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5 Elements of A Money Making Blog
June 24, 2008
When it comes to making money from a blog, there are a few things that allow a blog to earn an income. Being that there are so many different types of blogs, not all of them were created for the sole purpose of making money. There are a lot of personal blogs, and blogs that were created simply for fun, and not necessarily to make money online.
I remember one of my first blogs was simply about my random thoughts. Seriously, I mean that blog was not narrowed down to any specific term, it was completely random. One post could be on my views on politics, and the other on a cool video game I came across. Ironically it ranked well for completely random terms (none of importance), that is individual post pages ranked well, not the homepage itself. Mind you there was no sort of optimization done for it whatsoever, it was sort of my online journal.
At the moment I had no clue I could make money from a blog. When I did learn about monetizing blogs, I realized my blog was way too random, and ads weren’t relevant enough to get clicked on. I ended up shutting that blog down after I started building other blogs and monetizing those. I kind of regret it too, I should have kept the blog up just to have it as my public online journal.
The point of me saying all of this is that not every blog can be monetized and that there are certain things your blog needs to have in order to be able to make you some money.
For starters if you want to start a blog it’s good to know whether or not you want to monetize it. You also want to determine how you will monetize it. Will it be an affiliate site, with affiliate links as the only source of revenue? Will you have a pay per click based site, where you make money from PPC networks such as AdSense, BidVertiser, and Kontera? Or will you rent ad space on your site, and make money from sponsors?
Or all of the above?
Once you decide this then great your ready to begin…
Element 1 - Researching your keywords - If your planning on monetizing your blog in any form, then it would be wise that your blog is specific in its niche. In other words, make your site about a topic and avoid making it completely random. Doing this allows you to have a target audience. When you write a post it should be relevant to the blogs main topic, like this your visitors are more likely to click on your ads and affiliate links, increasing your earning potential. When you start your blog select the search terms you want to optimize it for and stick to them.
Element 2 - On Site Optimization - Now that you have your desired keywords, it’s time to optimize your site for those keywords. You want to make it easy for people and search engine spiders to know what your site is about, especially potential advertisers if your planning on renting ad space. This is important because it is the target audience of your site (and amount of traffic, with a number of other things) that will make an advertiser decide whether or not they will advertise on your site.
For the spiders, title tags, H1 tags, and meta description and keywords tags, would do good. For people a nice tag line under a logo describing the site, and a well written, easy accessible “about” page would do good as well.
Element 3 - Traffic - A blog that earns a decent income is one that has substantial traffic going to it. The 2 elements above are necessary, but they obviously are meaningless unless you can get some traffic to your site. Ways you can do this is through Social networking, media, and bookmarking sites, search engine optimization, off-site optimization, and guest blogging.
Element 4 - Ad optimization - Ad optimization is one of the best ways to make a blog that’s making little or no money, to a blog that’s making a decent income. Where you place ads on a page, the size of the ad unit, the color and how well it blends into the content are all taken into consideration. A combination of all of these will determine how well your ads are optimized and how often they get clicked on.
Element 5 - Quality Content - Quality content will determine a blogs overall worth in the long run. All of the elements above are no where near as important as this element. The other elements are ways to monetize your site for now in order to get a nice check every month, but quality content determines how much someone will be willing to pay (revenue also, but there won’t be much revenue if there is no quality content) for your blog. When it’s all set and done, and you want to retire your blog can be sold for several hundred thousand dollars, and if you make a really good blog you can even sell it for seven figures, why not? It’s been done.
If you want to make a successful blog that can be properly monetized and make you a great amount of money both in the short and long run, then following the 5 elements above is the right way to go.
Not only will you be able to maintain a steady income from the potential avenues of generating revenue i.e affiliate links, PPC ads, sponsors, etc but you will also be able to build a quality site that will appreciate in worth with time. Of course there are more factors that are more detailed that will make your site more credible and be worth even more, but these in my opinion are the 5 core elements to a money making blog.
