How To Generate A Sustainable Income From Blogging
So how do you create a sustainable income from blogging? The answer to that question is not a short one, although the basic points are quite straight forward. What I would like to do is outline everything that you would need to know in order to make a substantial income from using the blogging format. This guide should be detailed enough so that everyone reading should be able to have a serious go at this. The beauty of the internet now is that you do not need to be a computer geek to make a go of it. As long as you are basically literate you have the potential to generate wealth online. Its not easy though, and all those people who say its easy are liars, the truth be told most people fail at making an income online. But this is true of almost any career choice, so don't be down hearted, you simply need to have what it takes in this industry - most notably that equates to time and commitment.
The first few months of any blogger take the most effort and seem to yield the least results. It takes a monumental effort to build up a large core of committed readers. Once you have 5000 hits per day then its easy (comparatively speaking) to maintain. Its the getting there that is tough.
If you are not willing to make the effort to blog day in and day out for weeks on end with no one reading but your mother-in law then do yourself a favour and quit now.
If you are new to blogging then I really recommend the site i want 2 blog for all the info that you will need for blogging for money or for pleaseure.
Now that the part-timers are out the way I can begin....
1. select your subject.
You really need to know what you are talking about to create a sustainable income online. You need to select a subject that you know more about than anyone else. Consider it carefully. You will be writing day in and day out about this one subject. You could perhaps bluff your way for a week writing on a subject your not up to speed on, but then you will rub out of steam. So you must be an expert in your field....
And.....
You must focus in on a specific niche in your field. Don't just write about city nightlife - write about nightlife in your home town. The aim is to create a niche where you will know as much as there is to know on your subject.....
And.....
You need to be sure there is a market out there to support your work. You might be an expert on sweeping the floor, and you might be able to narrow it down to a specific floor covering and make of brush combo - but if no one cares what you are writing about then your efforts will all be in vein.
There is a lot to get thinking about before you even get near to a computer. Take some serious time to consider your options. You are about to invest a lot of time on your chosen field so be sure its the right one.
2. Your writing.
A lot of people ask how often they need to post on their blogs. The answer is always 'as much as you can'. You should be looking to post daily on your site, at least for the first three months (I told you that it would be time consuming). It is essential that you build yourself a reputation for posting frequently so that people return to your site. No one is going to come back day after day if there is never any change on your site. Also frequent posting has a dramatic impact on your search engine ranking, but more on that later.
All of your posts need to be of a high quality as poor content costs you readers. You should construct your blog around four or five pillar articles. These should be of a decent length and be essential info for your niche market - a 'how to' article always works best. This article should be timeless, as it will be being read for months and years to come (if you are successful). In other words you should avoid any time sensitive information. The success of your site long term will depend on these articles reading as if they were fresh written, 2 years after they were first published.
You need to steadily release your pillar articles mixed in with your standard articles. You should aim to have your four or five pillars published within the first two months of blogging.
3. Which host.
There are hundreds of options open to you on this, but I would suggest using Blogger. Blogger is free, attractive, with good features and most importantly is search engine friendly as it is owned by Google. It is going to do the job for you, no doubt.
One of the best features of Blogger is that it allows you to publish an article to be posted on a future date. This means that you can plan ahead and keep your blog going for your off days. This is essential when you are developing your blog initially.
4. The search engines and traffic.
Without question this is the biggest concern of all bloggers and would-be bloggers alike? How does the blogger get people to his blog. The best way to do this is to rank high on a search engine list for keywords relating to your site. This is something of a catch 22 however as search engines won't pick you up until your getting hits and you won't get hits naturally until your picked up by the search engines.
The secret is to generate traffic until you hit the point where the search engines pick you up. The most important point in this is.... You guessed it..... Content. You need to make sure that you have some high quality content on your site straight away, the reason for this is that it is your fellow bloggers who will be visiting your site to generate initial traffic - and they are not the most forgiving of audiences.
There are thousands of bloggers in the same position as yourself: eager to blog there way to a six figure salary, each of them with a blog they are trying to promote and finding themselves in the same catch 22 as you. In this situation you immediately find back scratchers willing to view, read, comment on and recommend your site as long as you do likewise. Do not think of these other bloggers as competition but rather as peers. Statistically almost all the bloggers you interact with will fail, so publicly promoting their blog for a while won't hurt yourself long term anyway. To find these blogs you need to start registering at blog forums. As soon as you can start posting shamelessly self promoting threads about your post. You need to plead the innocent here - tell them its your first blog/post and invite feedback. Post threads wanting comments on your blog. And comment on other blogs. Comment on the blogs that you find in the comments of other peoples blogs. And always, always remember to have a link back to your blog on every comment you leave. Make your comments relevant, funny or serious, insightful and memorable. Put the same amount of thought into your comments as you do your own articles - remember that they are advertising your blog on foreign soil, they need to represent what you can do linguistically.
If you find blogs that you think compliment your blog or that your readers would enjoy then put a link to it on your site. Make sure the author of that site knows that the link is there.... Become regular a poster of comments on more popular blogs of a similar nature to your own.
Remember the goal of this exercise is to generate traffic until the search engines pick up your site.
There is a whole science to search engine optimization (SEO) but the bottom line is that if you have regularly updated relevant posts and you maintain a level of traffic then the search engines will come to you.
Never be tempted to fall for the ploys of companies who claim to optimize your site for you. The search engines adjust what they are looking for so that it negates the work these companies do, and they will not refund you when that happens. Also a lot of sites will sell you increased traffic, but this is not targeted traffic and most of these hits are just poor surfers who get sucked into your site and then leave again.
There simply is no replacement for hard work. If you are cut out for this blogging lifestyle then you should enjoy it, although watching days when no one comes to your site can be soul destroying.
5. Generating income.
Before we go any further on the business of making a massive income, there is a sure fire way to generate an smaller income - but its totally free and can give you maybe £60 per month if you max your allowances. basically 'Matched' will pay you £3 per ad that you post. You can only post one per page and up to 4 per site. You can have up to 5 sites. So £3x5 sites x 4 pages = £60 per month. Its paid via paypal so is totally safe and ligit. You also get a £5 bonus when you sign up. To register you can click here also you can read up all the FAQs. Its always worth checking out the detail. And, although it doesnt apply here - you should never pay upfront to post ads - its just not worth it.... I use this service though, and I am satisfied that it works perfectly well.
So far we have covered the basics of how to produce a blog and how to get people to read it, but that does not give any form of income. So how do you actually make money from a well read blog? The answer is advertising.
Google ads is the most obvious method to get an income. They are free and easy to post and work on the click through rate and not the purchase rate. They are notoriously slow for generating income however with substantially less than 1% clicking through and less than £1 per click.
Affiliate marketing and links are where the money is. You need to tailor your content to focus on these services.
Affiliate links are effectively working relationships between publishers (bloggers) and clients (producers). A client has a product to sell, the publisher (you) advertises that product on their website and gain a commission for every sale. Could it be much more straight forward? The beauty of this is that you do not need to do anything to generate this income once the link is posted, although you will need to maintain visibility of the site for commissions to generate.
You can also get involved with second tier advertising. That is, getting people to become affiliate advertisers, this also generates an income.
So i hope that it is clear by now that you need a stratagy for blogging for income. Even if its clear what you want to write about, and how you are going to get people on your site, you really need a clear stratagy for developing sales out of your traffic. I read recently about a blogger who suddenly hit the big time - 10,000 hits in a single day! - but he had no clear stratagy for sales or profit and he didnt make a penny. How miserable must he be feeling? How would you feel? All that hard work and suddenly he made it but made no serious provision for generating an income...
Without doubt my recommendation for a complete strategy is found here its called the Super Affiliate handbook and I think its worth its weight in gold. There are thousands of these ebooks kicking about, and some are total garbage. You can find a review of some of the best of these ebooks .There is a larger supply on this site but without an independant review I wouldnt recommend a purchase.
The thing to watch with these ebooks is that they always seem to promise millions in a week or something, realistically they dont deliver that much but they still provide a strategy for make a life changing income, if you use the
6. My top secret tip.
My top secret tip for generating income online, which is something I intend to publish in this blog alone, is not just to make one site, but several.. Make them all related. Link them all together. But make your blog your centrepiece.
If you want to sell fitness equipment using an affiliate link for example then post an article on your blog outlining the benefits of exercise and include copious links to a secondary website containing all your affiliate links. You can of course link directly from your blog, depending on what you intend to link to. This secondary site, if well maintained and presented will draw traffic of its own, and either drive sales by itself or transit traffic to your blog through the copious links that should be on there.
The key benefit of all this extra work comes when you have a centrepiece blog and four or five secondary sites, each one well presented in its own right and linked to each of the others. When you have this network established then all you need to do is to keep pushing for your blog to catch fire on the search engine rankings. It is at that point when your hits sky rocket. This will snowball through each of your cash generating secondary sites and the money will start to roll in.
This is the point where it feels like you are printing your own money. You will soon forget all the effort that it took to get to that point. Hundreds of pounds can be generated daily in income while you sleep, eat and relax as you don't need to be at your computer to be earning.
Of course most bloggers never get there. Most give up. And the ones that don't give up mostly didn't have the fore site to establish a network of sites before the hit the search engines high rankings...
As a blogger its up to you to establish how much you want to earn. It takes so much more effort to aim for the big time, but it would be so much more rewarding.
This blog was designed to encourage those who are hungry enough for it to work really hard and to put off those not willing to commit to the task in question. The question is, into which camp do you fall?
For further information on making money using a blog, and blogging in general then you should visit i want 2 blog
