how to start blogging for profit

How To Make Your Blog More Appealing

Every blogger who earns income from their blog knows that the only way you can make money is by getting and keeping the traffic coming. Without your readers, you wouldn’t be making money at all.

There are lots of ways to get them there, but the question is – how do you keep them returning? If a reader isn’t impressed by your blog at all, then they’ll leave your blog, never to return again.

With them goes their blog’s traffic that you could’ve benefited from if they’d linked to you. Here are some tips to make your blog appealing enough to keep the traffic there to earn you some money.

Design

The most common mistake some bloggers make is in their blog’s design. Blog readers not only look for interesting and informative content – they also want to come to an inviting space to read it.

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The blog’s design needs to be inviting to them and comforting. It’s crucial not to have anything that would annoy them to the point of leaving because they can’t stand it. Make sure you’re not annoying them with colored font that’s hard to read or a bunch of graphics that are too distracting.

A few animated graphics are fine, but don’t have flashing ads and glittering graphics detracting from your blog’s message – or your strategically-placed advertisements.

It’s fine to use colored font for your posts, but make sure it’s easy to read. A pale yellow font color against a pure white background may be too difficult for the visitors to read. They shouldn’t clash with the background color either. Clashing colors can give visitors headaches, so they’ll leave your site without bookmarking it for a later visit.

Content

The other common mistake bloggers tend to make is with their content. Some bloggers don’t update very often. If you only post once a month, your readers will forget you’re there and won’t return to your site.

Post to your blog at least two to three times a week to keep human visitors and search engine spiders coming back.

Some bloggers also make the mistake of only providing text content to their blogs. Text posts are great, but mix it up a little every once in awhile with multi-media formats. Provide some interesting pictures, audio files and videos. Offer a little variety and your visitors will come back to check and see what else you’ve been up to.

It’s also important to stick to your blog’s niche topic. If you’re blogging about Homeschooling, then stick to that topic. Providing information about a celebrity’s latest excursion will turn off your readers unless it somehow relates to homeschooling.

To make your blog successful in bringing you money, make sure you make the blog appealing to your readers. If your readers keep coming back, your chances of making money from your ads and offers will increase.

Of course, having a good looking blog is only part of the puzzle. You have seen that you need great content to share with your readers but how do you go about finding and creating that content? Let’s take a closer look…

How To Find Great Content For Your Blog

In order to make your blog a successful money making entity, you’ll need to get traffic to it and keep them coming back.

The best way to do this is to provide the best content you can in your niche and make it interesting to your blog readers.

Even the most successful bloggers start to run out of their own original content to post about. Some resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel to find things to discuss, but that ultimately loses them readers, which means less money streaming in.

Ideas

Where do you find great ideas to post about? There are actually many different things to use to get you out of your stuck-in-a-rut mode. These may be simple techniques to use, but they can be effective if used right. Here are some things to try the next time you get stuck for something to write about:

Scour the news sites – Search the news sites like CNN, MSNBC, and FOXNEWS and see if you can find a top story that you can blog about. Instead of just linking to the story, add your own accounting of it.

You can post about your personal feelings toward the story or ask your readers what their thoughts are on it. Just make sure the story somehow relates to your blog’s topic.

Check out your fellow blogger’s sites and see what they’re blogging about – It may seem unethical, but as long as you’re not stealing content, it’s perfectly acceptable to see what the community is interested in.

Is there a post that catches your eye? Is there something you can add to that post? A new spin you can put on it? Media outlets always have an eye on the competition to see what others are doing – and you should, too!

Research

Internet research – Do a search on the Internet for your blog’s topic. See what information you can come up with concerning your niche.

You may become inspired by something you’ve read there or you may think of some comments to post about it.

Check the video sites – YouTube has a zillion different videos out there that you can add to your blog. See if you can find one that relates to your blog’s topic. Post the video to your blog and have your readers share their thoughts on it.

And what about podcasts or audio sites? You could try searching sites like Soundcloud to find audio to add to blog posts to enhance them for your readers.

Reviews

Consider doing reviews – Reviews can be a good filler to use while you try to get inspired again. Choose some articles, websites, books or whatever you can think of that’s related to your blog’s topic and post a review of it. If it’s a good review, add your affiliate link and make some money from your opinions!

Daily activities – Think about what happened within your day that you might be able to work into your blog as long as it’s relevant.

If your blog is about flowers and you happened to go for a walk and saw some flowers on the way, use that as your post. Let your readers know what kinds of flowers are seen in your neighborhood and if possible, take come pictures to add since visual stimulation enhances the reader’s experience.

You can easily get back your inspiration for your blog posting if you look to other sources. They can help you come up with ideas of what you can share with your readers or they can give you a nice filler until your personal inspiration comes back. Don’t lose readers just because you’ve lost your blogging muse!

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Use Blog Challenges To Coach New Online Marketers

If you’re an Internet marketer who teaches Internet marketing to others, it’s important to help the readers of your blog learn how to adapt to a blogging ritual seamlessly.

Blogging is one of those tasks that many new marketers jump into without understanding how it works. They know they need to blog (because all of the top successful marketers do), and maybe for a few days – or even weeks – they stick to it religiously.

They blog like clockwork, logging in every day, knowing just what they want to say. And then the day comes when it all fizzles out. One day they log in and they’re stumped.

They sit there staring at the screen, unable to decide what they’re going to blog about. Sometimes they start swiping other people’s content because they don’t want to lose the momentum of posting daily.

They might grab something from an article directory or buy some PLR content and use it as is. This is where they start getting lazy, not because they want to be, but because they’re simply lost on what topic to discuss.

Others don’t want to neglect their blog – but the formidable task of trying to juggle a myriad of Internet marketing items on their to do list prevents them from getting to their blog – they’ve backburnered it and soon it’s forgotten and stagnant.

You can host a blog challenge for your readers that will help them in any niche! Whether they’re marketing bloggers, or they have a blog on gardens, insomnia, or dating – your challenge will help them take action, stay committed and view you as a leader.

OK, let’s crack on…

What Blogging Challenges Do Your Readers Suffer From?

You should be able to listen to your subscribers and see some common themes among them when they come to you with blog problems. If you don’t have subscribers yet (that you know of since many are lurkers), then you might have to read other blog comments or look in forums to see what issues people have.

Finding topics is a common problem for many bloggers. People sit there staring at their screen, or they go to someone else’s blog to see what they’re talking about.

They key is to help them learn how to find topics – how to dig up new slants and fresh ideas and give commentary on them.

Understanding how to review products is another basic issue for marketers who are inexperienced with blogging. They don’t know how to review products so that they will be interesting to blog readers.

Making an engaging connection is a big deal – and so many marketers falter with this. Everyone wants to see blog comments or get emails about how amazing their blog post was!

Monetizing their blog post could be an issue. You wouldn’t believe how many bloggers are sitting there wondering why their blog isn’t making money, when the only problem is, they forgot to add links!

Consistency is probably the number one problem, though. People get sidetracked and for some reason, their blog – what should be their “home on the ‘net” – is what usually suffers.

Preparing Your Blog Challenge Ahead Of Time

Hosting a blog challenge is a great way to get a ton of branding for your blog, as well as traffic and comments for it, too. You want to go into this well-prepared, not floundering right alongside your readers – they’re expecting you to guide them!

First, announce the date ahead of time. Get everyone geared up to participate. Have them sign up – either simply by announcing their participation in the comments section of your blog, or by having them sign up to your email autoresponder list.

You should give them approximately two to three weeks’ notice so that they can wrap up their projects or get organized. Sometimes they simply want to motivate themselves to participate, or be talked into it by fellow marketers.

Let them know what the basic challenge will be. Create a list of rules, but don’t make it so stringent that people feel like labeling themselves failures. You want to inspire them and encourage them to keep going even if they miss a blog post.

Map out your helpful blog posts that you’re going to create along the way. You will be blogging daily to give tips and ideas, share your own entry to the challenge, and create a space for them to discuss it and encourage each other.

Some people might want you to create a forum for the discussions. Keep it on your blog. As the host of the challenge, your blog will benefit from the traffic and conversations taking place.

Give them any tools and tutorials you think they’ll need. If your blog challenge is to have them get comments, then you might steer them towards something like Disqus and give a tutorial on how that works.

This is not only a good way to be a leader, but it can help you make affiliate sales of certain links for people’s blogs, like paid plugins or WordPress themes, for example.

Supporting Your Challengers

As the host, it’s your job to support the people who are following you and participating in your challenge. Now if you have hundreds of people, it might be more difficult – in that case, you can just encourage people to support each other.

Allow them to share their blog post link. You can let them leave it in the actual comment as a live link, use a tool like Disqus, or just have their name hyperlinked to their website.

Visit their blog post and see how they’re doing. If you have tips, you might provide those to them, but not in the blog comments – do it privately using their contact form or email.

Leave a comment for them to show them they have traffic and encourage comments and sharing by others. By the time the challenge is over, they will have a thriving community – many will stay and at the very least, it shows search engines and new visitors that this person has an active blog!

Check in with those who stray. When everyone signs up, make a list of the name and email of the people participating. If you notice someone falling by the wayside, shoot them a friendly email of support. Sometimes they just need to be nudged.

Challenge Idea #1: Encourage New Media Formats

Blogging isn’t just about text blog content, although that is the most prevalent for of blogging that there is.

You can host a challenge that urges participants to get used to multiple media formats.

You always want them to have text as a staple, but you might make an “Audio Blogging Challenge” or a “Video Blogging Challenge.”

This will get people out of their comfort zones, but it will help them learn how to cater to many of their subscribers across the board. When the challenge is finished, they’ll be able to use more than one format and switch things up for their audience.

Challenge Idea #2: 1-A-Day Affiliate Marketing Reviews

Because affiliate marketing can be so profitable through the use of a blog platform, it’s important that you help your readers learn how to master this.

When you review a product, you should personalize the review, share the specifications of the product, and add some consumer commentary.

For your affiliate blogging challenge, have some guideline steps like this:

Pick one product over $25 (or $50 or $100 or whatever)
Make sure it’s rated at least 4 stars
Write a review of at least 500 words per blog post
Each blog post should have specs, pros, cons, and consumer insight
Blog posts should have at least 2 hyperlinks to product (*Optional – 1 hyperlink to a top competitor product)

These kinds of details will help them from getting stuck trying to decide between one product and another. It also gives them guidance on the structure of the blog post.

Challenge Idea #3: Thought-Provoking Shareable Content

These are fantastic challenges to do on your blog. The concept of this challenge is pure 100% quality. You’re asking your readers to create blog posts that knock the socks off of their readers.

This isn’t about monetizing the exact blog post – but it can result in increased income because they gain a loyal following. This is definitely one you’ll want to give them time to map out a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.

This should be their very best work. It can be a combination of media formats, any length – or a length you require – but it should definitely provide lots of value for their own readers.

The goal here is to make sure they have their social networking buttons working. You want their visitors Tweeting, Google + sharing and Facebook sharing these blog posts because they’re that good.

Challenge Idea #4: Curated Blog Content

Curation is a buzzword in marketing circles, but it’s a fantastic way to build a blog readership! First, you need to explain to your readers what curation means. You don’t want them getting confused and swiping other people’s content and plagiarizing it.

Curation is when you act similar to how a museum curator acts – gathering pieces to represent a concept as a whole. The curator then provides commentary about the pieces to pull it all together.

Your blog curators won’t be lifting entire pieces from other bloggers. They’ll be taking one or two sentences as quotes and linking back to the original blogger. It doesn’t have to be a blog post that they’re curating, either.

They can curate a video from YouTube, a news story, or an audio file quote. Make sure they understand that it’s not about sharing someone else’s work – it’s about adding their own insight about that work and giving the original creator credit with a link.

Curation doesn’t always have to be positive. It can be a negative curation, where they’re showing poor examples of something. Just make sure they understand they might get some heat for this from the first author.

Challenge Idea #5: One Idea Fits Everyone

This is a good twist, but only if everyone is in the same niche. If you’re teaching other marketers, then this would be a viable possibility. If you have one in the gardening niche, another in dating and one in smoking cessation, this won’t work.

So let’s say you’re teaching the marketing niche. You would want to create an editorial calendar for the challenge. One each day (actually the day before), you would announce the topic for the next day.

Everyone in the challenge would write about that topic. It’s interesting to see what slants people have on issues. So for instance, you might have these on your list:

Top 5 Conversion Tips
Review of the Plugin ThriveLeads
Is JVZoo Better Than ClickBank?

Whatever topic you want to choose – see what the slants turn out to be after they are published. Don’t tell them what to write, just give them the basics. Your group will love being in these blog challenges and seeing their productivity soar!

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Which Type Of Blog Should You Create To Make A Profit?

So, you have decided that you want to make money online and want to start with blogging. That’s great but do you know what type of blog you should be creating if you want to monetise it?

Before we begin, it is important to note that building a business around a blog is a great way to start a business and it is also very cheap to do so; all you need to start is a domain name and some web hosting so it is well worth giving it a try.

And if you have an existing business, why not incorporate a blog into that too to boost your earnings 😊

There are several different types of blogs out there. Not all will earn you money… and even those that you think will generate an income, might not – if you commit a few cardinal errors.

This article will shed light on a few types of blogs and what you can do with them. Instead of pigeonholing the blogs into specific categories, it’s important that you view them based on their income-generating possibilities rather than the purpose for which they’re built.

OK, let’s crack on…

Personal Blogs

These types of blogs have very low income-generating potential. Generally, they’re nothing more than online ramblings where you write about your thoughts and feelings on what’s going on in your life, etc.

You may have a readership that’s comprised of your friends, family and the occasional curious onlooker. Monetizing such a blog will be difficult unless you specialize in one topic and make most of your upcoming content about it.

For example, a lady who has a personal blog may decide to write about make-up tips and so on and start promoting cosmetics, skin care products, etc. It’s possible – but difficult to make money with this type of blog.

Niche-Specific Blogs

These are the most common types of blogs which are created to target a specific audience. If you wish to do affiliate marketing or sell your own products, you’ll want to create these niche blogs.

It’s important to get an umbrella domain for the market while you niche down. What does that mean?

Let’s assume you wish to create a blog on ‘homemade dog food’, buying a domain that’s too closely related to the niche such as DogFoodZone.com will stifle your growth. What if you wish to blog about dog training in future?

Instead, you may buy a domain such as HealthyPaws101.com (this domain is probably taken, but you get the idea).

By having a domain that is like an umbrella for the niche, you’ll be able to blog about other topics in the niche. After you’ve written about 200 articles on homemade dog food and you’re ranking well, what then?

Well, with the HealthyPaws101 domain, you can start blogging about puppy training. It will be a new category on your blog. As time goes by and you start going deep into each different and related category, you’ll have an authority site.

This is how authority sites are built. They’re just a niche sites that grew big.

Journey-Type Sites

These sites are similar to personal blogs, but they have a purpose here. Let’s assume you’re overweight and decide to go on a weight loss journey. So, you start a blog to journal your progress and let people know what you’re doing.

When you have progress, you can share what tools and methods you’re using. If you’re following a program such as P90X, and losing weight, you can share your affiliate link to the Beachbody website and make commissions when others sign up.

You may also have links to products on Amazon. Maybe you’re using resistance bands, push up bars, yoga blocks, etc. Whatever you’re personally using, you can promote too – because it works for you.

Herein lies the crux of this type of blog – You MUST be making progress and succeeding for people to trust you.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an online marketing blog or a keto blog or even a calisthenics blog. You MUST have results for people to trust you. Your success and progress will spur them to trust your journey and do what you’re doing – and buy what you’re using.

Curation Blogs

These are blogs with different topics that you’ll curate content from different sites.

You won’t need to create much content yourself… and will make most of your money from ads and affiliates who promote your site.

Beginners would do well to steer clear of these types of sites. You’re better off targeting one niche and building a brand and an audience.

Guest Post Blogs

Similar to curation, but you’ll be vetting the different guest posts and only posting what’s relevant to your niche. This is more of a technique than a type of blog per se. Some blogs are totally made up of guest posts… while others have lots of content created by the blog owner and the guest posts are also thrown into the mix.

You’ll need to decide if you need guest posts to supplement your content marketing efforts or if you’d rather have a blog where all content is proprietary (with no need for outbound links).

Besides these types of blogs, there are blogs that are dedicated to teaching… or the pursuit of a certain lifestyle, etc.

At the end of the day, the fundamentals are the same when it comes to profitability. Your blog will need traffic… and once visitors reach the blog, it will need useful and entertaining content that promotes and sells products.

The profitability of a blog is dictated by its ability to sell. You’ll do that with affiliate links, product links, ads, and also build a list that you can re-market to in future.

While you don’t need all these components in place, you definitely need the list building and the links that translate to sales. Your blog only makes money when people buy from or through you.

Create a blog that people love because of its value… and they’ll trust you and buy whatever you recommend.

“Successful blogging is not about one time hits. It’s about building a loyal following over time.” – David Aston