Six Steps to Setting up a Money Blog

Making money blogging doesn’t happen overnight, but with patience and persistence it can be a fun way to earn money without leaving the house. There are six steps to setting up a successful blog and making money from it, which are…

1. Decide on a niche
2. Set up a site
3. Produce Content
4. Be Patient (Yes, this is a real step)
5. Add whistles and bells
6. Monetize

Let’s look at each step in greater detail.

Decide on a niche

A great niche for you is one that you are both passionate about and has enough people willing to spend enough money for the niche to be profitable. Once you have decided on a niche that has enough people who spend money in it, consider the competition in that niche. If you are interested in an extremely competitive niche, “such as health,” don’t be discouraged by the heavy competition. In that case, you can choose a “sub-niche.” A sub-niche, for example, would be people of a certain age group, ethnic group, religious group, or local area within the general niche. For example, a sub-niche of “health” would be “University students interested in health.”

Set up a site at WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad

Although there are numerous ways of setting up blog sites, WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad are the best. If you have limited resources, and you have never set up a blog before try Blogger or WordPress.com. They are both free, very powerful, and easy to use. For more experienced bloggers, who want a top-notch blog I recommend WordPress.org or Typepad. Be warned, WordPress.org does require that you have your own hosting account and domain name, which both cost money, and Typepad requires a monthly fee.

It’s a good idea to include “like” buttons and other such social media buttons on the site so that readers who like what they see can share your greatness with their social groups. Additionally, consider having a newsletter sign up. When you begin to build a newsletter email list you can continuously engage your readers by sending them emails about new posts, upcoming events, and eventually you can market to them too.

Produce awesome content

Producing great content requires considering who your readers are, and considering what they will be interested in learning about. Be sure to give your readers information that they are looking for and will appreciate.

Writing is not the only content that bloggers produce, consider making videos too. Often ideas or directions can be communicated much more clearly through a video than in the written word.

Include pictures of either yourself of something relevant to your post. A great resource for free pictures is stock xchng.

Find awesome information. If you have access to sources of information other than regular search engine results include that type of unique and fresh information. What often happens on the internet is what I call “content recycling.” Content recycling is a phenomenon where the same information is reprinted by everyone on the internet simply because everyone decided to search for information on their topics from the top ranked sites in Google. Fresh content engages readers and it draws the attention of the search engines.

Give it some time

Before jumping to monetize a new blog, it’s a good idea to let it gain some momentum. After a few months of producing great content, you can hope to gain some exposure through search engines and social media. Monetizing a site too early can stunt it’s search engine rankings, so continuously producing great content without monetizing is a strategically valuable step.

Add whistles and bells (optional)

Once you have spawned some interest in your blog you can begin to tactfully flaunt it. Consider adding any of the Facebook social plugins or include your Twitterfeed on your site itself. Also, if you are getting great feedback from readers, you can add a page of things that your readers are saying about you, accompanied by their pictures, of course.

Monetize

Once you have built of a base of people that trust you, they are eligible to be your customers. Now you can monetize your blog with banner advertisements. It is also possible to affiliate market through links in your blog posts.
It is important to monetize the blog tactfully. Here are two good advertizing rules to follow…

* Only recommend products that you really know about

* Produce enough great content that the advertizing remains secondary and the content remains primary.

Conclusion

Of course each niche is different, and each blogger is different, so in addition to these 6 steps you are free to be creative, experiment, and have fun with your blog.

Author Bio:
Scott Hersh is a business blogger for BCAblog.com the official blog of BCA: leaders in merchant cash advances.