money

Starting a make money blog is easy. There is a weath of information on ways to make money online by blogging, selling affiliate products and offering services in make money forums. It’s continuing a blog that’s hard.

Blogging for money is a long-distance marathon and many blogs will fall by the wayside after the initial burst of enthusiasm wears out. Finding content that is fresh and relevant for your blog also becomes more difficult as you go on. If you are thinking of starting a make money blog, here are some realities to expect.

1. Content that helps people solve a problem keeps them coming back.

2. Make your blog stand out from the rest – this is one of the most difficult things to do for a make money blog.

3. Blogging takes not only time and effort but also talent. If writing is not something you enjoy, don’t start a blog that requires constant updating.

4. There will be times when you run out of ideas completely no matter how hard you try to find something to write about.

5. Your content will get stolen. Make money blogs are popular targets. It’s just a matter of time before scrapper blogs find you.

6. Don’t exchange links with just anyone who asks. Check out their site first.

7. Give a different perspective on things. There is no point in repeating what all the other make money blogs are saying.

8. Don’t over monetize your blog. Being blatant with ads drives readers away.

9. Make your blog pleasant to read by reducing clutter. Get blogging tips on how to make your posts more reader-friendly.

It’s a good idea to have several sources of income, especially those that are recurring and don’t require constant marketing or maintenance. You will have to experiment and try out different ways to see which methods work for you.

A good balance of ways to find money making ideas comprising of selling affiliate products, providing online services and a make money blog works for many.

Before you start searching for make money blogging sites to exchange links to promote your blog, there are some tips beginner bloggers need to bear in mind. Opinions are divided as to whether link exchanging does more harm than good but the general consensus is that it is no longer effective in getting a higher PageRank or higher rankings in Google search results. However it still has some value in getting targeted traffic to your blog.

Why Link Exchange Could Hurt Your Blog

Link exchanging as a method of blog promotion has fallen out of favour mainly because of abuse by webmasters who practice spam indexing. Spam indexing consists of various methods of deceiving search engines of a site’s popularity by link manipulation. These include creating hundreds of small web sites called link farms to link to a main site to give it a false representation of its popularity.

The quality of the site giving the link is now taken into consideration when ranking is given. So it’s a bad idea to put down cash for seemingly good deals that promise 1,000 links for $10 because you have no control over who links to you. Being linked by an undesirable site does your blog more harm than good.

The more one way backlinks you can get for your blog, the higher authority it will have with search engines resulting in your site getting listed higher in search engine results pages or SERPS.

Apart from using great content on money making ideas and creating linkbait to get one way links and increase blog traffic, there are more direct methods of getting direct one way links. Methods such as buying links from a blog network, submitting your blog and posts to web directories, article marketing and social bookmarking sites.

However, sometimes these methods used to obtain one way backlinks can either end up harming rather than helping your blog or are just useless links. Here are some things to take note if you are using any of these methods to get one way back links.

Buying Links On A Blog Network

1. If you are buying links on a bog network, make sure the blogs are on unique C-class IP addresses meaning they are hosted on different web hosting servers. A large number of blogs that link to each other on the same server will be seen as a link farm.
2. If you are submitting articles to these blogs with anchor text links pointing back to your blog, have the articles rewritten in as many versions as possible since these articles will be viewed as duplicate content by search engines and will harm your blog.
3. Ideally, these blogs should be in niches related to your blog and your anchor text links are “dofollow” links to allow pagerank to be passed on.
4. Another point to note is that adding links gradually is preferable to gaining several hundred links in a few days.

Submitting Your Blog To Web Directories

1. Many web directories have high pagerank but your blog url is listed on a sub-category page which won’t have as high pagerank. In fact many have zero pagerank but it can still be useful to get listed just to increase the number of backlinks.
2. Check to see if the web directory you are submitting to has SEO friendly links. There are several sites which list SEO friendly directories such as here and here.
3. Submitting to web directories generally do not pose the problem of gaining many links too suddenly since many directories take anywhere from 1 to 3 months to include your link.
4. But be sure to vary your site title and description. Many directory submission services allow up to 5 different titles and descriptions.

Using Article Marketing

1. If your main aim is for better SERPs, submit to directories that allow html links with “dofollow” tags or that are SEO friendly. Most online article submission services used for article marketing to increase backlinks allow 3 or 4 anchor text links in the author’s resource box at the end of each article.
2. But these links would be useless if the article directories are not SEO friendly. An example is the largest and most popular article directory, EzineArticles whose html links do nothing for SEO although they are still useful for driving traffic to your blog.
3. Worse still are article directories that remove your html links altogether. If you use an article submission service such as iSnare or Article Marketer, chances are that your article will end up on some of these non-html directories since you have no control over where your articles go.
4. If you are using Firefox, you can install the “Search Status” plugin that indicates “dofollow” links.
5. Alternatively, there are article submission services that submit to SEO friendly article directories although they may cost more on a per article basis.

Submitting Blog Posts To Social Bookmarking Sites

1. Social bookmarking sites are primarily used to increase blog traffic but if the sites allow “dofollow” tags in their links back to your blog, they are useful for improving blog SERPs.
2. Some social bookmarking sites that are SEO friendly can be found here and here.

Submission Services On A Budget

1. Professional submission services can be costly as many require you to subscribe on a monthly basis. So what can you do if you are just starting out and don’t have a big budget?
2. You don’t have to do your submissions manually although many swear that it is the best way since it is slow and adds links naturally. It is also very time consuming if you have many posts to submit. Your time could be better spent on other tasks such as writing articles or blog posts.
3. There are many submission services offered at DP Forums under the “Services” section. Be sure to check out the seller’s rating first or read other people’s reviews for the service before buying.

Article Submitter And Directory Submitter Software

1. Alternatively, you can get your own article and directory submitter software. These software automate many of the tasks such as pre-filling in forms and categories so that submission becomes very fast.
2. The good thing is that you just make a one time payment and the software can be used for as many submissions as you want. Another major advantage is that you can select the directories you want to submit to and build one way links gradually.

If you are planning to make money blogging, having your own domain name is important because it establishes your blog identity, affects your ranking in search engines and the money value of your make money blog should you decide to sell your make money blog later on.

A dot com domain name costs about $7 a year upwards. Don’t save the $7. There are several points to keep in mind when deciding on a domain name for your make money blog.

1. Include A Main Keyword In Domain Name
   Choose a domain name that contains at least one main keyword. For example, if your blog is going to be about making money online, try and include “money” or some related word in it. This makes your blog more search engine friendly and helps in getting your blog rank higher in the search results pages.

2. Make A List Of Relevant Keywords
   List down main keywords or key phrases relevant to your blog topic. These are keywords you would use to type into search engines if you were searching for information on that topic.

3. Use Keyword Research Tools
   Keyword research tools help to check which words get more search results, Here are some free online keyword tools to use:

   http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
   http://www.ovtkeywords.com/

4. Use Domain Name Suggestion Tools
   Once you have a few keywords, you can try and form a domain name in different variations. Domain name suggestion tools are useful to give you some ideas:

   http://www.domainsbot.com/
   http://domain-suggestions.domaintools.com/

5. Create A Short Memorable Domain
   Try and configure the main keywords into a short, memorable domain name that is relevant to your blog topic.

6. Keep To Dot Com Domains
   These rank higher in search engine results, have higher perceived authority and better resale value.

7. Invalid Characters
   Your domain name cannot contain spaces, or begin or end with a hyphen. These characters are invalid: _ ! @ # $ % ^ & * + = ; :

8. Avoid Hyphens
   Don’t use hyphens as they can be confusing to remember. For example, http://moreblogmoney.com is better than http://more-blog-money.com

Chances are you will find it very difficult to have a short domain name that makes sense. The next best thing would be to incorporate keywords into a medium length domain name.