The blogosphere, comprised of countless blogs from everywhere, is among the most popular faces of the Internet. It's not just for teenagers anymore. Several years ago, most blogs were run by kids who just wished to talk to their friends, or people who just wanted to discuss their daily life.
These days, almost everyone online includes a blog.
Itâs likely that, you have one - and if you don't, you need to.
Stay in the home moms like to blog about their daily lives and raising children. CEOs of major corporations own blogs about the latest happenings at their company. Many celebrities run blogs, plus they blog about their upcoming events, movies, and roles (not to mention scandals).
And marketers have blogs about every niche imaginable!
I'm confident to state I myself am the main blogging culture.
Blogging is an excellent way to get in touch with the people online. They can touch millions of lives, and spread your message like no other medium. You can say almost anything you want, and you will have an audience for nearly every niche!
It is possible to run a blog simply for fun. To be able to talk about parties you attend, restaurants you take in at, places you go shopping, or where you continue vacation, someone should probably read about it.
Even if the only real audience you have can be your good friends and relatives, you'll have fun and be able to say whatever's on your mind.
Increasing numbers of people are embracing blogging in an effort to make money. Some people just want to create a few extra dollars for extra cash, but others are in fact creating a full-time income making use of their blogs.
A few prominent bloggers even feature making thousands of dollars with their blogs (a la Perez Hilton, who parlayed his blogging fun into thousands of dollars in ad money every month, which delivered him their own TV show, podcast, and clothing line)!
There are many ways to make money blogging. Whether you're a college student who just really wants to make a little extra cash for pizza and clothes, or you're a significant marketer who would like to make a small fortune, it's very possible with blogging.
Blogs are big, even if they're small. Some blogs get millions of hits monthly. Blog traffic has been growing steadily for several years as consumers gain confidence from peers instead of trusting hard hitting sales pitches they find on the internet.
With more and much more people jumping onto the blogosphere bandwagon, it probably won't decelerate within the foreseeable future. If you're considering getting into blogging, it's a good idea to begin with now.
It generally takes a few months to begin with accumulating a following. And you also really need regular visitors to be able to make money with your blog. You need to work to gain subscribers to your RSS feed, because those people should come back often to read your new posts.
And be sure you lend your own unique voice to your posts. The most important nuances when it comes to why blogging is such a major global phenomenon is the fact that people really enjoy reading unique voices on certain topics.
They crave the differences in personalities. It's refreshing to learn information which has personality and isn't stale or stuffy, which means it's been translated by a single editor in order that every voice is uniform. This is the reason columnist pages in local newspapers are so popular.
Your unique voice is the most important part of getting regular people to your blog. If you need to see examples of this, visit probably the most popular blogs you can get. You'll see that one thing these blogs have as a common factor is the proven fact that the bloggers make engaging, funny, or original posts.
That's your key to rendering it big in the blogosphere!
Before You Blog, Build a Blueprint
Plenty of bloggers put together a blog without the real plan for how they're going to promote it or monetize it. Putting a blog together without a plan is like trying to build a house without a blueprint.
It's possible, yes. But the end result is most likely going to be shoddy, and the whole thing could break apart at any minute.
You should develop a solid course of action before you even buy the domain. It is advisable to develop a strong blueprint before you ever begin. Waiting until after you have already set it up and are getting traffic could mean a lot of extra work moving in to correct mistakes.
Changing themes and adding plugins after you're already getting traffic could interrupt your traffic. Sometimes new plugins and themes can temporarily break your site, that could mean a loss of traffic (and money) until you can fix everything.
The first part of your plan should be choosing a niche, needless to say. Part of selecting a niche is finding products it is possible to promote. In case a niche has no products available, you can create your own.
But if there are no affiliate products available, it may be because there isn't enough demand there for a product. In cases like this, you'd have to do some careful market research so that you can determine if a niche is truly viable.
What's your purpose for blogging?
Do you have your own product you want to promote?
Do you want to promote affiliate products?
Do you want to just put AdSense or CPA offers on your own site?
You need to ask yourself questions like these in order that you'll know how you would like to monetize the site. In the event that you intend to promote affiliate products, you need to test the merchandise yourself before you promote them.
If you don't, these potential customers could become very upset if you promoted something of really poor quality and they got it because they trusted you. Even worse, what if you wind up promoting something that turns out to be a scam?
You don't necessarily have to purchase every product you wish to promote. If you can prove you've got a decent level of traffic (and sometimes in the event that you just ask), you may be able to get free review copies of a few of the products you'd like to promote.
It generally does not hurt to ask. Even if you don't have any existing traffic yet, it is possible to write to who owns a specific affiliate program, tell them what you're planning to accomplish, and ask in the event that you could get an assessment copy.
Some people won't give you a review copy. Plenty of marketers get requests for review copies from those that just want to get yourself a copy of these product for free. So if you come across a skeptic, or someone who's been burned before, you can find turned down.
In this case, it's probably far better just go right ahead and buy the product in the event that you actually want to promote it. Whether it's a scam or a really crappy product, just require a refund.
You can also consider using a donation button on your own blog. If you can't find worthwhile products to promote, and you also don't have the time, money, or ability to create your personal product, you can still set up a donation button. If your blog is very good, you may get donations.
Or, you can always sell ad space on your own blog. If you strat to get a large amount of traffic or you get a very high PageRank in Google, you could charge big money for a link on your blog. You may also get paid to make posts on your blog that review other sites.
Should a Blog Topic Be Broad or Narrow?
You can find two schools of thought regarding blog topics. Some people believe your topic ought to be very focused, as you may bring in a flurry of laser-targeted visitors. Plus, you have less competition in smaller market segments.
Another group believe that anything worth doing is worth doing big. They believe that the only way blogging can truly be worth it is if you're attracting massive traffic, and the only way you can achieve that level of traffic is when you are very broad - casting a broad net, as they say.
For example, you might have a sports blog that has broad appeal. You could talk about baseball, football, basketball, soccer, tennis, and golf. This might give you a a lot more broad appeal, and the prospect of larger traffic.
But since there would be so much competition, it might take a lot longer to get more traffic coming in. Plus, the way I see it is, if I'm thinking about golf, I really won't care about the other parts of your blog, so the value of it plummets in my eyes.
But let's say you select golf as your broad topic. Even that is broad, although you just segregated it from another sports in existence. There are plenty of things you could write about golf - vacations, apparel, clubs, courses, techniques, etc.
You could choose a far more targeted niche like women's golf or senior golf. It is a smaller segment of a small niche. This means you could get traffic faster, because there will be less competition.
Less competition means you have the potential to go up faster in the search engine ranking positions. Needless to say, women's golf would get much less traffic from the main spot of Google compared to the combined traffic of all of the other sports niches, however the chances of that traffic converting into a sale will soar.
So basically, it boils right down to how you feel about your abilities. If you believe you have the ability to get one large blog to the top of the various search engines rather quickly, you then might manage to handle an easy topic blog.
Unless you believe your abilities are up-to-snuff, then you might want to stick to a smaller niche initially. Remember, it is possible to always start other blogs later. You could either build a network of small niche blogs, or you could start out with one broad blog and then start multiple sub-niche blogs later. You can then link to all of your smaller blogs from your own large blog.
You could also start with the smaller blogs, get them to gain some popularity, and then start a large, broad blog later. Once you start the bigger blog, you'll have several smaller blogs already getting traffic and already having PR that may link to the bigger blog to get it started.
If you already have a lot of SEO experience and you're confident in your capability to pull off some very nice search engine ranking positions quickly, then starting with a far more broad blog might be a better option.
You can still get some good of the advantages of having an inferior blog by having categories for each of the smaller niches on your broad topic blog. One very last thing to bear in mind is that your traffic will undoubtedly be less targeted in the event that you run an easy blog.
If you have a site about skin care, you may get plenty of traffic that's just searching for information about the best lotions or skin creams. But in the event that you start a blog about something specific, like acne, you're more likely to get people who are ready and ready to buy something.
Where DO YOU WANT TO Host Your Blog?
Lots of people begin by hosting their blog for free at one of many common blog serves. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is a far better idea to host your blog by yourself domain if possible.
Let's check out WordPress. WordPress is a very popular blogging platform. It is possible to host your blog on their servers, or it is possible to download the program and host your blog by yourself domain.
There are many reasons why you should host your own blog, instead of hosting your blog directly on WordPress.com. For one thing, WordPress doesn't enable you to promote affiliate links on their domain.
So if you desire to make any money with your blog, you can't host it on the server, you'll have to host it yourself. Another reason you shouldn't host your site on WordPress may be the proven fact that you can't use the selection of plugins and themes that you could use all on your own domain.
WordPress is very limited so far as the functionality, so don't have a much anything really cool on your blog in the event that you host it there. You can get free WordPress tutorials to help you get started with your blog.
Now let's look at Blogger. They do allow commercial blogs, in order to post affiliate links there if you would like. But they're also against what they deem as "spam blogs" or "splogs." Should they decide your blog is spam, or they decide it's "too" commercial, or they just don't like it, they can delete it for just about any reason.
There goes all that effort you put into it!
You have to agree to those terms and conditions when you sign up. That means that even though you don't actually break any rules, they could still delete your site if they chose. That is clearly a pretty powerful motivator.
It certainly wouldn't be a very pleasant thing to create a blog up to several thousand hits each day, only to have it deleted (and believe me, I've heard these horror stories). You'd lose all of that traffic, all those backlinks, all your reputation and your search engine rankings.
Imagine it all being destroyed overnight. That's not a good thing.
It's like having a fire rip during your offline store and you haven't any insurance to rebuild.
Another essential reason to host your site on your own domain is that it offers you credibility. In the event that you host your blog by yourself domain, you'll appear more professional, and more as an authority figure in your niche.
People will automatically assume you're more serious if you're hosting your blog all on your own domain, rather than putting it up somewhere free of charge. If you do opt to host your own domain, one thing you will have to do is choose a domain that contains a few keywords linked to your niche.
If your blog is approximately home cleaning tips, then try to get housecleaningtips.com. If that's not available, decrease your keyword list and discover the next most sensible thing. Then register the domain.
Next you need to find a host for the blog. You might want to choose a host that has Fantastico, which is a program that sits on the server and lets you very easily install WordPress (along with other scripts) and never have to create and manage MySQL databases yourself.
After you have hosting, you merely need to go to your domain registrar and create the name servers to point to your new host. Click here to find out more will be able to help you with this.
Blogging Is Big Business
An increasing number of companies are starting blogs, and several people are even forming their entire companies around blogging. Customers really love blogs because they're generally full of great (free) information, they offer an individual touch that generally isn't entirely on a typical corporate website, and they are not usually filled with a great deal of hype and hard sell tactics.
Another reason customers love blogs is they provide a great medium for interaction. Visitors can leave comments and receive responses with their comments. This helps build loyalty to your blog as well as your company, and readers enjoy this level of interaction with someone they consider an authority figure.
It helps them feel like they're really being listened to, and just like the company really cares in what they need to say - even if that "company" is an entrepreneur as if you! Blogs are a fantastic solution to build loyalty.
You can achieve your audience in an exceedingly personal way, must way more than with a typical, stuffy stagnant website. Readers be prepared to see some personality developing in a blog. In the event that you really let your personality shine through, you can build a following which will subscribe to your Feed and come back often, eagerly waiting to listen to more of everything you have to say.
This is a great way to brand yourself as well as your business. Since you can get more personal with a blog, people start to become familiar with you a bit as a person. This makes you seem more real, and people commence to trust you and your messages more.
For some reason, people trust websites with identifiable people in it.
Remember, if you are blogging for business you should stay somewhat professional. It's probably best not to post about your aunt's cataract surgery or your grandma's cat that died. You can get a little personal - after all, that's what really enables you to stand out.
But most people who find themselves reading your blog is there to find out information regarding the niche, seeking solutions to their needs. Keep your posts on topic, but get personal by giving your personal voice within those entries.
Provide valuable information inside your blog posts. People aren't going to keep returning to your blog again and again just to read about the brand new products you're releasing, unless you're releasing some really revolutionary stuff.
They're going to desire to read industry news, guidelines, special strategies, and other important information free of charge. While it's perfectly fine to blog about new product releases, you'll want to keep providing helpful tips to keep your readers returning.
Don't ever lose sight of the fact that your readers are real people. Guess what happens you love reading in a blog, right? You want solid information - something helpful. You almost certainly don't mind the casual sales page on a blog filled with great information, but you would be pretty annoyed to reading only pitch after pitch.
If you're running a business blog, it's important to keep your readers in mind. Give them the type of quality information they're hungry for, and they're going to keep coming back for more. Actually, the more you give them free of charge, the more loyal they'll become, and the much more likely they'll be to buy from you in the future.
Blogging is all about informing and educating. When you can do that, your visitors will form a bond with you and they'll make sure you spread the word about your blog which means that your URL goes viral also it attracts an even bigger following inside your niche.
Blogging can be quite lucrative, not to mention it enhances your current branding and networking on the 'net. Listed below are the steps you need to take to begin RIGHT NOW:
1.) Pick a niche topic (my advice would be to go narrow).
2.) Find a domain and purchase it.
3.) Create your WordPress blog making use of your Fantastico host.
4.) Pick a theme online - Google free WordPress themes and you'll find millions you can upload.
5.) Set up your blog for categories, ad space, and stick an opt-in box in it to begin creating a list.
6.) Start posting to your blog using keyword relevant titles and entries.
7.) Start bookmarking your site and sharing that connect to get it moving in the viral direction.
8.) Test the conversion of varied products you promote on your blog and replace the ones that aren't working well for you.