Fast Start Guide: The Basics of Blogging For Money

Hey everyone, Dexter here with Winning Blog Tactics, and today I wanted to get into some basic nuts and bolts about blogging for money.

There are a lot of people from all walks of life who have realized that blogging is a great and inexpensive way to make money online, and many business, both large and small, have realized that blogging is an easy way to create traffic and get more leads.

Now, while this post can help just about anyone, my goal is to make getting started blogging easier and faster with more results.

For more tips, tools and strategies about blogging and making money online by blogging, please enter your name and email address in the form on the left column, or simply Click here to continue.

Fast Start Guide: The Basics of Blogging For Money

1. Basic SEO Considerations

I’m sure if you did a search about making money online, just about every one of them will say that ‘content is king’ and don’t worry about SEO.

The problem though is that the biggest complaint that bloggers have is not enough traffic, then they turn around and waste a lot of time trying to learn SEO and waste money buying useless software.

First… don’t do that.

And second, while content is very important, so is the marketing. You can have the greatest blog post in the world, but if you can’t drive traffic you’re lost, so you HAVE to consider SEO when you’re blogging, especially blogging to make money.

So here are some SPECIFIC guidelines to follow.

1. Stop Chasing Keywords; Start Chasing People: No matter what business your in, or market you’re in, or topic you’re blogging about always remember you’re talking to people.

   Just because a keyword is popular that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is what your target audience is looking for. What do I mean by that?

   It means that a lot of people are running around looking for the most popular keywords and key phrases without considering who their target audience is.

   For example, I have several clients involved in commercial real estate but not all of their businesses are the same. One client focuses on building leases, another does just land deals, and another handles both.

   When they all came to me, each were targeting ‘commercial real estate’ and they all had a problem with low quality traffic. In the case of the first two clients, their target was just too generalized. They were getting traffic from anywhere and everywhere.

   In the case of my other client, they were getting a lot of traffic but it wasn’t the right kind of traffic, meaning that the people who came to their site through the search, didn’t match the services that they were offering.

   Commercial real estate is a very, very popular and competitive search, so they were all getting some business, but they weren’t getting the results they wanted.

   My game plan going in was to narrow their focus and help them target relevant traffic, and by relevant I mean targeting the people that would most likely look for their products and services – and I did that by making them focus on their existing clients, as well as making them examine everything they offer from the point of view of their customers.

   It’s easy to pick a popular search term and run with it, but if you truly want results, popularity has to match your target audience.

   So go ahead and do that. Ask yourself, if I’m looking for a particular product or service, if I were looking for information, what would I search for?

   Put yourself in the mindset of a consumer. Look at your product or service as if it were someone else’s. Is what you’re writing about or offering good enough to attract you? Would you buy that?

   Believe it or not, that is the hardest thinking you’ll ever have to do, because the rest, I spell out for you!

2. Make It Relevant: Not the same relevant as the previous item but relevant to the search engines. Whatever keyword or key phrase you’ve landed on for your target audience, (and this is a general guideline) you want to use it in your blog’s title, tags at least twice in the content itself and in the title, alt tag, and descriptions for images.

   For the category, especially if you’re on WordPress personally I avoid using the keyword there. I’ve found the best use for categories is to help the reader locate what they’re looking for, however it should be relevant to the target audience.

3. Change The Name: This one may sound strange but it’s really quite powerful. Change the names of images to include your keyword or key phrase.

   For example, let’s say you want to upload an image onto your ‘make money online’ blog but it’s named IMG9C08341.jpg, why not rename it to ‘make-money-online-blogging.jpg’ then upload it?

   The perk of this one is that not only can it help your SEO, but your image may show up in the image searches, which will drive additional traffic back to your site it’s a good practice to pick up.

4. Use An SEO Plugin: Anyone who’s heard of SEO will understand what META tags are. Relevancy aside, they tell the search engine as well as other sites how to display your link, so if you’re on a blog platform with SEO fields built in make sure the title, keywords and descriptions are filled out.

   If you don’t have one with your blog, get one. A good SEO plugin will work wonders for your results.

   Note that keywords aren’t used my many search engines like Google and Bing, but they are still used by others, so they are relevant to a point.

2. Think Relevance, Not Word Count.

This point is a recap of the first, but well worth saying. We covered relevance quite a bit from different angles, but here’s the take away.

You want to keep SEO in the back of your mind, but you also want to write for your readers, which leads to the very next point.

3. Be Useful And Offer Value.

Look, it’s simple… Nobody wants to land on your page or blog post and find useless garbage. Seriously, don’t blog just to blog and put something completely useless.

The Internet doesn’t need any more garbage, and it’s a quick way to get your site reported and loose rank. You know what they say about reputation right?

So focus on value, please!

Make sure that people can use the information you’re sharing. If you’re going to blog about your business, try answering questions asked with each blog post.

If you’re writing about your favorite ice cream, link to a Google search where people can find an ice cream shop close to where they’re living so after they read your post and they are craving, they don’t have far to go.

If you’re a specialist in a field and you’re blogging, make sure the information is something people want, whether it’s a technical paper with instructions or gossip.

If you’re teaching people something, make sure they can understand it. Make it easy to follow. Make it informative.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

The blogs that get the most traffic tend to lead with value. Everything else is a second. In this case, valuable content is king.

4. Use Social Media For Easy Sharing.

I didn’t put this under SEO because it really deserves special mention on it’s own. A very large item considered in ranking your pages and posts is interaction. User feedback is incredibly powerful.

You want people to leave comments, like and share because it builds authority, and the higher your authority, the higher you will rank.

So if you don’t have it on your blog, use a Social Media plugin and make it easy for a person to share and recommend your posts.

Don’t by shy about asking people to as well. Tell them, If you found this post useful and know others than can benefit from the information, please like, share and leave a comment below.

5. Ask For The Sale

The same advice for using social plugins, applies here. You have to tell people what to do and where to go when it comes to sales. If you leave people to “figure it out” then they’ll go somewhere else.

In the online world we call it a “Call to action” and this is one of the most powerful things that will make or break your income.

If you want people to opt in to a form tell them.

For example, I offer a free online marketing strategy guide. People respond to the ads and posts but guess what?

I tell them, to download the free guide, enter your name and email address in the form below, click Submit, then check your email address for more information.