Money Blogs – Make Money With Content: Part Two

Last week, I posted Part One of our Money Blog series. Now that we’ve covered all the little things that I think you should learn before diving into the blogging game, let’s look at the next steps you should follow.

This post is going to cover most of “the action.” I’ll talk about planning for and outlining your new blog, installing WordPress, tracking site traffic, and a few ways to monetize your site (finally!).

Begin building your money making blog.

Outline and build your blog.
Once you’ve decided which topic to write about, break it down into several sub-topics (these should actually be the keywords we discussed earlier). If you find yourself coming up with lots of sub-topics (more than five or so), group some of the more closely related topics together. If you have too many sub-topics, your visitors may have a hard time navigating through your site.

Once you’ve established an outline for your site, it’s time to download and install WordPress (It’s OK to use a different method for building a site if you want. I just happen to feel that WordPress is the easiest to install and use). Keep in mind that unless you’ve got your own web server (don’t worry, most people don’t), you’ll need to find a web host with Linux servers, PHP support, and MySQL. Hosting is pretty cheap these days and usually costs anywhere from $5 to $25 per month. Some hosts will even set install WordPress for you!
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Out of the box, WordPress does a decent job with SEO, but there are a few things you can do to tweak it to make it as optimized as possible. That subject alone is worth its own article, so I’ll just give you a few tips to get started:

• Change your permalink structure to “www.mysite.com/category/post-title”.
• Create a “Category” for each keyword you want to target. Create a “Page” for each of these categories that only displays that category’s posts. You’ll probably need a plugin to enable using php code within pages.
• Edit the navigation links in the header to include static links to each page in place of the links generated by WordPress based on categories.
• Install the plugin All in One SEO Pack to gain further SEO control over your site.

Now that your site has some structure, it’s time to install a nice theme. There are tons of free themes out there as well as really nice that you’ll have to pay out a little cash for. Regardless which you decide on, just don’t leave your blog set to the default theme.

With your theme installed and configured, it’s time to start writing. You should plan on posting at least three times a week but certainly more if you can. Don’t neglect your different categories by focusing on just one for too long. The most important thing, though, is that you post original content (and have fun doing it!).

Sign up for Google Analytics
You’re going to want to track the traffic that your site is getting. Google Analytics makes this possible as well has showing where your traffic is coming from, what keywords were being searched to find your site, how long a visitor remained on your site, and so much more. It’s an invaluable tool.

If you already have a Google account, signing up for Analytics should be easy. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll add your site and generate some script to add to every page in your site. If you’re using WordPress, just paste the code into the footer, just before the </body> tag.

Add monetizing strategies to your site.
Well, we’ve certainly taken a long journey to get to this point! After you’ve built your site and have been posting regularly for several months, it’s time to add a few ways to make money. Here are a few monetizing strategies:

• TTZ Media – I’m sure most of you guys have heard of John Chow. Well, Mr. Chow has started his own ad service, TTZ Media (named after his first successful site, The Tech Zone). TTZ ads are attractive product-based ads that include an image of a product along with several prices from leading vendors. In my opinion, these ads seem to be more “click-able” than just plain Adsense… and as a bonus, each TTZ ad has a referral link at the bottom right. So you have the opportunity to refer people to the service and make a percentage of their revenue for twelve months! Before you can place TTZ ads on your site, you’ll need to fill out a form to sign up. The form itself is short and straight forward and you’ll probably hear back from them within a day or two (which is pretty fast compared to some of the other ad networks).
• Google Adsense – Adsense is the easiest and most hands-off approach in my opinion. Just sign up for an account, create ads, and paste the code in your blog. You should note that it takes quite a bit of traffic to generate a significant amount of money.
• Text Link Ads – Another fairly hands-off approach. Submit an application for approval and paste in the provided script once you’re approved. One thing to note, however, is that Google frowns upon this… and you don’t want Google mad at you.
• Amazon Associates – Join the Associates program and create links to products that is relative to your site’s content. You’ll get a small cut of every sell you send to Amazon.com.
• Commission Junction – Sign up as a publisher and find advertisers related to your blog. You’ll have to be approved before you can run some ads, and the payout scheme is different for each one. I wouldn’t worry about using CJ until you’re getting lots of traffic.

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Don’t quit your day job.
It’s fun to dream about being successful and carefree; dreaming big can be a great motivator. Just realize that this is going to be a long term investment of time and possibly a little cash out of pocket. Don’t assume you’re going to be rolling in the money in mere weeks or months. It often takes at least a solid year of posting and maintaining before a website really starts to take off. So, plan on taking a few hours out of your week–maybe even a few hours out of each day–to work on your site and establish a routine. Try to make at least three posts a week and be sure to stay on top of your stats via Google Analytics to find trends in traffic and searches.

Look for Part Three next week.
I hope you’ve found this helpful. If you have any questions or remarks, please leave a comment below; I’ll do my best to respond.

Next week I’ll talk about a few things that can help generate traffic for your site in Part Three. If you missed Money Blogs – Part One, it’s worth a read!