If you are reading this then I will assume you are looking for ways to make money blogging. You probably started your blog with high hopes and dreams of making lots of money from it but so far that hasn’t happened and chances are it never will. However, there is one way you can quickly and easily make money from your blog. And the best part is that you can do this again and again with as many blogs as you want to keep making money!

So, what is the fastest way to make money from your blog?

The simple answer is to sell it. Blog flipping is one of the most popular ways to make money online right now and you can easily start flipping blogs for quick cash if you want to.

I know that selling a blog you have put a lot of time into might seem stupid but if you aren’t making any money from it or if you aren’t making as much as you hoped at this point, then selling it for a lump sum of cash can be a wise decision.

You can keep building (or buying) and selling blogs to make money online as often as you want. Blogging isn’t going anywhere and there will always be more people coming online looking to buy a blog that has already been built for them, so blog flipping as a way to make money will be here for a long time.

If your blog isn’t making the money you thought it would, head over to flippa.com and do your first blog flip right now.

Confused about how to flip blogs? Visit the Blog Flipping University for all the information you need on how to make money blog flipping.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Giving you free home based business tips.

Filed under: Blogging, Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

As a follow on from my last post Make Money by Working With Search Engines,where I looked at several methods of working with the search engines rather than against them, I’m going to mention a linking strategy that you can use to boost the authority of your main site from which you make money online while remaining within the guidelines of the search engines.

First and foremost, you have to understand that this is by the book and legitimate, but the trade off is that it takes quite a lot of work on your behalf.

Ok, now that statement has probably frightened of the tyre kickers, the serious contenders can read on…

This idea of how to make money with a linking strategy is simple, obvious and actually quite simple to set up. It just takes time and some planning and using what we know about SEO to make money online. Time is something we all have plenty of, its just that a lot of it is wasted on non-essential pursuits, so instead of checking your stats 20 times a day, use that time to do this. Find a niche that you believe you can make money in. Avoid the Make Money Online niche as it is saturated and very competitive. Find a less competitive niche. You’ll have to do the research and come up with one that has several well searched keyword phrases that combined, will generate sufficient traffic for your main website or blog to make money. Then you need a plan.

Build Your Plan:

If you have the basics on how to use a spreadsheet like Excel (or if you prefer free, Open Office’s similar offering) then crank it up and make yourself a simple spreadsheet. On this you are going to make a list of blogs in the left hand column. Those blogs are the ones you are going to create on different platforms but in the same niche. Use free blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Blinkweb etc and create set of around 8-12 blogs. Divide them up into two groups and split blogs on each platform up as best you can so you don’t have, say all Blogger blogs in one group. They need to be split across various platforms for this to work best.

These are your first tier sites and they are going to be fairly general themed around your main niche. They are also going to provide your main site with the links it needs to dominate the SERPs for your chosen keywords. Getting the keywords part right is one of the methods of how to make money with SEO and has been covered in provious posts here and at the sites that are linked to in this post. Of course, the number of first tier sites you make will depend upon how competitive your niche is. So look at the top 3 sites in Google’s SERPs (this is the search engine you need to rank in by the way) for the keywords you want to rank for and find out how many anchored links they have pointing at them. You can do this with software like SEO Elite.

The strategy is simple in that you need more links than your competition to beat them in the SERPs.

Now build up each of your new blogs with posts, using relevant content. It doesn’t have to be quality content, just mostly original and relevant including your keywords both in the title and text of your posts. You can get links to these sites using the common variety of methods such as dofollow blog comments, forum sigs, article submissions, pligg site submissions etc. Once they have been indexed by Google you can start including links to your main site in each post.

You can also link some of the first tier blogs together but not all of them. This is why you split them into two groups. Only link blogs together within each group and do not link to blogs in the other group. Better to be frugal with interlinking and don’t daisy-chain them together but rather link out to maybe only two other random blogs in the group from each blog.

Why?

There is every chance that even though your blogs are perfectly legit, a competitor in your niche might not take kindly to a new site coming along and knocking them off their pedestal. They may check the back-links coming into your site and if they see a large group of blogs that not only link to your main site but are also interlinked, they will smell a rat and report your blogs as spam. Now, even if they are not spam, Google will shoot first and ask questions later and your blogs may get de-indexed until the Google visual inspection team can satisfy themselves that they are legit. During this time, your links will be discounted and your main site will drop out of the index.

It takes a while to get it back there and in that time you will lose money. So by not interlinking all your blogs, you minimize the risk.

Ok, now to the linking strategy itself and how off site SEO works its magic. All links must come from within posts. So no blogroll links. The links must have a keyword text anchor and either point directly at the homepage of your main site for its main keywords, or point to a post on the main site with the title of the post as the anchor. The title of each post in both first tier blogs and main site must include your keywords. This is highly important and what will help you to beat your competition, because chances are if the niche is not competitive, they will not know what you now know. Generate a mixture of links all containing variations of your keywords to make it look more natural.

Don’t overdo it. Keep it to a maximum of two links out from each post and work of a basis of one link per roughly 200-250 words for maximum link juice.

Well, that’s the strategy. It works but it takes time. Google take their time indexing sites, indexing posts within blogs and counting links. Several months may pass before your links get counted and your main site rises up onto the first page in the SERPs, let alone takes first place. So you need plenty of patience and keep diligently working all your blogs to keep providing fresh links to the main site.

Good luck, be tenacious and stick to your guns and you will succeed.

Freelance Writer Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: SEO | 1 Comment »

Here’s a timely reminder that things will be easier for you in your quest to learn how to make money online that was sparked off by Trent’s previous post here at Blogging Web 2.0. He mentioned getting your blog noticed in the search engines in order to attract traffic, the kind of traffic that will convert into revenue when you find a good niche to work in.

I’m going to expand on that part somewhat by saying that while many bloggers are spending all their time chasing social traffic. They do this by doing the rounds and reading umpteen other peoples’ blogs, commenting in them, then using social networks like Digg or Stumbleupon etc to attract more traffic to their blogs. Well that’s fine of you like looking at your stats and seeing a few hundred unique visitors coming to your blog, as long as you have posted in there, that is.

But reading your stats isn’t going to make you a dime. Neither are those social visitors, because, let’s face it, they’re all just like you. They are bloggers too and they know what ads look like and they don’t click on them. So you’re working like a trooper, posting every day and commenting all over the place and not making any money!

No matter what anyone else tells you, if you want to know how to make money online, you need Google to rank your blog on its first page for its main and several long tail keywords if you are going to stand any chance of making money from it. Other search engines will also bring you traffic, but Google are the main prize as they generate fully 67% of all search traffic. All the other search engines put together generate the remaining 33%, which is divvied up between the likes of Yahoo, MSN, All The Web, AOL etc. While ranking well with all of them will contribute to your blog’s overall potential earnings, the lion’s share will come from Google.

So instead of wasting your day doing the social blogging rounds and checking your stats, use that time wisely to get yourself lots of strong, keyword anchored backlinks to your blog. And not just to your homepage, but also to your deeper pages with long tail keywords in the anchor mixed up with your main keyword. That way you’ll begin to rank well for lots of different keywords and start attracting traffic from lots of different searches.

And don’t expect it all to happen overnight.

Be patient, because Google are relatively slow to count new links. While you’re waiting, don’t sit back and revert to the social scene and checking stats, keep at it by continually creating new backlinks. Sure, in order to keep the how to make money online momentum going, keep writing in your blog too to increase its content. Make good use of those posts and include your main and long tail keywords in the content of each post. The more keywords you can get in there (without stuffing) the more ways you will rank in the search results. And the more traffic you will attract!

And what does traffic make? Money, that’s what!

Of course, your blog will need to be monetised in order to make that money, so either put up some Adsense, or affiliate links with some good reviews of the products you’re selling.

One last thing… If you’ve been relying on the odd reader throwing some chump change into your hat by clicking on the “buy me a beer” or whatever begging method you’ve got sitting in your sidebar, get rid of it! Most serious marketers (me included) have a serious dislike of begging as it implies failure, like a beggar in the street. And you want to be a success, right?

Well, what are you waiting for? Stop reading about it and get out there and start doing it!

Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet Marketing | No Comments »

There are thousands of people who are making money blogging right now and new blogs are being started all the time. You can make money blogging and it’s not as hard as you may think. I will admit, it’s not the easiest thing in the world but anyone can do it if they are willing to put in the time and effort.

The first thing to remember if you are started a new blog is to stay away from the “Make Money Online” (MMO) niche. It is very hard to make money blogging in the MMO niche. There are many reasons for that but I won’t go into them right now. Just take my word for it.

There are thousands of easier niches you can tap in to and make money blogging about them. All you have to do is use a free keyword tool and do a little research. Start with things you are interested in or know a lot about, and go from there. You should be able to find a good niche pretty quickly. The more it gets searched for the better. However, volume of searches is not the only thing you need to take into consideration. You are looking for niches that have a fairly large market with money they are willing to spend, and not a lot of competition.

You can find the first one with the Google Keyword Tool. It will tell you the approximate monthly search volume for any keyword phrase and how strong the advertiser competition is. If there is a lot of advertiser competition then it’s usually a good indicator that the niche has profit potential.

Then, you need to see how much competition there is for that keyword phrase. An easy way to do that is to go to Google and search for it in quotes. The results will come up with sites that are using that exact phrase on their sites. You can see that number in the top right corner of the search results page. You do want some competition but not a lot.

Once you find a good niche then all you have to do is set up your blog and start blogging. Wordpress and Blogger are popular blogging platforms that are free and very easy to use. After you get some blog posts written and published you should start getting inbound links. This can be done through article marketing, link exchanges, dofollow blog commenting, buying links, directories, social bookmarking, forums and many other ways.

Updating your blog often with quality content and getting a lot of keyword anchored inbound links will increase your search engine rankings and start bringing in a lot of traffic to your blog. Once you have the traffic you can put up some affiliate links, do paid reviews, sell advertising or any of the other methods there are for making money from a blog.

That’s pretty much all there is to making money blogging. Of course, this post is a very summed up and simplified guide for how you can make money blogging for free. But it is the basics of how you do it. Use my tips as a guide and do some searching for a more in-depth explanation of anything you don’t understand. You could have your niche picked and blog set up in a matter of hours, and be making money from it very soon.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Teaching you how to make money online with your own internet home business since 2003.

Filed under: Blogging | No Comments »

For those of you who dig Star Wars, you might be delighted to hear about a new blog that focuses on make money online free. Wookie is a fun take on Chewbacka (did I spell that one right) and the sole focus is on helping you to make money without charging a $1 per post.

Ok that was a joke on the Conn man. Never mind, the blog is failry new but already contains some words of wisdom for budding Internetpreneurs. If your dream is to make money online, then What A Wookie is your place to snoop out.

If you like freebies, you will be at the right place since the owner plans to give away free domain names and maybe some other goodies over time just for blogging about his blog.

Since I’m a sucker for goodies (like the rest of you), this is my take on the blog, throwing my towel into the mix to be picked.

So head over to make money online and enjoy the content.

Filed under: Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Sometimes it’s hard to find a good topic for a new blog post and you need a little help. One way to do that is to take a look at Google Hot Trends and see what the hot topics of the day are. You can usually find at least one trend to fit with most niches so there’s a good chance you will be able to find something that will work for your blog.

This can also be a great way to get a nice boost in traffic. If you blog about a hot topic and your blog has enough authority to get posts indexed quickly and rank well then you stand a good chance of getting thousands of new visitors who are searching for that topic.

Going for the hottest topics on the list probably won’t do much for you because they will have already been picked up by the huge authority sites that you don’t have a chance at competing against. However, if you pick a topic somewhere in the middle to end of the hot trends you might just reap the rewards.

As I said above, there’s usually enough of a range of topics that you should be able to find a trend that is at least somewhat relevant to your blogs niche. You should choose a term that is as closely related to your niche as possible. You could also just start a general information blog and make all of your posts based on any hot trends that interest you on a daily basis.

Use Google Trends to your advantage to help you find topics to blog about and possibly bring in huge surges of traffic to your blog.

Dedicated to your blogging success,
Trent Brownrigg
Teaching you how to make money online and build a successful home business!

Filed under: Blogging | No Comments »

…Blog, Blog, Blog while I sing this song… I’m gonna write this post, I’m gonna publish it online… Then I’ll start another but I don’t know why!

Does that pretty much sum up your daily blogging habits? Are you one of those bloggers who thinks you need to constantly update your blog as much as humanly possible? If so, I want you to sit back in your chair right now and really think about why you feel the need to write 10 blog posts every day even if you really don’t have anything to say.

Contrary to what you may have been told before, there really is no need to update your blog numerous times per day. In fact, you don’t even need to update your blog once per day! It is much better to write a couple long, informative, useful posts per week than it is to write a bunch of worthless posts every day just for the sake of doing it.

Just think about how much less stressful your life would be if you weren’t constantly thinking about how you need to write a new blog post or trying to think of something to say. Write higher quality posts less often and you will actually be doing yourself and your readers a favor. Heck you will probably even gain more readers by doing this.

Remember quality is always better than quantity!

Dedicated to your blogging success,
Trent Brownrigg
Owner of the top home business website and a popular make money online blog.

Filed under: Blogging | No Comments »