Blog Marketing: How Much Money Can You Make?

When you are using blog marketing to make an income, really the amount of money that can be made is something that you determine. You are in charge of the amount of work that you put into it, and therefore in charge of the amount that can be earned. Of course, the more you do, the more you can possibly make. The old saying,If you build it, they will come, is one that is not true in the marketing world of the internet. Not only do you have to build it, you also have to market it and promote it. You have to get your blog out there so that people can find it and know that it exists.

Blog marketing is not something that will give you a limited income. The more you promote and market, the better your chances of making money or more money. Lets say you all ready have a blog set up. You are promoting some services and products through your blog, and you are making a nice little effortless income. Well you want more income; you want to make more money with your blog. What do you do? You promote it more. Maybe you can start with the paid blog directories and submit your blog to those. Investing some of the money that you make is a great idea, especially if you are looking to increase your income. 

However, there are also many free tools that you can use to promote your blog as well as techniques. There is the comment section that is on just about every living blog on the internet. The comment section is a very useful and powerful tool that you can use to get visitors back to your blog. For example, lets take a market like model airplanes. You have a blog on model airplanes, and you want more traffic. Well, the first thing that you would need to do is to find a blog that is about airplanes, or models. You can even use your direct market if you wish which are model airplanes. Once you have found an authority blog that gets traffic, and comments on a regular basis, you can leave comments as well. Leaving comments with a link back to your blog will give others that read the high authority blog a way to get to yours. If your blog is of interest to them, they may even bookmark it, and become a regular reader. 

If you are not all ready, be sure that you update your blog regularly. Doing so will allow your readers to know when they can come back to your blog for new content. Let them know how often you are going to update, and stick to it. If you tell them you will be updating once a day, do so. Or you just might end up with readers that will not follow you because they can not depend on you to give them what they are looking for; new fresh content.

When you use blog marketing to make money, the sky is the limit. The amount of money that you can make is determined by you, and something that you set. The more work and patience that you put into it, the more money you will get out of it. Whether you are promoting your favorite things, or someone elseís, do it with a passion for the best results.

Blog Marketing: How Easy Is It?

Blog marketing is one of the latest trends of marketing online that you are going to find. Blogs which are also known as web logs are very popular in this day and age. You can make a blog on any particular subject that you want and then publish it for the world to read. 

If you are just beginning in internet marketing, you are going to find that starting a blog is very easy to do. Anyone can sign up for a free blog, and then proceed to market basically anything that they want to. Because blogs are free to have and make, this makes blog marketing even better. Where as if you have a website, and are wanting to market things that way, you would have to pay for your domain, pay for your hosting of the domain, and then know some HTML or hire a website designer. 

Search engines love blogs, and are always pretty fast to index them. Getting yours out there for the world to see is not going to be hard. There is this cool tool that you can use every time you update your blog that is known as pinging. Pinging your blog after every entry that you make will let everyone know that your blog has a new entry and updated.

Depending on your overall goal with blog marketing, you can update your blog as frequently as you like. Which could be daily or weekly. Whichever you choose, just be consistent with it. If you start out updating daily, stick with it. This way your blog readers will know that they can check your blog daily for new postings. 

If you are wondering exactly what you can market in a blog, you can market whatever you want to. However, it is best to stay within one market in your blog. If you have several different things that you would like to promote, and none of them really fit together well, you can create a blog for each market. Remember that if the markets are not related, do not mix them on your blog. For example, if you have a blog on vacuum cleaners, you will not want to also mix in television sets on the same blog. This is because both vacuum cleaners and televisions sets are two different markets. But, you could mix vacuum cleaners and handheld mini dust busters. Make sense?

There so many things that you can market in your blog. Whether you want to sell your own products and services or someone elseís and make a commission off of what you sell. The sky is the limit when it comes to marketing. Affiliate links work great in blogs as well. Signing up to sell other peopleís products and then marketing them in your blog is a great idea.

If you are considering having both a blog and a website that will work if you have enough information to cover in both. Linking them both together is a great idea if you do decide to have both. You can always use the website to hold your main information and products, and the blog to promote them and discuss any issues regularly.

Wondering about hosting? If you have a website, you can either host your blog on the same server you use for your site, or you can leave it where it is. The choice is ultimately up to you, either way you can have successful blogs that will begin to bring in revenue to you.

Getting links to your blog is a good way to gain new readers. Another great tool you can use is the RSS feeds. When you use the RSS feeds, it allows people to publish your blog on their site, and in return it gets you more visitors.

Blog marketing can be pretty effective if it is done right. However, you cant just set up a blog and expect people to find it. Get your blog out there and make it known to others just as you would a website. Exchanging links with others will help, so will article marketing using your blog.

Blog marketing is easy and anyone that wants to can do it. Getting your blog out there and known will be your biggest challenge, but just know that the harder you work at it, it will pay off. Find sites that are related to the market you are promoting, but not in direct competition and ask for link exchanges. 

Blog Marketing For Money

Blog marketing is something that most everyone is doing that owns a blog. You are going to find that many of them are blogging for money, and many are not. The numbers really vary and depend  on what you are looking at. If you are wanting a home business that consists of blog marketing, then you would be blogging for money. However, if you just have a blog that you use to write your thoughts and journal more or less, you are probably not blogging for money. Everyone blogs for a different reason.

Blog marketing to make money means that you are simply blogging for a profit. If you are going to make an amount of money that will add up to become anything, you need to be persistent, and consistent. To do so there are some things as well as techniques and tools that you must know and know how to use. Keep reading for more.

While good content is something that you will need for your blog to make money, you also want to ensure that it is original content as well. You can market a blog with something that is copied and that you do not own the rights. Plagiarism will get you in trouble with Google as well as the person that originally wrote the content. Be sure that all of your posts are ones that only you own the rights too. This is a great thing to know and do when you are marketing your blog to make money. Content is the key to successful marketing lately.

Tracking is another part of blog marketing for money that is so very important. You want to be able to track your visitors and clickers to know where they are coming from. You want to be able to tell what keywords they searched on to find your blog and where they did their searching. Doing so will help take out all of the guess work when it comes to blog marketing and making money while blogging. You will want to know what keywords are working, and which are not. So that you will know which keywords to use more of and which ones to drop.

Another thing that is important when you are blog marketing for money is to find other sites and blogs that are in the same market as yours, but not in direct competition with you to exchange links with. This will help you out a lot as well, especially if you can get some good exchanges with high authority sites. The higher the page rank of your link exchange, the better for your blog. Google and the other search engines will recognize your link exchanges, and the more the better in this case.

Blog marketing for money can be done. You just simply have to know what works and what does not. It is truly a trial and error basis. If you think you might know of a new way to market your blog the most effectively, try it! You just never know if it will work for you until you do. Then if you find something that works and works well, consider making it in to an ebook and marketing that as well. You will have the know how, it is just a matter of using it.

Blog Marketing: Be Seen!

Having a blog and making it known to cyber world is not as easy as it may seem. Many people think that they can write it or build it and they will come. This is not the case at all. Just because you put something out there on the WWW, does not mean that it will be seen by all. There are some things that you can do to ensure that your blog will be seen and seen by many. Blog marketing is really only as hard as you make it.

Building links for your log will definitely help get it out there and get it know. However when you are trying to build a customer base and get your blog known, just a few links are hardly every enough. You will need to continue to work on your blog and get links to it all of the time. The more the better in this case. Also keep in mind the higher authority sites, the more links you can get from the high authority sites, the better off your blog is going to be. Obtaining links is something that you will never stop doing. While you may take a short break, you will never be done.

Adding videos if possible to your blog is also a great technique that you can use for blog marketing. This is because you can then submit your blog to the video directories. So if there are any videos that will fit into the market of your blog it would be to your advantage in the blog marketing world to add them. Then submitting your blog to all of the directories that it would fit in would be a great plus for your blog.

If you have funds for your blog marketing campaign, you should most definitely use those to submit your blog to the paid directories. Google trusts the paid sites, and they know that money was used to get your blog into those sites. They will also use the fact that not all paid directories will take just any site or blog. No matter how much money you have. So, seeing if you can qualify for their blog standards will be something that you can use as well and get you in with the best sites and blogs on the web. 

Using a press release as part of your blog marketing is another awesome way that you can get your blog out there. For a fee, you can have a press release written about your blog and then submitted to all of the hot off the press news sites. Your blog will get many hits from a press release and having it linked to these kind of sites will also help the page rank substantially as well. While the cost of all press releases range from the company or person that you have do them, many times they are affordable and will fit easily into a marketing budget that you may have.

Using discussion boards such as forums and message boards with your blog link in your signature is still a great way to get your blog out there and known. Be sure that the message board that you post on is relevant to your blog or chances are that no one will be interested in clicking on your link. Also, if you came off as an expert in your market, you should have no problems attracting new readers to your blog from the use of message board posting. This can also be a great way to market a website and get that out there as well to be seen by the world.

Find other blogs that are in the same market as yours and leave the writers comments. This will take them back to your blog and will also take their readers there as well. Doing this will bring some more traffic and is a great way to get your blog seen.

Follow all of these great tips for easy blog marketing and you will have more readers reading your blog in no time.

Blog Marketing and Scams

Blog marketing is something that has really peaked an interest in the online world. Many people across the interent are blogging, and have blogs. A blog is also known as a web log. But you will hear the term blog more often than the term web log. It basically is just an online journal that you can use and publish for the world to read. Whether you choose to write about personal things, or business. Maybe you want to use it to promote products or services. The way you use your blog is totally up to you. However, you should be aware of the scams that are out there, and what to avoid while you are trying to market your blog.

Blog marketing or really any kind of marketing has scams. Just like everything else you are going to come around. There is always someone that is wanting to scam someone else and take money from the ones that do not know better. So what can you do to protect yourself? The best way to protect yourself from blog marketing scams is to become familiar with them, and know what they are. While this can also be hard to do because the scams change as much as you change your clothes, just stay on top of them, and know what to be looking out for.

Many times when a blog marketing scam surfaces, you will find that someone is going to write about it. They are going to try and warn others before they can fall into it. So, just make sure that you read and know what you are getting into. Do your research when you are marketing your blog. Ask others if they have heard about something that you are interested in doing. Chances are, if you are wanting to pay for some marketing of your blog, that you will find someone else that has used every company out there. Get feedback from your fellow marketers for the best results. Ask them if they have recommendations, or know of places that are legitimate. 

If you have been scammed, chances are there is not much that you can do other than get the word out about it. However, just remember, if you have paid someone through something like paypal that protects you, then you have a time limit to get your money back and freeze the scammers account. But, that does not always work. Most of the time the scammers are all ready aware of things like that, and they work fast to move to not be caught. If that is the case, you really can not do much else about it other than alert the proper authorities and count your losses.

While there are many that will scam you with blog marketing, there are also many that will not. There are just so many legitimate resources that you are going to find that you can use and trust. The best thing to do if you are new to the blog marketing world is to ask around and find out who is the best for the marketing that you are trying to do. Doing so will often keep you from falling into a scam, and throwing your hard earned money away.

Unfortunately, you are going to come across those that have no regrets what so ever about scamming others. The only thing that you can do is your research at times to make sure that you are using a service or person that you can trust. Ask for references, and make sure that you will be getting the best that you can afford. You will not regret it in the long run, and it will pay off to check someone or a service out before you go and invest your hard earned cash. Actually contact the services or personís references to make sure that they are who they say, and that they can deliver what it is that you are looking for. It only takes time.

Blog Marketing and Home Businesses

Blog marketing is something that all blog owners do. They market their blog so that they can get readers, and make a profit from their blogs. Marketing their blog means to get it out there so that others that are interested in it can find it and read it. It is also a great way to sell things by using affiliate links and programs. Blog marketing can very well become a home business if that is something that you are interested in.

Having a home business by blog marketing would definitely entail that you have more than one blog. If this is something that you are considering, you will want to make a list of markets that your blogs can cover. You will find that your blogs will do best when you only have one market per blog. For example, if you have a blog about cats, you will not want to include anything on the blog about kitchen appliances. This is because the readers that read your blog and visit your blog to learn more about cats and what you have to say about them will not be interested in learning anything about kitchen appliances. Once you have overcome the relevancy issue, you will be ok. You can however, have a blog about pets, and then blog about all of the many pets that you want to include. 

In order to make a living by blog marketing, you need to know every aspect of it. You need to know what needs to be done to get readers to your blog, how to write about the things that you are promoting and how to get it up in search engine rankings. Doing so will lead to successful blog marketing and making a home business income with it. 

One big aspect of blog marketing is SEO. SEO is search engine optimization and it consists of optimizing your blog so that the search engines will find it and rank it as high as possible. Which also leads to more traffic and leads from your blog. If you do not have time to learn SEO, and apply it to all of your blogs, hiring someone to do this for you might be something that you want to consider. Especially if time is an issue.

Outsourcing much of your work is something that you will need to get used to if you plan on making a substantial amount of money with your blogs. You may want to hire bloggers or writers that can write the content for your blogs, and someone else that can leave comments on other blogs with a link back to yours. Spread out all of the duties on a spread sheet and decide how often each thing needs to be done for each blog. Doing so will help you to be more organized and know what you need to do when, as well as prioritize. Using a spread sheet will also help you to keep track of who is doing what, and keep you from asking more than one person to get one job done.

Blog marketing for a home business is not much different from any other home business. You are going to get out of it what you put into it. If you only put in a couple of hours a week into your blogs, you can not expect to make a full time income with them. However, being consistent and working on your blogs every chance that you get will pay off in the long run. You will also discover that there is no better feeling in the world than owning your own home business, and working for yourself.

Just remember to start small, and work hard. That is all you need to become successful at blog marketing and make the income that you are dreaming of. All of your hard work will pay off if you are persistent and keep it up.

Beginner Blog Marketing

Blogs which are also known as web logs are the new thing on the internet. They are pretty much a platform that you can use that will allow you to post your thoughts on most any subject that you want to. They can be used for journaling, promoting, writing, and publishing, anything that your heart desires. However, if you are a beginner and new blogging as well as marketing, there are some very important things that you will want to know.

Blog marketing is pretty easy if you have a marketing mind. You are going to find that many people use blogs as a diary, and many times these blogs that are used for this purpose are not intended to make them money, but simply a way to put there thoughts out there and find others that are going through the same thing. If you have never even had a blog before, the simplest thing that you can do is to start one, and just journal in it for a while. This will allow you to learn just what it takes and what it is all about to keep up a blog. When you are just journaling your thoughts and what is on your mind, you have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. You donít even have to make your blog public if you donít want others to read what you have to say. That is a personal preference. However, doing this will let you see how it works. Then you can move on to trying to market a product or a service.

Using a blog to market something is cheaper than using a website. This is because there are so many free ones out there that you can use to get the word out, and they are really just as good as having a website that you pay for. There are of course some advantages to having your own URL, but for a beginner, a free one will work until you get the hang of it and want to move it all over onto your own server. The free blogs are just not that customizable. If you are not familiar with HTML, you are going to find that your blog will look like everyone elseís. But, that is ok in the beginning. You can always make changes later on once you are becoming successful. 

When you have your own blog, you are in charge of the content that is posted on it. You can decide what is said, and what is not. You are after all writing it all, right? So, the sky is the limit. Whether you want a blog that does website reviews and takes nominations, or you want to sell things that you make out of your home, the choice is yours. Using a blog to get the word out about whatever you want too is a great way to market and promote something.

Blog marketing can get complicated if you let it. It is really only as hard as you make it. While there are some bloggers out there that are making a six figure income with the use of blog marketing, we all know that it can be done. We just want to know how. Well, for any beginner, start small, and be consistent. The six figure bloggers all did. They started with one, built it up, and then added another blog, built it up. Then, keeping up both blogs and not letting them fall behind, they continued to add more and more. Of course they had help, and they outsourced a lot of their work. If you are looking to make a massive income with blogging, you will need some help.

Blog marketing is a great thing to learn. If you can sell things from a blog, you can sell them anywhere. Making money by using a blog is one of the most satisfying things that you will ever learn how to do. Just do not expect to make money over night, know that you have to work at it consistently everyday, and remember to put into it what you want to get out of it.

Search Engine Optimization For Your Blog

Any blog owner who wishes to get traffic without constant promotion and marketing will have to use some form of search engine optimization. While search engine optimization is a hotly debated topic, most experts agree on two things: in order to best optimize for search engines, you must establish reciprocal or one-way inbound links; and you must also optimize the content on your pages for specific keywords.

The first phase of any search engine optimization project is researching those keywords. Before you start to optimize, you must determine which keywords will pull the most traffic for the least amount of effort. You can do this by purchasing a subscription to Word Tracker or you can do this by using Overture Inventory to search ìaggregate searchî records for all possible keywords for which you could potentially optimize your blog. Record all of the returns you receive for an Overture Inventory search you perform on your given keyword. Your next step will be to analyze the site or page supply for your keywords. You can do this by searching for each of the returned keywords on Google. Not only will you want to record the search return data in terms of numbers, but you will also want to look at the top competitors for those keywords (i.e., are the PR 9 home pages or are they a deep page for an unranked site?) Optimal keywords for search engine optimization purposes will have high search counts, low site returns, and low-quality competition in the top slots.

Your next step should be to perform onpage search engine optimization. You can do this by using your selected keywords as titles and headers on different pages of your blog. You will then want to fill those pages will good information about the keyword in question; additionally, you will want to optimize it for a keyword density of 1.5%.

The last step in your search engine optimization campaign is to perform offpage optimization. You can do this by submitting links to directories that contain a selected keyword in the link title. You can also join link swap programs and swap with other high-quality blogs. 

How Can RSS Benefit Your Blogging Activities?

How can RSS benefit your blogging activites? RSS can benefit your blogging activites in two different ways: it can help you generate traffic and it can help you retain traffic. RSS can benefit your traffic-generation efforts by adding fresh, optimized content to your blog automatically; and it can benefit your traffic retention rate by providing better, updated content for your blog visitors.

Also, how can rss benefit your blogging activites in other ways? If you own a blog, you will have to constantly update it with fresh content, so you can ping more often and so you can get higher rankings for your targeted keyphrases. Aggregating and using RSS feeds can benefit your blogging activities significantly by allowing you to add fresh, targeted content to your blog without actually updating it yourself. Whenever a search engine visitors your blog, it will record your RSS feed updates as fresh and possibly unique, targeted content.

How can rss benefit your blogging activities in other ways? If you own a blog, you can further enhance the amount of unique visitors you get by using RSS to syndicate your updates. In addition to netting you several backlinks on blogs and websites (which will increase your offpage search engine optimization score), it will also net you some unique visitors through direct links from other blogs and sites.

How can rss benefit your blogging activities by recycling traffic? If your site aggregates a number of important authority sites via RSS feed, you will become an authority site aggregator at the very least, which is useful for people looking to find authority sites on your given topic.

In summary, how can rss benefit your blogging activities? RSS can benefit your blog by generating traffic ñ by improving your actual search engine rankings and by increasing the amount of direct click-thrus you receive ñ and by helping you retain traffic ñ by positioning your site as an authority aggregator and by providing better, original content for blog visitors.

What is RSS?

What is RSS? RSS stands for more than one thing. Usually, RSS stands for ìreally simply syndication,î but it can also mean ìrich site summary,î or ìRDF site summaryî -- RDF standing for ìresource description framework.î That answers the question of what is RSS, but what can it do?

What is RSS in the context of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. This essentially allows them to syndicate their content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters to use this summary as part of a list of summaries on a specific topic.

Blogmasters and webmasters collect these various summaries with something called a feed aggregator or a feed reader. Rather than asking ìwhat is RSS?î this tool will ask ìwhere is RSSî -- and then find it. An aggregator finds RSS feeds to aggregate from selected large sites ñ such as Yahoo and MSN ñ and selected smaller sites, such as hand-picked personal blogs and news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. This then creates an RSS feed that automatically pulls news items and blog posts whenever they appear. Whenever the blog or site page is refreshed, it will display the latest items.

This is good for two reasons. If you use your own RSS feed, you can get your content syndicated across the Internet without actually paying to submit dozens of press releases and contact dozens of blog owners and webmasters.

Additionally, using RSS feeds is good if you own a blog and want to add fresh content. This will allow you to constantly put new content links and summaries on your blog without spending the time to hunt around for related information. All you will have to do is select a feed aggregator and select a potential feeds from a list of news sites and authority blogs. Additionally, you will be able to input your own selections, allowing you to create custom feeds.  

So what is RSS? RSS is a simple way in which to drive traffic to your blog and to display summaries of other blogs.

How to Create Your Own Blog Account

Creating your own blog account is relatively easy, especially when compared to building a website. Even if you're using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor to build a simple website, you will still have to design every page, purchase a domain and hosting, and figure out how to upload your work to your site. This is not so with a blog. If you create your own blog account with with a large blog network, you will actually be able to do it for free and without worry that you wont be able to figure out how to upload new pages.

So how do you go about creating your own blog account? You should start by selecting the type of blog you wish to create. For instance, are you using blogs to promote your business or for to chronicle your daily life? This will affect how you go about creating your own blog account.

If you're using a blog to chronicle your daily life, you may want to create an account with a network such as Myspace. Myspace will give you a simple means to design your blog, to update it, and to communicate with other network users. Creating your own blog account with Myspace is actually completely free; and you wont actually have to host the blog yourself. Instead, Myspace will host it on their own network and will also provide you with all the tools you need to update it.

If you're creating your own blog account simply to promote your business, you may want to open an account with Google Bloggeróespecially if you do not own a website. Upon creating your own blog account, Blogger will allow you to customize the template and the subdomain you use to display your blog. If you're trying to target a specific keyphrase with your blog, you may want to use that exact keyphrase as the subdomain. 

Once you have completed this process, you will want to spend some time searching through Blogger's various options. For instance, to optimize your blog completely, you will want to consider how many posts you display on each page and whether or not you will allow comments.

What You Need to Start a Blog

Many people ask what you need to get started in order to make a profitable blog. The answer is nothing, provided that your only goal is to spend no money at all. Now, if you want higher returns and if you have the money to spend, the answer to ìwhat you need to get startedî might several hundred dollars to invest in tools that could make your climb to the top faster and smoother.

One of the most important things you will need to get started is some form of keyword research tool or database. Currently, there are dozens of these products on the market, which range in price from free to around $500. The most popular tool on the market is probably WordTracker, which offers a limited trial version for freeóor a fully-functional version for $7.50/day or $45/mo. This will allow you to find out which keywords are most profitable and have a reasonable demand (aggregate search)/supply (aggregate site) rating.

Other than a keyphrase tool, the answers to the ìwhat you need to get startedî question will usually depend on the project. For instance, if you're hosting a blog and you want to monetize it with Adsense, you may want to add a thumnail generator to your ìwhat you need to get startedî list. A thumnail generator will create code that, when inserted in your blog, will generate scraped-thumnail pictures from related searches on Google imagesóand will place them next to your contextual ads, increasing the click-thru rate.

In contrast, if you're planning to sell your own products, you may want to add an autoresponder to your ìwhat you need to get startedî list. An autoresponder will allow you to greatly improve your conversion rate by allow you to put all follow-up emails on autopilot, rather than doing them personally or strictly using your salespage.

So what exactly do you need to to get started? Nothing. You can create a profitable blog without paying a cent, but if you want to take advantage of automating tools to further improve your profitability and efficiency, you will have to purchase at least a few tools.

Choosing a Popular and Profitable Theme For Your Blog

Choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog will determine whether or not you are able to stay in business for an extended period of time. While narrowing down the theme from a list of themes can be a fairly scientific process, choosing the themes on that list to begin with is considerably more experential.

If you're planning to market your own products, you may want to start by finding a need, rather than looking at data. For instance, do you know of a pressing need that many people have? Could you provide some sort of substantive solution to that need? If so, would a blog be the appropriate means though which to provide that solution? Something might come to mind immediately, but if it doesn't, you can proceed with data-analysis as a means of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog.

You can start by using a program like WordTracker to begin choosing a popular and profitable theme. WordTracker will allow you to view a list of the 100 or 1000 most searched topics on the Internet. 

You can then break this list down into smaller pieces. For instance, if number 10 on the list is ìcarsî and you have some sort of an interest in cars, you can then take the keyphrase ìcarsî and search for it on Wordtracker using overture pay-per-click results and demand/supply analysis called ìKEI.î

This will tell you two things: it will tell you approximately how hard it is to penetrate your niche; and it will tell you roughly how much money people are making in your niche. For instance, if pay-per-click amounts are high and have a lot of bid competition, that means that people are making a lot of money in your niche, which is why they are purchasing advertising for large sums of money per click. It also means that you can potentially make a lot of money for serving ads for these advertisers via Adsense and YPN.

And there you have it: through data-analysis and need-analysis, you can begin the process of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog. If the topic you select is popular, has a good KEI rating, and has a high PPC rating, you know you have a winner.

Planning Your Blogging Profit Plan

Planning your blogging profit plan is crucial part of the construction of any monetized blog. But what does it usually involve? Generally, planning your blogging profit plan consists of two things: working on a traffic generation plan and improving conversion rates.

When planning your blogging profit plan, you may want to work on the conversion side first. If you begin sending traffic to your blog before it is monetized properly, your conversion rates could be too low to earn a significant return on your investment; this is especially true if you are paying for traffic from pay-per-click sources, such as Adwords.

One important thing you must consider when planning your blogging profit plan is how you can improve the quality of your copywriting. If you do not feel that you have the expertise or writing skills to convince someone to buy your product, you may want to hire someone to write your salespage for you. 

With the recent boom in freelancing markets, you should be able to find a talented copywriter on elance.com or guru.com for a relatively low price per word or page. If your copy is bad, your conversion rate will also be bad, which means you are wasting traffic.

Additionally, you should consider including pre-selling tactics while planning your blog profit plan. You may want to include such pre-selling methods as giveaways, cash prizes, or some other form of interaction for visitors. 

The other important part to consider while planning your blog profit plan is your traffic generation methods. No matter what the topic of your blog, you generally have five basic traffic generation methods: pay-per-click programs, which allow you to pay for targeted traffic; natural search engine traffic, which you can build by optimizing onpage and offpage factors; link-based traffic, which you can build by purchasing links from link brokers; list marketing traffic, which you can build by purchasing solo ads from list-owners; and repeat traffic, which you can build by giving visitors a reason to return and by persuading them to bookmark your site.

All things being equal, you must concentrate on traffic generation and conversion rates while planning your blogging profit plan.

How to Monetize Your Blogs

Other than direct sales and adsense, are there any other methods you can make money from using your blog? Yes, there are several, but three are usually used more often than others: 1) lead generation; 2) affiliate marketing; and 3) newsletter subscriptions.

Of all the other methods you can make money from with your blog, lead generation may be the most promising. This is an especially true if the market your blog is in is related to anything financial. Mortage and refinance leads are especially good, as they bring in tiered commissions. Your first commission will come when you generate the initial lead ñ which will simple entail getting someone to fill out a completely free form; this lead will earn you anywhere from $3 to $12. If this lead then goes on to refinance her home with the company in question, you could earn a windfall of several hundreds or several thousands of dollars.

The other methods you can make money from with your blog include affiliate marketing and newsletter subscriptions. Affiliate marketing generally consists of either directly signing up as an affiliate through someone's website ñ or signing up as an affiliate through a third party. You will then use your blog to market this person's products for a share of the total price. If you sell information products from Click Bank or Commission Junction, you can earn as much as 75% per sale; however, if you sell physical products, such as chairs and tables from Link Share retailers, such as Wal Mart, you will earn a 7-15% commission at best.

If these other methods you can make money from don't sound appealing, you can always consider newsletter subscriptions. You can create an opt-in page or a ìsqueeze pageî on your blog and offer a trial subscription to your newsletter. If you provide quality content and promote your blog, you could end up with hundreds of subscribers over time.  

Other methods you can make money from on your blog include selling advertising space directly and selling site memberships that allow visitors to access certain server-side tools.

The Popularity of Blogs Today

In recent studies by the American Life Project and The Guardian (UK), researchers asked whether or not the popularity of blogs today was growing in the two countries; and if so, why? The results on the popularity of blogs today were not exactly what most members of the blogosphere might expect.

Researchers working on the American Life Project found that the popularity of blogs today in terms of readerships in the United States was absolutely exploding; however, they also found that the amount of blogs available was increasing slowly in comparison. In the last six months of 2004, for instance, blog readers grew from a mere 17% of the population to a robust 37%--a significant increase. However, blog writers only increased from 5% and 7%; and largely maintained their homogeneous composition, which is predominantly male, young, and wealthy. The ALP attributed this explosion in readerships to the Presidential race, where both candidates employed blogging in some form to attract campaign donors.

The Guardian, which performed their study more recently, also found similar results in the United Kingdom on the popularity of blogs today. While they also found that readerships had increased dramatically, they did not find the same issue of slow blog growth; however, they did find out that a fairly astonishing 30% of frequent Internet users had never even heard of a blog.

So in which direction is the popularity of blogs today moving?--To greater profusion or to obscurity?

Given that blogs are the best intermediary between websites and forums, it is hard to imagine that they will decrease in the popularity of blogs today; conversely, however, it isn't hard to imagine that they will improve significantly in continuation with how they have changed since their inception in the mid-1990s.

In the short term, it is fairly safe to imagine that larger blogs will experiment with video technology while older blogs stick with easy, faster-loading models. It is also fairly safe to image that blog indexing methods will continue to improve and may even break away from the traditional algorithm method.

Types of Blogs You Can Build

The types of blogs you can build are limited only by your imagination and by your willingness to conduct research. For instance, while some bloggers focus on general topics, such as cars, other bloggers narrow the scope of their blogs even further to sub-topics, such as luxury cars or antique cars. From an optimization standpoint, a blog with a narrower scope would likely outperform a blog with a broader scope in terms of conversions or clicks-per-visitor. So, if your goal is to make money, the types of blogs you can build are somewhat limited.

In terms of actual topics for the types of blogs you can build, there are about 9 major areas that are popular for current blogs: business, culture, community, politics, religion, science, travel, online diaries, and gossip. Most blog directories use similar topical categories to order blogs.

In addition to the topic for the types of blogs you can build, you will also want to consider the program used to generate it. This is another way that directories categorize blogs. For instance, blogs can fall under the category of the tool or software that was used to create them. Some blogs are created using Google's Blogger. These blogs are often lumped together in directories as the same "type" of blog. They actually have an auto-surfing system that allows you to jump randomly from one Blogger blog to the another. 

Other types of blogs you can build include social networking blogs, which allow members of the same network to interact with each other using various blog functions. Two examples are Livejournal--which was one of the original social networking blog systems--and Myspace, which is currently the largest, boasting a base of around 80,000,000 users. In recent months, marketers and business persons have begun using Myspace to introduce their product to potential customers.

Another type of blog you can build is a video blog or "vlog." These usually contain videos and allow other posts to attach media in comments.

The last types of blogs you can build are geographical blogs. With such a robust blogging atmosphere--with users weighing in from all over the globe--directories, such as Blog Wise will allow users to search for blogs by geographic location. If you believe you have some information you can contribute about your specific region, you may want to start a regional geographic blog.

Blogging Defined

With the recent rise in advanced social networking sites and the subsequent attention they have received from media outlets, people commonly perceive weblogs--which are the staple of social networking--as a new invention; however, this isn't entirely true. Adding information to web-logs or "blogsî--blogging defined today--has been around for over ten years--and has gradually gained strength on the Internet as means of communication.

While people blogging in the early 1990s generally limited their blogs to personal information, such as chronicles and diaries, bloggers defined today includes blogging on a wide variety of different topics--from politics to cheese-tasting; however, blogging defined today is very much the same: a simple means to better facilitate communication.

Blogging defined is one of the most effective means of Internet-based communication because it is relatively easy and requires little time investment. Using a blogging interface like Wordpress or Google's Blogger, a blog owner can add a new entries to his blog while he sits in a meeting at work or watches events unfold on TV. Rather than fooling around with messy code, he can simply enter his message textually in his blog; and then update it in a matter of seconds. 

Another crucial aspect of blogging that makes it such an effective medium for communication is that it allows for rapid-response comments. A political debate could literally unfold over the course of the afternoon in the form of comments on a blog.

Conversely, blogging defined by the media is often ìcontroversial,î but it doesn't have to be that way.  Many blogs are used to simply say "hello" to friends who are blog owners. This is quite common with social networking sites, such as Myspace and Livejournal--both of which use a form of blog to facilitate communication.

Whether blogging defined is a form spurring debate between political opponents or blogging defined is a means of increasing bonds between friends, they have the ability to rapidly increase the speed of communication by acting as a sort of intermediary between a full-featured website and a forum.