When blogging first came to prominence it was little more than a glorified – and public – online journal for many people. However, with its great increase in popularity, it has now become a popular way of making money via the use of affiliate links and advertising programmes such as Google Adsense. If you are considering trying your hand at earning money from blogs, or if you already have a blog set up, it is crucial that you know how to make it a success.
Produce a good quality blog
First of all, it is imperative that you are providing quality content. Make sure you know your subject well so that you can produce a blog which is informative and well written. If you are enthusiastic about your chosen subject, so much the better, as you will know what your target audience are interested in and can tailor a blog suited around those wants or needs.
If you have set up a blog purely as a potential get rich quick scheme and have not invested the necessary time and effort into researching your topic, it will show in your blog. Unless your blog is targeted at a particularly narrow niche there are likely to be hundreds of other blogs competing with yours for traffic, so if you have produced a poor quality site people will have no hesitation about going elsewhere. They certainly won’t be staying long enough to take a look at your affiliate links or click on any adverts.
Update your blog regularly
If you have produced a good quality blog you should receive a steady stream of interested visitors and be earning a little money. However, the bloggers you are probably aspiring to – those who are earning 6 figure incomes from their sites – are earning good money because they are constantly building on their success by constantly adding fresh content, maybe even as frequently as several times a day.
It is in your best interest to keep your target audience hooked, and returning to visit your pages again and again. A regular reader is much more likely to tell people about your blog or link to it from their own sites, and in the long term this is going to be very beneficial to driving up your traffic.
There is a second way in which regular blogging can greatly increase your traffic. There are sites specifically dedicated to bloggers announcing the new addition of content to their sites. Post a link to your new blog entry every time you add new content as when the search engines trawl the internet these links will help speed up the indexing of your pages. Services such as pingomatic.com can help you do this automatically.
Use of keywords
Keep in mind what keywords are likely to draw people to your blog. Within the text, some keywords are going to be given more value than others by the search engines, such as those included in the header, bold text, or those used for hot links. The more emphasis given to the targeted keywords on your blog, the better your search engine ranking will be.
However, try to find a balance between your use of keywords and providing quality content. Over use of keywords can mean the quality of your blog suffers as the text may not ‘flow’ so well. It is also worth noting that if the keyword density is much more than 5% some search engines may regard your blog as potential ‘spam’, and your engine ranking will suffer.
Blog Directories
Seek out blog directories such as blogwise.com and bloghub.com. As well as increasing the number of back links to your sites (thus raising your search engine ranking) you will also be taking advantage of the fact that many people searching for blogs do so through these directories rather than using search engines. This is particularly beneficial if your blog is still fairly new and not particularly prominent on the search engines yet.
Building a succesful blog takes time. Do not be discouraged if it does not immediately attract good traffic as this will come with time and perseverance. Your efforts will eventually be rewarded and with an increase in traffic will come great money making potential.
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