How To Make Money Online With Your Blog: a definitive (I hope) guide to making money online. Hi, my name is Kory. I have been involved with designing and programing websites for a decade. It started out as a hobby at first, and it has been my source of livelihood for the past three years. I decided to put on a “reality show” of starting a website from scratch and applying the knowledge I acquired over the years to make it generate a revenue stream. I am calling it a reality show, because I will be posting periodic updates for everyone to see how the project is progressing. Every week, I will post the traffic reports of my case study blog. In addition, I will also reveal the tools of the trade essential to make money online. Since, I prefer to get things done on the cheap, I will use free software whenever I can.
I created a WordPress blog called CutePetsCity.com.The subject of this case study is to show you how to make money online with this blog through the Google Adsense model. (If you are not familiar with some of the terminology, don’t worry, I will explain everything in due time. All you need to know for now is that a blog is basically a content management tool that allows even the the not-so-tech-savvy individual to establish an online presence quickly, and WordPress is the most popular software for that. Google Adsense is the text ads on the right-hand side of every Google search result page. Google has a program where you can display their ads on your website as well.)
Business Model:
There are a number of ways to make money online. The simplest way to do it is to place advertisment on your website, and drive free search engine traffic to it. This what I am doing on
Steps to Make Money Online With Your Blog:
Making Money Online Step #1: Choose a Subject
First, you will need to decide on a subject. While, casting a wider net when it comes to your subject matter can work very well (the blog you are reading right now, Tube108.com, is an example), specialty sites perform very well for a number of reasons. I will go into detail as I dive into my case study. I decided to create a site dealing with pets. People do a lot of pet-related searches every day, so I thought it might be a good subject for me. While I have some experience with cats and dogs (my folks used to breed them while I was growing up), I am not an expert on the subject by any means. You won’t have to be either, as you will see later. Just pick a subject you are comfortable with.
Making Money Online Step #2: Choose a Domain Name
If you have a general idea what direction you want to go in, you will need to find a good key phrase as the basis for your domain name. This is important, because when you set out to build incoming links to your site, most of the time you have no other choice but to use your website’s adddress. It might as well contain a phrase that will generate you some good traffic.
There a couple good places to go to pick the right key pahrase for free. Wordtracker is one, and KeywordDiscovery is another. Right now, KeywordDiscovery is the better of the two as they use actual historical data where as Wordtracker’s numbers are extrapolations from limited data. It is defiantely worth your while to subscribe to at least one of these evetually, if you are going to make money online with your blog and take advantage of the full capabilities of their tools.
I am planning got write a whole separate post on comparing the two, so check back.
I knew that pets were probably a popular subject, so I fired up Wordtracker’s free suggestion tool, and typed in the word “pets”. I wasn’t going to just pick a domain name like Pets.com. First of all, single-word doamin names are probably already taken; and second, they do not serve your best interest. Internet users are becoming more savy, and they use more discriptive searches containing 2-5 words. You might as well capitalize on that. After looking around for a while, I settled on the phrase “cute pets.” Still, the domain name CutePets.com was taken, so I added an extra word “City” to it, so I could still have a .com. CutePetsCity.com was available.
Making Money Online Step #3: Buy a Domain Name
The best and cheapest place to buy your domain name is GoDaddy.com these days. I buy all my and my clients’ domain names there. One that ends on a “.com” will cost you $9.99 per year. Set up is easy and fast. (I will be posting a tutorial on registering a domain name with GoDaddy as soon as I get around to it.) Google is said to favor webistes that are registered for longer than one year. The reason being that it shows that you mean business and you are in it for the long haul. The longer the better, but two years should be just fine.
Making Money Online Step #4: Find a Place to Host Your Blog
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Work in progress, more coming soon. Thanks. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!