5 Top Secrets to Blog Your Way to the Bank

There are multiple ways of making money online. One cheap effective way is to make use of blogs. Even if most people know what a blog is nowadays, the general view is that they are only used as a fun “diary” to share people’s opinions. If someone makes money it’s a schoolgirl that happened to have luck writing about a popular topic.

Those unfortunate people that have tried blogging for money and failed know that it’s not just a matter of quickly putting up a blog and wait for the money to come rolling. You have to have patience and do daily efforts in order not to drown in the millions of other blogs out there. Focusing on daily traffic generating strategies and working for long term will almost always be rewarding.

While you can use free blogging platforms, a blog on your own blog is highly recommended since it will give you a lot more flexibility and you are not dependent on a service that could shut you down any second.

I will now reveal my top 5 secret steps to build a money making blog. They are research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving:

1. Research a Niche – To find a niche that you are comfortable blogging about, you can for instance take a look at popular magazines in Amazon, popular products in Ebay and most published/view articles in Ezinearticles. Write down your niche ideas and choose a subniche from each that has at least 10-500 searches per day in Wordtracker. Also search google for the main niche keyphrase and favor phrases that have under 10.000 competing pages in Google. Also check Clickbank and Commission Junction to see if there are good products that match the keywords.

2. Setup – Create a domain name with the main keyword included to maximize SEO efforts. For the niche golf swings you might choose improvemygolfswings.com. Setup Wordpress as it?s the most recommended blogging platform and optimize your blog with plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack, Feedburner, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet, Google Analytics and Auto Social.

3. Finding Blog content – Pick out 2-3 main keyword phrases from the research phase to start optimizing your blog for. Search these phrases for content in Ezinearticles, technorati, PRwebs, forums, magazines and books. It’s also a good idea to setup Google Alerts in order to receive daily keyword specific articles. Strive to make daily quality posts by rewriting the content in your own style or just adding your comments under the article. Don’t just copy other peoples work. Make sure you include keyword phrases in the post title, body and header tags, but don’t overdo it. It’s more important that it’s readable to the user.

4. Monetization – Join and search both Clickbank and Commission Junction to find suitable products to promote. You could also find affiliate merchants by searching Google for [main keyword] + affiliates (or affiliate program). Sprinkle affiliate links in your posts and put some banners in the sidebar. Just don’t make it look like a big advertisement blog that will scare away the users. 1-2 products to start with are enough.

5. Start driving Traffic to Your blog. Submit Articles to Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Isnare and other article directories. You can also use an article submission service to automate this. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedage, Feedagg, Feedfury and Feedsubmitter. Bookmark each post you make in sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. Socialmarker is a good service for this. Comment on other People?s blogs and make use of free services like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and Blogger to create article pages that link back to your blog.

If you are persistent and keep doing the traffic generation tactics mentioned above you will soon see a boost in visitors and hopefully a good amount of revenue stream. Always strive for good quality content that enriches the users experience and update your blog regularly.

If your blog doesn?t perform as well after doing all of the above tactics for a month or two, you could turn down the effort and some Adsense on it instead. Repeat the process on a new blog. All blogs does not become successful and some take a long time to do, by having a couple of blogs out there you will spread your chance of hitting a gold mine.

The highly successful million dollar blogger Rob Benwell teaches a lot of secret strategies in his latest e-book, Blogging to the Bank 3.0. This guide is gold worth for someone just starting up but also includes a lot of tricks for the more experienced bloggers. Another tip is Firepow, a top notch tool which helps you automate the setup of a blog with the right plugins, getting content, optimize posts and promote all your blogs within a single easy to use web interface.