Archive for March 1st, 2011

Blogging is one of the forms of websites that is supposed to be serving the purpose of updating a certain audience about the news of someone or something. This form of blogs is now the least one around thanks to the fellow affiliate marketers who took blogs out of their context and built thousands upon thousands of fake blogs to deceive their readers into buying something they don’t want or don’t need.

This way to make money from blogging is totally unethical and I will not be surprised if within months a new law will come out with strong enough penalties to stop this kind of cyber crime that not only hurts the individuals economy, but also ruins the reputation of the honest affiliate marketers who don’t approve this method.

It’s time to get things back to normal and stop the evil from spreading on the Internet. In the following few paragraphs you’ll read the outlines of a new approach on how to make money from blogging in a way that enriches the web with knowledge instead of deceiving the readers.

The Idea

A blog is supposed to be personal. If you are not a company or a business, then your blog should represent you as a person. And this is the way you’ll do it. You’ll be blogging about yourself, not the whole “you” but rather about one side of you that you think will benefit others to read about it. This is not a theory. If you are interested in something or have knowledge about one thing there certainly is somebody out there who needs your knowledge. To prove it go to Google and search that thing that you want to blog about. While typing your search term a drop down menu will show you what else people are searching that’s related to your terms. The search results also show you how many other websites are talking about this subject.

To make money from blogging about your passion or experience you’ll need to send traffic to your blog and let Google advertise on it for you through the AdSense program.

That was just the beginning, but money comes later.

After you’re accepted as an AdSense publisher go to Google trends and find out what are people searching for now. Pick one of those topics or keywords and either post about it on your blog if relevant, or write an article and submit it to an article directory like EzineArticles.com. In the latter case include an introductory paragraph about yourself and link to your website. This kind of keywords is usually an untapped gold mine that you can rank for easily. When people search that term, find your article, and find your information valuable they will probably click through to your blog to know more about the wonderful author who enriched their minds with his wisdom. And here comes the traffic to your blog.

The Implementation

1. Sit down and write a list of at least 3 subjects you are good at and have passion for. Remember that you’ll be writing about this subject almost daily for a while.

2. Go to Blogger.com and get yourself an account. If you have a Google account of any kind just log in with your Google ID and password, and build a blog. Make sure your url has something to do with your blog subject.

3. Edit your profile and write about yourself and what makes you an expert in this field. Upload a photo and pick your interests.

4. Add your first post about your subject. Say hello to your visitors and start listing more of your qualifications.

5. Start posting like once daily about your subject. For example if you are a fitness frenzy and you want to write about fitness, start with a series of the basics of healthy life style, then a program to burn the fat and build more muscles. You can also put these stationary stuff in pages instead of posts and leave the posts for the next steps. After your first post you can apply for Google AdSense program from within your account from the “monetize” tab, or if you already have an account just feed your publisher ID and pick the default ad placement.

6. Follow the news in your subject and post about every single piece of news you come across that’s directly related to your subject. To know these news you can use Google alert, watch the news on TV, listen to radio, watch talk shows, or the newspapers.

7. There will be some news that are not directly related to your blog but you still can write about them because you have knowledge in that field or because you have an opinion to express or passion you want to share. Write about those issues and publish your articles on article directories like EzineArticles.com. Link to your site from the resource box.

8. Share every article you write or post on your blog with the world by email, social media, social bookmarks, and even by mouth.

9. Keep track of your visitors by using a service like StatCounter.com to know where your visitors came from, what they did and how did they leave your site. This also gives you an idea of what keywords they are searching to reach your blog so that you post articles about them.

10. Never change the personal look of your blog. People are people whether they are online or offline. People tend to connect with peers not with authority figures. That’s why you don’t want your blog to look like an authority site, but rather a personal blog of an expert who loves to share his knowledge with the world.

Always add value to each post you have on your blog and in each article you write. This way you are contributing positively in building real value for Internet users. Someday this value will replace the fake blogs and articles that are only there to deceive people.

This is my way to make money from blogging. And it’s all explained above. If there is something you don’t know how to do, instead of just leaving this page just Google it and you’ll find a lot of info out there that will help you. This article on just an outline of a way to make money from blogging, but it’s not a detailed one. After all it’s just an article that has limits. But you already know what you need to know to do it. The research process is easy if you know what you are looking for.

Being a subset of journalism, it is no surprise that blogging shares many traits with its parent. In particular, blogging strongly resembles the feature or editorials pages of many newspapers. Not beholden to quite the same rules of timeliness or AP style guidelines as the news sections, these sections focus on matters of personal interest to the writer, or on a specific topic of particular relevance or human interest.

So, given that blogging tends to be derived from these sections, it is reasonable to look into the tactics that bring traditional journalists such success in their writing and to borrow the best ideas from them. In particular, many bloggers have discovered the value of including interviews in their publications.

An interview is fairly straightforward: a conversation between the blogger and another party, generally about a topic of mutual interest to the blogger, the subject and the readers. Some interviews are scripted, some are more extemporaneous, but at their heart they all have the mission of illuminating the thoughts of the interviewee to the audience of the publication in order to shed some extra light on the subject being discussed.

In the world of blogging, there are generally three approaches to integrating an interview into a blog.

The Writeup

This is the general, news-story style form of an interview. The blogger contacts the subject, does their interview, then writes a story around the interview using the subject’s quotations as a framework. It tends to look something like:

Recently I spoke to branding icon John Doe, asking his thoughts on the importance of personal identity. “You really need a strong name, something people can get ahold of and never forget, that’s the first thing.” When I asked him for details, John commented, “Well, if you don’t have a name that people remember, they’ll just refer to you as ‘that one guy’ or any old thing.”

The structure is easy to follow, and very much suited to blogging as a style of writing. It doesn’t have to be in first person; it is easily adapted to any blogging style. It has the value of letting the blogger do most of the writing. This way, their style remains intact and the interview is presented on their terms to the readers, maintaining a unique voice.

The weakness of this style is that it tends to raise questions. Did the blogger use the whole interview? Are they editorializing in their choice of quotes? and so on. For example, in the choice above, When I asked him for details could actually have played out as “Well, that’s obvious. Could you be more specific?” and our imaginary blogger simply rephrased to make himself look less confrontational.

The Reprint

The alternative is simply to reprint the entire interview, without editing other than to remove little asides such as “um” and other verbal tics. This tends to look as follows:

BenjaminBrandBlog – Hello, John.

John Doe – Hello. Thanks for interviewing me.

BBB – Glad to talk with you. So, what would you say is the first thing that comes to your mind when talking about branding?

JD – You really need a strong name, something people can get ahold of and never forget, that’s the first thing.

The reprint is rather an unusual choice, very rarely seen in blogging or in print journalism. This is because it has some obvious weaknesses. For example, not every question in an interview ends up being relevant. Not all interviews follow a particular script; some go down tangents, interesting or dull asides, and so on. It is the job of the journalist to edit the content so that the material that stayed on subject gets to the readers.

However, there are some cases in which reprinting an interview is an interesting alternative. If a conversation was purely illuminating, if it covered some amazing grounds that people didn’t expect, and the writer wishes to share it, then by all means share the interview itself.

The Podcast or Video

Similar to the reprint, this is the process of using recording equipment to make an audio podcast or videoblog of the interview in question. This has a number of advantages over the simple reprint, because it allows the personality of the two subjects to shine through in a way that text doesn’t always quite capture. Sarcasm and wit come through a bit more readily when tone of voice or body language are added into the subject matter, making the whole process more dynamic and interesting.

The difficulty of these formats is in their complexity. The logistics of getting recording software to work, of cleaning up audio and video for proper use on the net if they aren’t your blog’s primary medium, etc. can all make this a bit out of reach for the average blogger. They require the dedication of actual time and effort to produce, share and refine as a series. Further, not everyone is as suited for speaking as they are for writing; some just aren’t as comfortable in a spoken medium, and a skilled writer isn’t always a stunning speaker.

In this online world there is a huge difference between a website and a blog. Unfortunately there are places where most people make a big mistake when it comes to calling a blog a blog and a website a website, and this is the online article world. for the most part this can be an honest mistake, but here are seven points about what a blog really is and is not.

1) A blog has posts: This is simple, for example, a post will have the date when it was written along with the section for comments. If you are writing on an online article site (HubPages and Squidoo are the best examples) there will often not be dates when you last published something on there, and more often than not you will be looking to link to other pages.

2) A blog is a series of views: In a blog you will be writing to a select audience, and they are what are known as regular readers, who expect a new post each day. They also know that comments are encouraged.

3) A blog is not a website, but can act like one: Some people use their blogs as a part of a larger website and some website owners use their blog as the main page. Often, blogs are just that blogs, which are updated on a regular basis. (You will often see post dates and short posts)

4) A blog is not static: If you leave a blog alone for too long, you lose your readership. Whereas a website can be left alone for a long time, and still get people coming back from many different traffic sources.

5) A blog is a long term business: This can be a part of your business, but it can also be the main part of your business, to make money with a blog you need to think long term.

6) It is easy to start blog: It is much easier to start a blog than it is to start or build a website. with a blog, you have a long term thing, and you can learn which ones will help you and what does work or does not work for your blog.

7) A Blog is not a short term plan: Do not go and write a blog with the plan that you will see success on it in a matter of months, this is not the case. In fact it can take years to build a great blog, and make money with it.