Make Money Using Blogs - Lesson 4

Make Money Marketing with Blogs

As of this morning anyone searching for "Project Payday Review" on Google will see a blog I own in the number 1 position on the first page. I wrote the review and posted it on my make money for beginners blog on January 10, 2007 and just over a month later it is number 1 out of 1,270,000 competitors on Googles index. Who knows how long it will stay there but the point is that it IS there now. This is the result of a system I have been tweaking for some time regarding how to set up blogs for optimized traffic.

This is also the system I have been teaching you to do in the 3 previous lessons. I mention my page listing above not to brag, no far from it, but to encourage those of you who just don't want to put the time and effort into this to reconsider. Reaching page 1 on Google is worth the work. Think on this. It doesn't matter what or how you sell something online - you will still need customers, aka Traffic to make money. Getting your site on page 1 of Google gets you traffic - Free traffic. You can spend money and build a website or you can follow my directions and build a blog for free.

How to turn Traffic into Money

My make money blog is not set up to market products and as a result the "Project Payday" traffic is not earning me anything. I'm not an affiliate of "Project Payday" so people who read my review and sign up will not benefit me in any way. However my "make Money" blog is set up for other purposes which I will discuss later. I do have several other blogs that are optimized for selling products and I have got most of them listed on page 1 of Google as well. These blogs only do one thing. Sell the product. Google sends the traffic for free. I post 1 article a week to each of them and other than that they are forgotten. I spend my time creating new blogs and repeating the process over and over again. They don't all make money everyday but everyday some of them do. Combined they are averaging $106 a day. This might not seem like much to you but that's $3000 a month and my expenses are ZERO. Think on that before you say that you don't want to do the work.

Now that I have shown you the basics of setting up your blog let's discuss making some money with it.

Step 1.

Find a niche that will make money. This is all important as some niches are ready made for people who want to spend money and other niches won't produce enough cash for a cup of coffee.

Before running a keyword search you have to ask yourself what kinds of things people are willing to spend money on online. Music, electronics, books, travel, how to stuff, get rich quick stuff, personal development products and shoes all come to mind without thinking very hard. There are, of course, a lot more profitable niches than this.

The point is don't pick a niche that doesn't have an associated product or ebook that can be sold on it. You also want to be sure that there are adword advertisers for your niche.

One of the first websites I set up is about Betta Fish. It's a nice site with lots of info related to Bettas. After doing all the work and incurring the expenses involved in a website, I found out that there wasn't a lot of products that could be easily sold on the net for Betta fish. There were lots of adword advertisers though and I thought I would make some money from that at least. Wrong!

One of the ironies of setting up a good informative site is that if you do too good of a job people will stay on your site and read something that they came looking for. Then leave. This is fine if you have something to sell. I, unfortunately don't. This is when I started to think that I was providing to much info. To test this, I set up a series of free blogs on Betta fish but this time I put crap on the sites. (Yes I admit it) I still used all the right keywords so that they are optimized for the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) but now when traffic shows up they depart in a hurry. Usually they just close the page but a number of people click my ads. Bingo - I get more ad revenue from the crappy blogs than I do from the real website. This seems to work rather well with certain niches like pets. People are attached to their pets and when they need info they are determined to find it. The blogs are useless to them but when they see the ads, which appear to have the answers they need, it's easier to click the ad than do another Google search.

I am not saying that this is right or ethical. I am saying that people who make money with adsense use these techniques. As I have said before, no one in the business likes to admit this and they certainly don't divulge this to beginners.

Note: If you have been sucked into enough programs that promise to make you rich you start to realize that most of these programs give you just enough info to get you started but always seem to leave out the key ingredient. All the programs available that promise to show you how to make money with adsense are exactly like this. They tell you how to optimize your site, how to research keywords, how to find traffic and a few other details - everything in fact that you need to know to make money from adsense. And you will - maybe $1 a day. They don't tell you that you will need hundreds of sites to make any real money. Then again maybe they do but it's between the lines. The "lines" in this case would be the software that they flog. Stuff that generates unique content articles, programs that upload content to your sites automatically, automated forum posting, automated directory posting, automated guestbook posting, automated blog builders, automated website builders and the list goes on.

Why do you need automated software for anything? Because it's all about the numbers. To make money you need to create lots and lots of sites and you can't do this manually. Automated programs are spam programs - in the loose sense of the word. Spamming means many things and spam blogs are included in the definition.

I have received a number of emails asking me for info on these programs. I have been reluctant to tell you for a number of reasons. First, you need to know how to set up a "real" blog properly before you start duplicating it. Second I fear you will start down the spam path without knowing what your doing and spend a small fortune in the process. Thirdly, on a personal level, I have corresponded with many of you and realize that there are real people reading this and I like them, hence my conscience is weighing in on this. It's one thing to sell stuff to anonymous people who happen to find your site but it's harder when you know the people on the other end.

A few facts.

- most of the available software - while effective - requires some or a lot of knowledge about various aspects of computers, codes, operating systems, html, php, java script etc. Most beginners don't have the ability to work through this stuff and the producers of this type of software don't tell you about all the "bugs" and "fixes" needed to run the software before you buy it.

- every program I have used to date has "bugs". Most developers will issue fixes and updates as they get them but the fact is all software has bugs (Windows XP had hundreds when released) and this can't be helped as there are so many different computer setups that programmers can't take everyone in to account when building the program. They tend to build it for the most common applications .ie. Windows XP, 32 bit etc. In this instance a Mac user may have problems.

- this stuff is expensive.

- if you don't use the programs properly you will leave a spam footprint a mile wide that Google, among others, will see and at best your sites will get dropped and at worst you will be banned from adsense.

That said I will give you a list of some of the more popular software but without any links. That way I receive no affiliate fees and my conscience is clean if you pursue this avenue.

VooDoo Blogger - this program is designed to create thousands of crappy blogs. Has bugs but there is support given. This is a notorious spam program that doesn't make any bones about what it's for.

RSStoBlog - this is a legitimate program used to post content feeds automatically to your blog. Nothing wrong with this as lots of people use it to keep their sites up to date with fresh content. As with most automated software it can also be used to send content to all the spam blogs as well.

Forum Equalizer - this is simply a spamming program that lets you post messages on thousands of forums in order to leave a backlink to your site(s).

Guest Book Equalizer - same as the forum equalizer but you send posts to guest books instead. (leaving your backlink)

The following are not spamming software per se but can be used in conjunction with these other programs.

Article content generation software. There are too many to mention by name but they all do the same thing. (Google "Article Content Generation" for a list) They take articles that have already been written and change enough words and phrases to make it unique and then produce hundreds or thousands of unique variations of the same article. These can then be posted to thousands of blogs using RsstoBlog or a similar program.

I admit to using one of these programs but I only use articles that I write. This is to be certain that I don't get nailed for copyright infringement. If you don't set enough variables in the content generation program you could effectively produce an article that is only slightly different from the original and be guilty of stealing someone else's work. Be careful of this - I strongly suggest that you write your own articles. By the way there is no program that can create a readable article from scratch so beware any that advertise as such.

Article Submission Software - this allows you to automatically submit your articles to hundreds of directories. (a very time consuming process if done manually) You can Google this phrase for a list of available products. A word of caution - make sure your articles are well written before you submit them as most directories review articles before inclusion. Humans can tell if your article has been produced by spamming software and you won't get them posted.

Before spending a lot of money on this stuff I have put a link on the site to a program called "The OTO GoldMine". I came across this site in my travels and it seemed to be an ideal choice for beginners. You can join for free and make money by selling the products listed on the site with nothing more than an affiliate link. This is no different than other affiliate programs except that the product list here is as huge as any I've seen and has several very useful products. I also want to point out that they will try and sell you all these products when you sign up. The cost is $67. I mention this because a lot of the products in the list do the things I have just been describing - content generation software, blog submission et al. The price is astoundingly cheap for this kind of software that would cost hundreds of $ individually. (dam - that's sounds like a sales pitch and I don't want it to... old habits I guess)

What I am trying to say is that if you are going to invest in this stuff anyway then save yourself a lot of money and get it from this site. You can learn how to use the stuff and see if it is for you for a paltry sum in comparison to what you will spend searching for this separately. Anyway, whether you buy buy the products or not you should join for free and take advantage of the huge collection of products that you can promote on your site(s) and you only need one affiliate link. The nice thing about this is that they do all the selling - you just send them traffic and collect commissions.

This also applies to "The Ultimate Supertip" and "$7 Dollar Secrets" and the other programs I've listed before. These are ideal for beginners as they will sell faster and easier than most products. Why? They are cheap and they are easy to build a blog around. Optimize each blog as I have outlined previously using each program's name as your keyword. Write an article or two about each one and post them on your blog. Create a different set of articles for submission to the article directories like GoArticles.com and then move on to your next blog and product. Remember the more articles you submit the more backlinks you will get and the sooner you will get indexed in Google. It took me a month to get to number 1 for "project payday" and if I was selling that program I would be making money from it already from the free traffic Google is sending to my site. Is one month too long to wait? I am making money from all the sites I use to sell products and everyone of them gets free traffic and cost me nothing to produce.

Once you have enough sites up and running the money will start adding up. You may only make a few dollars at first but you will be surprised at how it will multiply in six months from now.

Get to it.

That's it for today. Next post I will look at several "tweaks" that you can use to increase your backlinks and a few other novel treats.

Later folks.