10 Tried and True Steps to Earning Income Online!
Niche blogging secrets from the masters
On a recent private forum posting, one of my good friends and teachers for earning income online wrote an article with an excellent 10 step program to turning your niche blog into a money maker. I'm just going to repost it here for your Online Privateer reading enjoyment.
Take these steps to heart, and build off them, they are from a real master of this field and successful online blogger.
Here's a step by step money makers guide:
1. Create a simple, cheesy looking and boring free blogger blog using your main keywords in the domain name
2. SEO it! This involves using your main keywords in the title of your first post, and liberally spread in the body of the post. Highlight the keywords in the body at least once.
3. Add some more posts every so often, all with your main keywords in the title as well as in the body.
4. Submit your blog to your Technorati profile.
5. Write an article about the topic of your blog and submit it to GoArticles with a link to your blog (using your main keywords as anchor text) in the resource box AND another link in the first paragraph - GoArticles allow you to do this!
6. In a few days from submitting the article, you should be indexed by Google.
7. Once your posts have reached 10-12, start monetizing the blog with PPC (adsense or similar) and affiliate links and banners.
8. Submit your blog to your MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog profiles
9. Blog about your new blog in your established blogs for more one-way links.
10. Write more articles to GoArticles and some other high PR article directories for more backlinks and to drive traffic your way.
By now a month or so should have passed and you should be placed somewhere in the SERPs. Over time your position should rise as long as you keep gathering backlinks slowly and surely from natural sources - that means NO link farms or link directories.
Try commenting in blogs that DoFollow your link. Write about your blog in some forums. Use free advertising message boards to generate more free links. Also Yahoo Answers is another way of getting high profile links.
Once you get high enough in the SERPs you should start seeing some search engine traffic - which is much more desirable than social network traffic.
Why?
Social Network traffic don't click ad links! SE traffic does!
All of these above steps are entirely kosher and white hate with the big G. There truly is no better and more above board formula to making money online. This method is tried and true. Couple this with a few of my other suggestions on link building and article writing, and you will have yourself a real online profiteering treasure trove in the making.
A warning example...
You may be wondering why I didn't fulfill my first promise to show you a real case study on how you can make online profit. I was going to feature a great blog that was making real money to show you how anybody can turn their blog into a job. I never did. Well, that's because he got his adsense account banned after only a month of blogging. Apparently he was a little to good at what he did. In less than a month, he racked up just about $100 in adsense earnings. This raised some huge flags with Google, as literally one in 10 million blogs are capable of doing that. He had literally no experience blogging before, and was able to turn a free blog at blogger into a real cash cow money maker. How did he do it? Pretty much he focused on networking. He taught a ton of other people how to put adsense on their blogger blogs, chatted in forums and chat rooms about his site, and explained how to they could make money on their own blogs. This in turn drove traffic to his blog, and they clicked his ads to see how it works or purely out of interest in his advertising.
But Google would have none of it. They banned him from their Adsense network because they said he was "clicking on his own ads" which was completely untrue and unfair. Now, google has to deal with a lot of scammers and people trying to game the system, but this guy did nothing wrong and did nothing to violate Googles terms and policies. He actually helped the G by teaching others how to monetize their blogs with adsense. You'd think G would be happy about this as it means more revenue for them. But no, alas, he was labeled as a scammer and lost his privileges. Really, it was Google who lost out.
What is the lesson all you Online Privateers should take away from this? Do good, but don't to too good. Making too much money too soon raises flags with Google. Our goal is to make money while staying under the radar. If your blog is making over $100 in its first month... then be aware that Google is going to do a little hand review of your website, and make sure everything, including any links or comments or articles you may have made are completely above board. Or else what happened to him could happen to you.
Coming spoon:
Coming soon will be an article discussing the finer points and differences in whether your goal is to make money blogging, or blogging to make money. As you will see, they are very different monsters, and each require a very different approach.
