The power of a blog is due to the automated content management aspects of the major blogging platforms, and the ease with which it lets you add new content. The software takes care of ensuring the link structure and navigation is correct between your posts. It maintains the framework that your blog occupies. With a traditional website that is a major undertaking. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of blogs are how easy it makes it to add new content. Unlike a traditional website, where you have to either code with HTML and upload iot with an FTP application, or use expensive and difficult software like Dreamweaver. Either of these methods can be very powerful in the hands of an experienced web developer. Unless that describes you, a blogging platform, such as WordPress is much easier, and, many would argue, just as powerful. It is also much faster to use a blogging platform to add content. That is very important, because the more fresh, high quality original content you have, and the more often you update it, the more your blog will be loved by both search engines and your visitors.

Many beginning bloggers turn to one of the free bogging platforms that are available, but there are two main problems with that strategy. The first reason to avoid free blogging platforms, such as Blogger, is that when your blog is hosted on Blogger, everything is owned by Google, who owns Blogger. They own your blog and your domain , so all the hard work you do building links to your blog and trying to increase blog traffic can go to waste in an instant, because nothing is under your control.

The other reason not to rely on the free services is that while they may be free, they are not a good value because noting you’re building will really be yours.  All your hard work will be on web real estate owned and controlled by someone else, and you could wake up one day to find it is all gone, never to return. Adding insult to injury , getting your own domain name and having it hosted is very affordable. It only costs about $10 a year for your very own domain name, and you can get quality hosting for less than $5.00 a month.

The first thing you should do when starting a blog that you hope will bring in a healthy income for you one day is actually plan things out. Take the time to actually do a bussiness plan for your blog. That will help make sure you don’t miss any of the details you’ll need to be successful. Be sure you include everything, such as what the main theme of your blog will be, the monetization strategies you’ll use, a financial plan, a growth plan, and an oft forgotten part of many business plans, the exit strategy.

Most highly successful blogs are tightly themed. Themed means they focus closely on a certain subject or niche, such as local residential real estate, working from home income techniques, ‘60’s muscle cars, or needlepoint. This narrow focus will help you build a core base of loyal readers and subscribers. These are very important for the immediate and long term success of your blog . In addition, having a large, vibrant subscriber list adds a large amount of value to your blog should you want to sell it. If you’re having trouble choosing a theme, look for one with a large profit potential. There will be more on this later.

Do some research to decide what to name your blog. The name should be based on profitible keywords associated with your theme. After you’ve homed in on a name, you can get your own domain name and hosting package. It is extremely affordable to do that. In fact, you can easily get a domain name for less than $10 a year and hosting for less than $5a month. Then you’ll be correctly set up. You will own the domain and will be free to do with it as you please. You blog will actually be an asset that you control. Doing so will also let you more effectively target keywords in your domain name. For example, a blog on quitting smoking should have the keyword phrase “quitting smoking” in some form in it’s domain name. The search engines will thank you for it.

The next decision you’ll have to make is what blogging platform you’ll use. The two largest are Moveable Type and WordPress. WordPress is open source, meaning basically it’s free. Because it’s open source, many developers freely create things for WordPress, so there are a huge number of add-ons, widgets, templates, and pluggins available for it. You can even publish your WordPress blog from your iPhone now!

Moveable type is not open source, but you may still be able to get it free, as many web hosting companies offer it as part of their hosting package. It too has many different things available to enhance the functionality and appearance of blogs published with it. I’ve used both frequently. You can have many fantastic, and profitable blogs with either publishing system.

So you’ve got your blog up and you’re posting to it with reckless abandon. How can you make some money for your efforts? That’s sort of a balancing act. You want to blog about a topic that interests you, or keeping up an aggressive posting schedule will become very difficult. You also want to blog about a topic that is profitable, or you won’t make any money.

To help find what blog subjects can earn you some decent profits, head to Google and see what keywords are going for these days. Use the free Google keyword tool in Google Adwords. You can type in keywords and keyword phrases and the tool will show an estimate of cost per click that advertisers are willing to pay for ads targeting a given keyword or phrase, and an idea of the number of advertisers that are advertising using them.

Expensive, highly competitive keywords mean that many advertisers are willing to pay fairly large amounts of money for those keywords. In theory that means that there is profit to be made by creating content that features those keyword phrases.

Remember that it is only an idea, and there are two schools of thought on earning money from your blog. You can try to find a narrow niche with little competition, and dominate it. The other approach is to head to a very large, but profitable niche and try to get enough traffic to skim some profit from the niche. Basically you’ll either a small fish in an ocean, or a large fish in a pond. There are successful bloggers using both strategies.

Next you’ll want to decide on a monetization strategy for your blog. In most cases you’ll use a combination of them to bring home the bacon. The three main strategies are:

1. Sales of your own products or services

2. Affiliate marketing

3. Advertising. This is usually contextual advertising, but some bloggers are successful with other forms, such as banner ads.

With affiliate marketing you’ll be paid a commission for referring a visitor to a company’s site. If the person you referred does the desired action you’ll earn your commission. In the majority of cases the desired action means the visitor buys something, or fills out a lead form.

Contextual advertising automatically places ads on your site that are targeted to your site by the context of your site. The ad publishers have algorithms that look at your blog and decide which of their advertiser’s ads would best go with your blog’s content. In most cases, you’re then paid a percentage of the advertising fee when one of your visitors clicks on the link in the ad. This is known as pay per click advertising. The leader is this is Google, with their Adwords / Adsense program.

To have a blog that makes money, you need to have targeted traffic, the more the better. That is largely a function of the content. A large amount of good, original content (not content scraped form other blogger’s RSS feeds). Some on page search engine optimization techniques won’t hurt either, but good, high quality content will get you both search engine visitors, and repeat traffic from people that just want to read your stuff.

Make sure you target the proper keywords in your posts and post titles . You’re looking for profitable keywords that have relatively low competition. By optimizing for words and phrases people are actively searching for, you’ll do better in the search engine rankings, and you’ll be giving your readers exactly what they were looking for. That double whammy is a true recipe for blog money making success. All the major search engines will reward you for properly executing this strategy.

These are the basics on how you can have a blog that makes money. If you want to discover more, maybe leave your j-o-b behind forever, click to reveal a little known strategy on how to make money off your blog.

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Here is a little explanation of the WordPress blog and how it can help small businesses connect to their message and potential (and current) clients and customers.

WordPress is a powerful platform that allows for instant content creation.

Are Small businesses using the idea of blogging to their benefit. If you are a small business owner, the WordPress blog can help you leverage the vast power and reach of the internet. The following video outlines some of the key steps you can take to use blogging as a powerful tool in your online marketing efforts!

WordPress, small business, marketing, internet marketing, blog, blogging

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To make money online you need to learn internet marketing skills, to find out more about a unique online marketing education platform and successful high ticket online business model that works

Duration : 0:3:40

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