Blog Monetization: 7 Ways To Outfit Your Blog to Make Money
If you already have a blog, the first major hurdle has already been conquered. Whether you began your blog with the aim of earning an income from it in mind, or you have a pre-existing blog that you have decided to monetize, it is important to give it a critical look over to see if it is ready for this approach.
Here are some blog monetization tips and tools that you can use to outfit your blog to make money.
1. Choose Your Main Keywords
Choose your main keywords or keyword phrases for your site, domain name, and copy. Use keyword software to find the most popular ones for your niche and keep a list of them in a spreadsheet for easy reference. Once you have these base keywords and phrases, you are then able to find new variations and combinations to use.
2. Naming Your Blog & Choosing The Best URL
Naming your blog is a key decision you will need to make. Not only will the name you choose become the name people know it by, but it is also a key opportunity to include the main keyword that relates to your blog so that visitors will find it easier. The name you choose will become the domain name for your blog and this can take a bit of time as you may have to try several names to find one available in the domain registry.
How you choose to portray the URL of your domain name is another key decision. One part of the blog submission process is choosing the best URL your blog. Will it be known as http://yourblog.com or will it be known as http://www.yourblog.com/ This is important because the one you choose will be the one that you submit to the search engines as well as the one you will use for links.
These two URLs are different in the eyes of the search engines and the traffic they generate will be split between them. By choosing one form for your URL, you will optimize its traffic. Use the robotics.txt file on your server to point the second form back to the one you are optimizing.
Type your domain name into a browser window. Does it’s natural name come up as http://yourblog.com or as http://yourblog.com/. That one character also plays a role in the URL submitted and optimized.
One last point to consider when naming your blog is the length of the URL it will produce as a domain name. http://www.yourblog.com/ has more characters than http://yourblog.com/. While many feel that the www adds to the professional look of a URL, it may hinder you should you decide to use PPC advertising as most PPC ads have a specified character length they allow for the display URL.
If the URL of this blog was http://worldsbestonlinebusinessresources.com it would be too long and would not be usable in a Google PPC display URL where the limit is 35 characters following the http:// portion of the URL. So you see, naming your blog and choosing the best URL work hand in hand and despite what others may say, length does matter.
3. Submit Your Blog To The Top Search Engines
Before others will be able to find you online, the search engines have to be able to find you. If they do not know you exist, their bots and spiders won’t drop in to crawl all over your content and your site will not be ranked or given the possibility of being shown to searchers.
In order for you to submit your blog to the top search engines, you will need a sitemap. A quick and easy way to generate a sitemap for a WordPress blog, is to use the Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress.
This plugin will create your sitemap, rebuild it when you add posts blog and resubmit the changes to the major search engines where you are signed up. You also have the option to manually rebuild the sitemap if you have made major changes that do not require a post.
If your site is not using WordPress and there are no handy sitemap builders available, try out XML-Sitemaps.com.
4. Set Up An RSS Feed
An RSS feed makes it easy for readers to remain connected to you. Once a reader subscribes to it, they will be kept updated on your new postings without the need to visit your blog daily.
5. Join Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking is all the rage at this time and many allow you to add your RSS feed so that your new posts will appear on these sites as well. Other sites allow you to manually submit posts where members viewing your content will often vote on how much they like it. Take care to read the guidelines set out by these sites before submitting to ensure you are not doing anything that would be inappropriate.
6. Toot Your Own Horn
Let others know just how popular you are by using a blog log profile. These profiles show your readers how many fans you have, which in turn will encourage those readers to become fans as well.
7. Make A List
Make a list of any other blogs or affiliations that you have for your readers. A popular place to do this is on the About page. This information will give your readers a more in-depth idea of who you are and help them in their decision to remain associated with you.
Just as you would take care to dress your best for an important occasion or interview, you must also properly outfit your blog to make money. Making a good first impression on your audience will go a long way towards increasing your blog monetization ability and is something you will want to continue to tweak over time.
Keep in mind though, that regardless of how spiffy your blog, it will not matter if the search engines do not know about it. Make the decision to submit your blog to the top search engines a top priority.
Blog monetization is in part about making is easy for your visitors to help you out. Starting with the tools and information listed above will get you started on the right track.
To Your Success,
SherryD
http://www.wbobr.com
I’ve never seen a blog business as streamlined and as straightforward as this. I’ve been to other websites that teaches such and they’re more confusing and you will have to research the rest of the info on your own. Nice one! This is very helpful.
Thank you for your comments.
I appreciate the insights.
I’d like to discuss one of them, that of url name.
What is the best url for lets say a car business.
Well, auto.com, car.com, autotravel.com,etc might be in the running. However, the “best” domain names have long ago been gobbled up, not by persons needing them, but by greedy folks who spend there days making sure that others will not be able to make a buck without paying paying paying.
How does one suggest getting around the greed for people truly wanting to go into business, but not having lots of money to pay for just the right name, one that it took a couple of days work to come up with, but one of the millions of people who do nothing else but secure these names for profit.
Lego now has purchased several hundred domain names. And, ToysRus, with no intention of ever using it just purchased toys.com for four million dollars.
Any suggestions in that area.
When you say “best” url name, I’d love to do that.
Unfortunately all the best names are gone, not to business people with legitimate capital to start businesses for the public, but to parasites who never intend to do anything except make the entrepreneur pay for the privilege of setting up a business that will serve the public.
Beth
I mean, what kind of domain name is wbobr?
That wouldn’t be on the tip of my tongue.
Great points on setting up your site. Simple and straight forward is the best approach to taking the first steps.
Beth, you are right on both counts. WBOBR.com is not a name that would be on the tip on your tongue unless it was a place that you visited regularly.
And you are right that most of the shorter domain names are gone. But you also want to use a keyword in the domain name (if you are using a keyworded domain name) that you have a hope of ranking for. I am afraid a name such as toys.com would be almost impossible to rank for in the search engines. It is far too broad.
The other suggestion would be to create a name as I have with WBOBR.com and then build your brand. Think about the name GoDaddy. Does it bring domain registration and hosting to mind? Actually it does. Not because it is keyworded, but because it is a recognized brand name that has been built up. With the lack of domain names, online businesses will find that creativity and hard work building their brand may be the only option.
The biggest issue I have is coming up with a domain name that isn’t already taken yet represents the topic of my blog. I sometimes resort to using synonyms to come up with a decent name (example: instead of using “great happiness”, I may use “felicity”).
Great tips. A post like this really takes me back when i first started using wordpress, now i use it on almost all of my sites, despite many of them not even being “blogs”. Looking back, a post like this would have saved me a lot of time lol
Josiah@Tumblr Themes´s last blog ..PhotoShow
Headlines do make a big difference. I like the paragraph about trying out different headlines to see which turns out to be the most appealing. I do the same thing when writing articles, just in a different way. I use Google trends to compare the most searched terms, that way I can write article titles that more people are looking for on average.
I think I have problems with using the right keywords. Maybe I should focus more on this.
Very useful tips, and In addition you can also use different Social Media sites to promote your site to attract more traffic and visitors.
Great idea it has been amazing to grow any business on the Internet, I need to market strategically to my customers, using a range for tools from content sharing to email marketing, search engine optimization, co-branding, ad buys, and more, to reach your target audience.thanks for the information keep posting.