others work can generate more revenue for your own site. For example, when I publish a third-party article, elsewhere on the page I include one or more of the following: AdSense; an advertisement for my own products; a newsletter sign-up box; or a relevant affiliate link. That way, every path off the page satisfies one of my own goals (direct ad revenue, new newsletter subscriber, or product sales lead).

- Increased targeted traffic. Each new page of quality content has the potential to bring in a happy chunk of incremental traffic from the search engines.

- Future collaborations or other projects. An indirect benefit from publishing others articles is contact and future collaboration with authors. For example, after one author received several new sign-ups to her newsletter through an article published on my site, she contacted me about collaborating on an audio product.

Poor Fit With Marketing Strategies

For some business models, including guest articles in a list of Web site marketing strategies does not make sense. For example, it can be counterproductive to include guest articles on Web sites where the primary goal is to sell.

Service Web Sites

If the goal is to generate direct sales and leads for your own services, it doesn't make sense to dilute the message and call to action with diversions. Karon Thackston explains:

\"The purpose of my site is to get those in need of copywriting services and SEO copywriting services to contact me in order to do business. People who come to my Marketing Words site, http://www.marketingwords.com, are looking for information about copywriting. They are also looking to hire a copywriter.\"

Therefore, you will find only material written by Karon on her site.

Product Sales Sites

Some sites have a single goal: to sell product. Every page on the site is devoted to product descriptions or copy designed to move a visitor toward a purchase. In these cases, where the predominant call to action is \"buy the product,\" articles could hurt sales by diverting visitor attention away from the products.

Visit your favorite online retail sites, and you are likely to find product descriptions, reviews, photos and other product-driven content - but little or no guest articles. Their absence on many e-commerce sites is an illustration of the poor fit of such articles as a marketing strategy for those sites.

Understanding how different techniques support, or sabotage, Web site marketing strategies can be critical to a site's success. Align your strategies with overall goals, and your business is more likely to flourish.

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Bobette Kyle draws upon 10+ years of Marketing/Executive experience, Marketing MBA, and online marketing research in her writing. Bobette is proprietor of the Web Site Marketing Plan Network, http://www.WebSiteMarketingPlan.com, and Moderator for the Web Marketing topic at highrankings.com forums.

Copyright 2004 Bobette Kyle. All rights reserved.

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The Google Adsense Profits Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing!

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Well, simply because affiliate marketing is the easiest and probably the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other businessman products on your site. But even online retailers can benefit from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate marketing actually works for merchants as well as it works for the affiliates.

Affiliate marketing, simply said, is a relationship or agreement made between two websites, with one site being the merchant website and the other being the affiliate’s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant advertise his products on the affiliates site. The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the affiliate in whatever method they have agreed into. This would generally mean easy income for the affiliate, as he would do nothing but place the retailer ad on his site. This would also be very beneficial for the merchant, as getting affiliates to advertise their products would be a lot more affordable than hiring an advertising firm to promote their products.

There are a variety of methods on how the merchant would compensate the affiliate for his services, and for the webmaster, these methods simply translates to the method by which he would earn easy cash. Among the more common methods of compensation are the pay-per-click method, the pay-per-lead method, and the pay-per-sale method. The pay-per-click method is the method most preferred by affiliates, for their site visitor would only have to visit the advertiser site for them to gain money. The other two methods, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they would only have to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products.

Getting much profit on affiliate marketing programs, however, does not depend so much on the compensation method is it does on the traffic generated by your site. A website that can attract more visitors would generally have the greater chance of profiting in affiliate marketing programs.

What about Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is actually some sort of an affiliate marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the affiliates and the merchants. The merchant, or the advertiser, would simply sign up with Google and provide the latter with text ads pertaining to their products. These ads, which is actually a link to the advertiser website, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the websites owned by the affiliates, or by those webmasters who have signed up with the Google Adsense program.

While one can find a lot of similarities between Google Adsense and other affiliate marketing programs, you can also see a lot of differences. In Google Adsense, all the webmaster has to do is place a code on his website and Google takes care of the rest. The ads that Google would place on your site would generally be relevant to the content of your site. This would be advantageous both for you and for the advertiser, as the visitors of your site would more or less be actually interested with the products being advertised.

The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly. Also, the Google Adsense program provides webmasters with a tracking tool that allows you to monitor the earnings you actually get from a certain ad.

So, where do all of these lead us to?

Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether you are the merchant or the affiliate. For the merchant side, a lot of money can be saved if advertising effort is concentrated on affiliate marketing rather than on dealing with advertising firms. For the webmaster, you can easily gain a lot of profits just by doing what you do best, and that is by creating websites. And if you combine all your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it would surely convert to a large amount of cash.

http://www.reprintarticlesite.com
http://www.youradsenseprofits.com

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