How to Make a Blog in 5 Easy Steps

Making a blog is far easier than most people think. It doesn’t require programming skills, a big budget or long lead times. In fact, I set up this blog in under ten minutes for FREE!

Choose a blog platform

You have two choices when it comes to setting up your blog. Your decision on which platform to use will depend on how you intend to use your blog. For a corporate blog, money-making blogs, blogs requiring a customized look, and blogs with frequent posts and lots of photos or music files server-hosted blog is the best option. If you are starting a simple blog to share your thoughts then I suggest going with a hosted blog solution such Wordpress.com or Blogger.com.

Choose a Domain Name

The Domain is the address where your blog will be found online. If you have a traditional website for your business, you can instruct your webmaster to add a page to your navigation bar that says “BLOG” and then give your blog a domain like blog.companyname.com or companyname.com/blog. If you want to make your blog a separate site all together, Go Daddy is a good place to find out if the domain name you want is available. However, be aware that if you do not buy the name as soon as you see it is available, there is a chance that Go Daddy will purchase it because you just let them know the name is of interest by searching for it. They will give you a few days to buy it before they snatch it up.

Choose a Blog Name

There are no rules about how to name your blog – the most important thing is to keep it simple and easy to find. If at all possible keep the name of your blog the same as or close to your domain name, so it is easier for people to find you.

Many music bloggers have taken to naming their sites after their favorite song lyrics or titles. The name of your blog can be as simple as Company Name Blog, or something obscure like Boing Boing or 3Hive. It is in your best interest to give it a name that reflects your branding or message in some way. Having a catchy name is great, if you have the audience to support it. My first blog was simply – www.kyrareed.com. I use it to discuss changes in the music world as it is affected by new technology. The name of the blog doesn’t convey that idea, but it helps with my branding to have my name as the title, and it is establishing that my name as an contributor in that field.

Once you have decided on your platform and URL it is time to create your blog.

Choose a Theme

A blog theme is a customized design or skin for a blog. The theme will determine the font, banner header, number of columns, color palette, and other visual elements of the site that are not related to content. There are thousands of themes available for server-hosted blogs, most are free but will require a little know how to install. For a hosted blog, the selections are limited but install at the click of the mouse.

Important things to consider when choosing a theme

1. How many columns do you want on your blog?

I recommend at least two, so that you will have a section for your blog posts and a sidebar for your blogroll and widgets. Use three columns if you plan on adding several widgets or information you wish to remain on the homepage.

2. Where do you want the navigation tabs to be located?

If you want to use your blog as a website, you have the option of creating static pages. For instance, an About page, a Services page, or a Bio page. If this is the case you would want to choose a theme with navigation pages that are easy to locate and read. I suggest ones with the navigation across the top of the site rather than in the sidebar.

3. Do you want a Custom Banner Header?

The banner of your blog is the first thing your readers will see when they visit your blog. Many themes allow you to upload an image of your choosing and provide specifications for the size of the image. This may not always be the necessary option. There are several themes with unique and interesting banners already in place.

Set Up the Blog

Now that you have your theme in place, its time to begin the set up.

1. Headline

Most themes offer a space for the name of your blog and headline in the banner header. Unlike the name of your blog, the headline will tip readers off to the content of your site. You will need to come up with a very brief, one sentence explanation of what your blog is about. For example, my blog is “I know music and Web 2.0.” Metafluence is “This is beyond marketing, its manipulation.”

2. Banner Header

The banner header is the first thing readers see when they visit your site. Some of the designs will allow you to place a custom banner header. Only use that option if you have a logo or photo that represents your blog. Otherwise I recommend going for a template that is clean and simple, with no photo header.

3. Blog Roll

The blog roll is also know as LINKS. This is where you add all the sites or other blogs that you like, recommend or want to show support for. The blog roll can be divided into categories and sub-categories, i.e, Friends, Clients, Music. This is a very important addition to your blog so do not overlook it. The links you provide act as currency on the Internet. They will help you to get your foot in the door of the blogosphere and encourage linking to you in return.

4. Widgets

Widgets are easy to install and are available for a variety of uses. Overuse of widgets can clutter the page, but the right ones can make your blog pop. When choosing a widget, be sure the information is relative or will be providing value to your site. I recommend Widgetbox as a good place to get started with widgets.

Congratulations! You have now made a blog and are ready to fill it with content. For tips and advice on writing blog posts download Blog 101, The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging. And check back at Blog 101 for more insight into the world of blogging.

(source : http://blog101book.com)

The Secret to a Successful Online Business!

People buy from those they know and trust. Nowhere is this more true than on the Internet, where you may never even meet anyone in person. Establishing a trust relationship with your potential online clients takes time, but it is well worth the effort!

Think about the last time you bought a product or service online, that had a substantial positive impact on your work or life in some way. If you were spending a good chunk of change (and perhaps investing a good bit of your time) on that purchase, chances are you did some research first: reading online forums and reviews to see what others had to say about them; contacting them directly with questions and observing how quick and helpful (and polite) their response was; maybe even buying a smaller product or service from them first. All to determine if you could trust this online business to deliver what they promise.

Your potential online clients are no different! They are going to want to know if they can trust you to deliver, too. Here are three specific ways you can work on building trust relationships online, and how each will help your business:

1. Get to know your customers. This helps you more deeply understand what it is they need - making it a lot easier to tell them how what you are selling is going to meet their needs. Find out where they "hang" out, on discussion forums, social networks, etc., and get involved. Don't just schmooze or try to sell your product right then and there -- instead, add value to the conversation. If you are doing it right, you'll be doing a whole lot more listening than talking.
2. Connect with your customer on a personal level. Let them see you as a person, one who has some things in common with them. People will trust you, and ultimately buy from you, if they feel you are like them. This means being sincere and transparent - not pretending or making something up. If you can't make that trust connection with one particular person, don't force it - move on to someone else.
3. Keep up the trust relationship. The relationship doesn't stop after the sale! Clients who know and like you, and have benefited from what you have sold them, will tell others about you! It will be easy for them to recommend you because they are recommending a trusted vendor, not an impersonal business or product. If you've done a good job of providing them with something that makes their job or life easier, they won't be able to wait to tell someone else!

article source:http://ezinearticles.com/

Make money with Google AdSense

How to Earn Money with Google Adsense

Google’s AdSense is a fascinating revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large web sites. Some webmasters are designing brand new sites specifically for serving AdSense text ads, however it’s against the AdSense rules to design a site purely for AdSense, so you’ll want to include a few Affiliate links or sell your own product, too.

Steps :

1. Determine a goal for what you want to earn using AdSense. Of course, you want to earn a lot, but make sure it's realistic. Consider that to earn $1 a day per page, you need, per page:
   • 400 visitors, 5% click-through rate (CTR) and average 5c payout.
   • Or 200 visitors, 10% CTR and an average 5c payout.
   • Or 100 visitors, 10% CTR, and an average 10c payout.
   • Or 100 visitors, 5% CTR, and an average 20c payout
2. Build a skeleton set of pages that have no content, just titles and some meta tags. Ads could be displayed on them; although all you see are public service ads at first, but the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.
3. Build keyword-rich pages containing well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site. For example, if your site is about topics such as debt consolidation, web hosting or asbestos-related cancer, you’ll earn much more per click than if it’s about free things. On the other hand, if you concentrate only on top-paying keywords, you’ll face an awful lot of tough competition. What you want are keywords that are high in demand and low in supply, So do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.

Tips :

• Quality is the most important part of any web site. If your site does not contain the content of expected quality the visitor might not come back,
• A great resource for earning money is using traffic driving sites like Flixya^[1]. You can sign up for Google Adsense and Flixya, without the costs or time needed to build traffic or your own site.
• Avoid non-English characters on English pages. There is a bug which can cause these pages to show irrelevant French ads.
• Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do say that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags.

Warnings :

• If you don't have any content, Google will have to guess what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant.
• Do not click your ads. If Google catches you, they have the right and will close your account and retain any earnings you might have.

source: http://wikihow.com/Earn-Money-with-Google-Adsense

How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started Immediately

You can make money from blogging. It can pay for your bills. It does work for everyone. There’s no secret and you’ll just really need to know how to get started and which blogging framework to follow.

It’s not a difficult process at all and this post will provide 7 distinct methods you can use to generate substantial income from blogging. These seven methods are strategies you can adopt right from the beginning, preferably before you set up your first blog.

You can think of them as guidelines which point out the different options you have, if you’re serious about using blogging as a method of making money online.

1. The “Flagship” or Big Blog Route

This is simultaneously the most profitable and most time-consuming blog venture. The flagship method directs all your focus on a few blogs in order to make them incredibly popular in their niche. Flagship blogs should have a large audience as well as high daily visitor traffic numbers.

These type of big blogs have a wide variety of monetization options with direct advertising sales being a big part of it. Know that not everyone can successfully create a big blog so attempt this route only if you absolutely believe that you have the networking skills, niche knowledge and marketing know-how that’s needed.

• Benefits: Fame as well as more monetization options/potential for your blogs, alongside personal satisfaction. Another advantage is that big blogs usually market or promote themselves automatically once a certain level of fame has been achieved.
• Disadvantages: Very time-consuming especially if you are not outsourcing the content creation or marketing duties. Expect a lot of work and experiment with creative promotional ideas if you decide to go this route.

2. The “Pay per Post” or Get Paid to Blog Route

This is rather simple. Set up multiple niche blogs on either your own domains or free blog hosts like Blogger. Maintain them over a period of time and focus on writing content and building up their Google PageRank, link profile and Alexa Rank.

Submit all of your blogs to multiple get paid to blog websites like Blogitive, Blogsvertise, Review Me, Sponsored Reviews, PayperPost, LoudLaunch and then start writing sponsored posts. I highly recommending using PayperPost as they simply have the largest amount of paid offers available.

• Benefits: The greatest strength of this method is that you don’t even need a large audience to make money. 20 people could be visiting and reading your blogs everyday and you’ll still be able to make at least $15 a day from each blog. If skillfully done over multiple blogs, this method can allow you to easily make over $1.5 K a month.
• Disadvantages: No passive income. You’ll need to spend time writing multiple sponsored blog posts, which can be boring and time consuming. Work will also be needed to maintain your multiple blogs, although that will be minimal after they have been optimized and running for some time.

3. The Automated Blogging or Splog Route

Automated blogging involves the setting up of blogs which automatically pull content from RSS feeds, search engines and news sources to serve as content on your website.

Some bloggers set this to pull partial excerpts of RSS feeds, which does go against some copyrights and one can choose to only include excerpts with a link back to the site in question. Monetization for automated sites is usually done through contextual ads like Google Adsense or affiliate programs.

• Benefits: Very little work needed to maintain these blogs as they do not need you to actively generate or write content. You might need to do a little SEO and regular maintenance now and then. Try if you are adventurous.
• Disadvantage: A weak potential for profit unless you understand the entire process perfectly and if you have quite a large number of blogs.I estimate that a fully automated blog will make you around $5 a month although the actual value depends on the niche and your skills. Assuming that this is so, you’ll need 1,000 blogs to make around $5000 a month. Splogs dwell in ethically gray areas as well.

4. The Text Link Selling Blog Route

The main bulk of your income through this method comes from selling text links to various webmasters and businesses who want to improve their site ranking in Google. While text link selling works for the flagship or other blog models as well, sites can be primarily built for text link sales as well.

The overwhelming emphasis here is on Google PageRank and niche relevancy so you’ll need to focus on these two factors. You can either convert a domain into a text link and sponsored post selling blog or you can purchase a domain with existing PageRank to sell text links for a quick buck. I suggest looking for link buyers directly through webmaster forums.

• Benefits: Selling text links or contextual text links is rather easy and doesn’t involve much work. Potential for profit will correspond to your Google Page Rank and niche. A site with a high PageRank and a profitable niche (mortgages, credit cards) will be very attractive to link buyers. Like paid review blogs, traffic is not a factor in these blogs as well.
• Disadvantages: Over Reliance on the Google PageRank algorithm means that your income may rise or fall depending on your actual Page Rank. There may also be a limit to the number of links you can sell which leads to an income ceiling.

5. The Made-for-Adsense or Made-for-Affiliate-Program Route

This involves setting up a blog around a specific topic with moderately high priced keywords (e.g. teeth whitening, car loans). You’ll only need to create around 25 keyword rich articles on the topic, optimize it for search, set up Adsense or affiliate programs and then leave them alone.

The main emphasis is on building links to the specific webpages, according to the long tail keywords you want to target. Search engine visitors will then find your blog and either click on the ads or convert on a product.

• Benefits: Not a lot of time involved as you can usually contract an experienced writer to develop the keyword rich articles. Not much time is needed to update the blogs as well and new material can be added on a bi-weekly or even monthly basis.
• Disadvantages: There might be a lot of competition in a profitable niche and search traffic might not lead to sufficient income, unless you go for volume and set up dozens of similar websites in other niches as well.

6. The Blog Network or Contract Blogging Route

This involves joining a blog network and getting paid to maintain and create content for blogs. You’ll get paid according to the amount of pageviews, possibly receive a token base fee in the hundreds or a share of the blog’s ad revenue.

• Benefits. Relatively stable monthly income because of the base fee. Contract work usually leads to more freelance blogging or writing assignments because of your proven ability or association with a specific organization.
• Disadvantages: Why bother? If you’re that good at creating and promoting a blog, set up your own website and keep all the profits. However, it is useful to note that a lot depends on the type of network or contract agreement you receive.

7. The Blog-as-Marketing or Branding Route

This method will only apply if you own an online business or provide a freelance service like web design, copy writing or marketing consultation. A blog can be used to help promote your personal or business brand and attract more customers.

This is an indirect method of making money. Ideally, this sort of a blog shouldn’t be plastered with ads or paid reviews because it can tarnish the image of the brand.

• Benefits. A blog can help your brand or business to develop much more search visibility because it allows you to easily create more fresh content that caters to specific demographics as well.
• Disadvantages. Your blog will only be as useful as the quality of the service or product you are pushing. The amount of money you earn doesn’t entirely depend on the quality of the blog but the value of your service/product as well. Income is therefore indirect and can be inconsistent.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several strategies you can choose if you’re interesting in making money from blogs. To ensure maximum success, be sure to pick one that suits your personal schedule, skill level and interests.

(source : http://www.doshdosh.com/)

Internet Business

8 Ways To Choose An Internet Home Business For You

Deciding to work from home can be a good decision or a bad one. It depends of your attitude and the passion you have for your business. If you really make the decision to start a home business you have made the first step to succeed.

But now the question is: " How do i choose the best home business among the internet business opportunities jungle ?

There are litterally millions of them on the internet. Where do i start ? And how do i know if this or this home business is the right one for me ?

There are so many home business opportunities out there that it’s hard to know where to start. And how do you know you have chosen the best one? It can all get pretty frustrating.

First do some research. How long are they in business ? Do they have a good products to sales ? Do they pay good commission ? Do they deliver the check ? (I remember one home business where i have nerver seen a check !)

So here is 8 ways to choose your own home business

1. The Company:

If your desire is to build a successful home business rather than looking for some quick business online, then the parent company is worth checking out. The questions, among others, to ask here are:

How long have they been doing this and what is the prospect for the future? b. Do they deliver on their promises - what are others saying about their products? c. How are the customer and affiliate support services

2. FREE to join (LOW start-up investment)

Do you have to pay to join an affiliate program for example ? How much those it cost ? Are you willing to pay $1000 a month or between $30 to $100 a month ? Are you willing to advertise between $50 to $5000 a month to bring people etc.

Most people don’t want to pay a lot of money before starting up a home business. So in my experience you should choose a home business that cost $30 to $75 a month.(It should be FREE to join). The cost should be for buying product to try yourself and advertising.

3. FREE Website.

Does your home business offer you a free website or gateways ? If not! Are you able to make or run a website. Or to pay to make one. (It can cost between $100 to $5000 to have one made by an expert.)

4. FREE Training and Follow-up

What kind of support and training does the Internet company offer? What kind of support and training do you want when you start up your home business? Do you want ongoing training ? Or just a Smart Start Training ?

5. Great Products

Does the company offer exclusive product like vitamin or special information ? Is it easy to sale ? Is it a quality product ? Does it have a money back guaranteed ? Are they to pricey to buy ?

6. Compensation Plan

Does the company offer a good commission like between 40% to 80% per sales ? Does it offer residual income ? (a residual income; is an income you get month after month on the same product you sell to the clients as long as he keeps buying it).

Does it offer great rewards like after 4 sales you get a bonus ? Are there clear goals that you can achieve? Is it hard to achieve does goals ?

7. Leads generation system

Does your home business offer you leads that you can buy to build your business ? Are those leads old or new leads ? Are they double opt-in or even triple opt-in quality leads ? Are they really good leads ?

8. Does your home business offer you a resource center ?

a. Like a hit counter with live stat.

b. A powerline genealogy where you can see the name and address of your affiliate

c. A sales report (SVP, Commission etc.)

d. Marketing aids (text ads, flyer, banner ads, wearables etc.)

e. Contact manager (where you can contact all your affiliate )

f. Key Code Tracking (for tracking your marketing effort)

g. Help Desk (FAQ's, Retrieve Password, Support, Email checklist etc.)

If you want to start you home based business immediately, promote other people's product. This product should have excellent support, all marketing tools are provided to you, many people use it and the buyers have to pay them every month.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/