Entries from July 2010 ↓

I thought I’d wrap things up today by giving you some quick tips you can apply right away to make money blogging:

1. Learn the lingo such as PPC, CPC, CPM, etc. As your blog gets more popular, potential advertisers will contact you, so you’ll need to know the standard jargon.

2. Monetize your RSS feed by putting ads in the RSS footers.

3. Be disciplined and treat blogging like a job and stick to a schedule. Use the auto-posting feature when you are on vacation.

4. Sell a service or your own products on your blog. There’s the potential to make more money from your blog this way because you aren’t sharing revenue with advertisers or earning only commissions as an affiliate.

If you’re just starting out as a blogger, keep focusing on writing posts every day and getting traffic. The more posts, the more traffic.

Once you’re in that position, most any monetization option will work.

And Socrates WordPress theme will be there to help you increase your blog revenue.

Header generator is one of the best things about Socrates. You need no design skills. Choose a header that matches the theme of your blog and upload your own photo if you wish. There are 160 header templates. You can endlessly customize your header with just a few clicks.

Best of luck to you as you start making money from blogging.

When you go on a trip or visit a museum or other tourist destination, do you often find yourself in the gift shop or at a local shop looking for unique souvenirs?

I know I do. It’s human nature to want to have a physical remembrance of an experience that was special to you.

I still have a child-sized glass mug from an old drive-in restaurant we visited while my family was on vacation way back when I was only four or five years old.

I also cherish the few items I inherited from my grandfather. Looking at them brings back instant memories of our times together.

There’s a lot to be said for a blog that has a loyal following instead of lots of page views.

Sometimes a blog doesn’t have a lot of traffic, but will have hundreds of subscribers.

This is often the case when the blog is very specific and about a topic such as religion, politics, sports, music, or other topics that people like to gather together online and talk about.

Or if you have a blog that is inspiring, such as a photography, art blog, or a self-help blog.

In these instances, opening a Cafe Press or Zazzle store and selling mugs, T-shirts, and other small items with personalized slogans and photos from your blog can be a nice stream of passive income for your blog.

These items are like souvenirs of your blog and your loyal fans will want to buy them.

Again, this won’t work as well if your blog isn’t one that attracts subscribers and just attracts a lot of drive-by visitors. In those instances, ads or affiliate products will work best. You need regular repeat commenters and a loyal following.

These personalized items will especially sell well seasonally, such as at Christmas.

Another thing to consider is putting your blog posts together into a book and selling it on a print-on-demand basis through Hulu or CreateSpace.

These sites will also list your book on Amazon at no extra charge.

These can be nice revenue streams for you with minimal effort.

These options will work well if you use Socrates WordPress theme too.

No matter what your blog topic is, Socrates will work and helps build your traffic more quickly.

Socrates is the last theme you’ll ever need. It’s easy to change the background and header and make it look like a blog that is professional designed.

As you wait for your blog traffic to grow to the point where ad revenue will be profitable, you might want to consider adding a few affiliate products to your blog.

You can make a quick $25 here and there by promoting an ebook or other affiliate product.

There are several affiliate networks to choose from:

Commission Junction, LinkShare, AdBrite, Chikita, Google Affiliate Network, Kontera, ClickBank, and Amazon.

In time, you’ll find that marketers will approach you to ask you to consider promoting their product as an affiliate. Sometimes these products will be a perfect fit for your blog.

You can place ads for these in the sidebar of your blog.

I also recommend including links to products in your blog posts in a way that is natural.

For example, if you are writing about a book you just read, include an Amazon link that has your Amazon affiliate ID in it so you can earn a commission on any sales.

Socrates WordPress theme makes it easy to add affiliate products to your blog.

It has many other features to quickly optimize your blog for niche marketing.

The great thing about affiliate revenue is that you won’t have any of the hassle of customer service, product creation, etc. You just put up the ad and collect your commissions.

Be sure to pick products that relate closely to your blog topic so that you don’t put off your readers.

Socrates theme will blend your affiliate products seamlessly into your blog.

Socrates is one of the most flexible WordPress themes out there and has 6 different color schemes and everything you need for SEO.

After my last email a reader asked, “How much traffic do I need before I start making $50-100 per day with ads on my blog?”

That’s an excellent question.

It depends on your niche, of course, but generally speaking you will need more than 1000 page views a day before you will make $50-100 per day through ad revenue.

The best way to get that many page views is to write a lot of blog posts.

Take a look at your current traffic. Let’s say you have 1000 page views per month right now with 25 blog posts.

You’ll need 30 times more page views than that to get to 1000 views per day.

Does that mean you’ll need 30 times more posts than you do now? That would mean more than 600 posts!

I know that sounds overwhelming.

If you write one post a day, you’ll be there in two years.

There are 4 ways to shorten this time frame.

1. Look at your most popular posts and write others that are similar to that.
2. Try to get the attention of a prominent blogger. If a high profile blogger links to your blog, the flood of traffic will be enormous, as will the increased page views and number of subscribers.
3. Hold a contest on your blog. If the prize is substantial enough, and you promote the contest well enough, you’ll get many more subscribers and page views.
4. Increase your number of subscribers by creating a subscribe page on your blog that explains how people can sign up for your RSS feed via feed reader or email. Regularly remind your readers to subscribe. The more subscribers you have, the more they will make return visits to your blog and increase your page views.

All of this will be much easier if you use the Socrates Theme:

Give it a try for 60 days. If you don’t like, it you’ll get your money back.

Let me know how it goes as you work your way toward getting $50-100 (and more) per day with your blog.

This topic is known to turn people quake with fear.

Ad writing? Isn’t that for pros who get paid big bucks to create clever ideas?

Nonsense. This is not about fancy splays in Better Homes and Garden Magazine.

We’re talking more about short ads—roughly 10 words or less if you use Google adwords. Ads are an effective way to bring traffic to your site—so I strongly encourage it.

You don’t want to rely exclusively on ads to promote your blog, mind you. You’ll get better results promoting yourself in a variety of ways.

As far as exposure goes, however, ads are a critical part of any online marketing campaign. There’s a lot of information out there, especially at the Google adwords site, for researching appropriate keywords. So I won’t go into that part of it.

Let’s say you have your keywords and are ready to roll.

Now what?

Say you’re blogging about fly fishing.

Find out what search terms people use to find information on fly fishing.

If they’re looking for “fly fishing tips” “ethical fly fishing,” or “best fly fishing locales,” you should run ads that speak to those keywords. For example, you might run an ad with a headline that says “Fly Fishing
Dos and Don’ts.”

In the ad itself, you can include Tip 1: ethical fishing practices.

As you can see, it’s not so much about clever as it is about knowing what people are looking for.

Of course, when you attract people to your blog with well-targeted ads, you want an attractive, professional looking site.

So how do you go about doing that?

One of my favorite things about Socrates Word Press Theme is that it comes with a lifetime of free upgrades. Whenever they add some new feature—which they do regularly—you are privy to it.

That includes new background designs and custom style options. Plus training videos on all aspects of blogging and Internet marketing.