Category: Blogging for Dollars
Need web hosting?
If you're starting a web site, then you're going to need web hosting. HostGator has an awesome deal going right now that basically gives you the first month free. Here's what to do:
1. Go to the HostGator website.
2. Order the "Baby Croc" shared web hosting package. It MUST be the Baby Croc.
3. At checkout, use coupon code HGCOUPONBLOG and you'll get the first month for a penny, but they won't actually charge it until month 2.
The truth of the matter is that, if all you're looking to do is make an extra couple hundred bucks per month on the Internet, it's NOT hard. On more than one occasion, I have spent about 90 minutes in front of a computer with friends, showing them by having them doing. By the end of that 90 minutes, they can have the basic shell of an online business set up.
So, what is the basic plan? Seriously, here's all you really have to do, and how to do it using nothing but FREE tools:
1). Create a Google account in order to get access to all their tools. If you have Gmail, then you already have a Google account.
2). Use the Google External Keyword Tool to find high average CPC Adwords keywords (do a Google search for the tool to find it - it's self-explanatory to use).
3). Create a Blogger blog (part of Google also), using several of the most commonly searched for, high average CPC (cost per click) keywords discovered in step 2 as your title and in your description and first post.
4). Edit your blog's template layout and ad Adsense blocks to the sidebar, header, footer, or between posts. During this process, you will create an Adsense account, which takes 2-3 business days to have it approved.
5). Also to your blog layout, add a Feedburner signup button. Feedburner is also a Google service, and provides a free way of building an email notification list. You MUST have an email list of some sort if you want long term profitability out of your new web site.
6). Create an account on EzineArticles.com (ok, NOT a Google service, but still free) and write an article about your topic, using some of the keyword phrases from step 2, and providing good info, and then create an author resource box that contains a keyword-specific link back to your new blog.
7). Rule 1: Update your blog daily with relevent, informative, up to date, keyword rich posts. This will help you start showing up in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) when people search for your keywords.
8). Rule 2: All blog posts are also articles that you should submit on ezinearticles.com. This will help build traffic.
If you're blogging about something that you really enjoy and that has sufficient search traffic, you will get to the $200/mo level in Google Adsense revenue in just a few months. Is it overnight? NO. That's why you'd better pick something you're passionate about, because you're going to get sick of it pretty quick otherwise.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to making money blogging. It's meant to give you the overview. For a complete guide to doing this, you can snag a copy of my online guide to making money as a blogger by going to:
Signing up there will give you access to the Blog Dollars guide, plus tons of other resources I have up for working from home.
To your success,
Jassen Bowman
This is a follow up to my previous post concerning keyword research and niche selection. In that post, I discussed how to do keyword research and find market opportunities on the Internet. It is well known that once you have selected a niche, built a web site, optimized it for the search engines, and added some content, that you cannot just sit back and relax. The importance of keeping live, fresh, and up to date content on your site on an ongoing basis is talked about ad nauseum in various Internet marketing circles. I wanted to provide a real life case study about this situation.
As of this writing, I own the #7 spot on Google for the keyword phrase "rachael flatt". Rachael Flatt is the reigning U.S. ladies national silver medalist and reigning World Junior Champion in the sport of figure skating. Until this morning, I didn't even that I owned that coveted #7 spot because, quite frankly, I had never checked. Several weeks ago I put up a very, very basic fan site for her after meeting her in person at a figure skating competition. Her silver medal performance at the 2008 U.S. Nationals was a significant inspiration for me finally getting off my duff and starting to skate myself.
So, what made me check? Apparently, her agent did a Google search to see what was out there about her, and found my bare-bones fan site. She then contacted me about the possibility of creating a more expansive site to help promote Rachael in the figure skating sphere.
This led me to one of the very initial steps involved with any sort of online enterprise: keyword research. When it comes to Internet marketing, keyword research is a major component of several tasks that go by different names, such as "market research", "niche selection", and "search engine optimization." Keyword research is a very important aspect of each of these business building tasks, and is often the first place to start whenever a new idea emerges.
Why would I want to do keyword research for a FAN site? Quite honestly, it has to do with niche selection. There is an entire universe of athletes out there, and converting a basic fan site into a full blown project requires the knowledge ahead of time about whether that athlete has enough search traffic to warrant the effort. In addition, it's wise to know what other keywords relevant to the project need to be targeted for optimization.
Where does one start with keyword research? Personally, I use a very methodical approach, which has evolved over time as tools and technologies change. Here's my current keyword research checklist, verbatim out of my own playbook:
This is more of a poll than anything else right now...consider it an idea I'm kicking around. I'd like to get some measure of how many people would be not only interested in having me help them set up their own Internet profit stream, but would also be willing to commit to doing their part for no less than three months to make it happen.
What I'm envisioning is something like this:
In my quest to bring my own costs down and also find "new" things to share with with my readers and "earn extra money" list subscribers, I recently revisited the wonderful world of finding free web traffic.
There are some great free things you can do out there, and many of them that I've been learning about myself lately center around the concept of blog promotion. While I've converted most of my own web sites to blog publishing platforms of one type or another, I've never really gotten into the learning about RSS feeds, content promotion through blog rings, pinging, and that sort of thing. Now that I've started to implement it, I'm really fascinated by the possibilities, and have added some blog feed based marketing methods to my list of things to always do. Speaking of which, if you don't have a marketing playbook or checklist of things you do regularly, then I encourage you to adopt one.
Content is, and always has been, the king the any media source. This includes television, newspaper, magazine, radio, Internet, and any other medium. The only reason that people tune in to a medium is for the content. With that in mind, you'll notice that most of my basic, free marketing methods in my playbook revolve around providing content, and using that content to build my lists (the money is in the list!).
Without further ado, here is my marketing matrix of free methods:
1. Ads on free classified ads sites, such as Backpages, Craigslist, and Kijiji.
2. Posting articles on article directory sites, such as EzineArticles.
(a) Corrolary: All articles are blog posts, and most blog posts are articles!
3. Creating educational YouTube videos and putting URL in the video and link in the description text.
4. Posting content to industry hubs and networking sites. For example, ActiveRain is a very popular blogging and online networking community for real estate brokers, in much the same way that Facebook is for college students. Networking with other people expands your sphere, also.
5. Discussion board participation. Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or "groups" on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
6. Comment on related blogs, leaving a link behind.
7. Automatically submit your content to aggregators. The easiest way to do this is to burn your feed to FeedBurner and enable the feature to distribute your feed to blog aggregators.
8. Place links in your blog posts to allow readers to submit them to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Fark, and other such "best of blogging" sites.
And last, but definitely MOST important, the number one web traffic generator of all time...
9. Build your list! Get people to subscribe to your email list or blog feed to receive announcements of blog updates, product promotions, tips, tricks, secrets, and anything else your readers might want to know about.
I recently became a huge fan of Feedburner.com, a Google product. It allows you to automate several functions listed above, as well as BUILD A LIST for FREE! You can add a "Get email updates" subscription form on your blog and they will be automatically notified whenever you put up a new post. While lacking the significant power of a sequential autoresponder, it's a great way to build a list without subscribing to a service. Feedburner will even let you export your subscriber list in Excel format, so you can take it with you if you move beyond it's capabilities.
These 9 free marketing methods should get you thousands of unique visitors per month to your site, which is sufficient to generate a small but significant Adsense or affiliate revenue stream.
To your success,
Jassen Bowman
I'm a huge fan of Google. With nothing but Google tools, you can quickly set up an entire online business of your own. What's presented here is intended to be a multiple use miniature business plan. Also, this is nothing new, it's been discussed on this blog in detail before and in excruciating detail on the Make Money Blogging job guide elsewhere on this web site.
How much money can somebody make using this EXACT strategy? To be honest, I don't have an answer yet. Using this strategy and my own 9-step Internet marketing plan using free methods, I've created several test blogs to see how much money I can actually make with them. One of them is the Yoga & Pilates Lifestyle blog that I set up last Friday as a demonstration when my friend Sasha asked me to show her how to set something like this up.
In the near future, I'm going to make a video demonstrating exactly how to go about doing all this, starting with nothing but a web browser and an Internet connection. It won't be tonight, but I'll post it in the next week or two for you to watch.
In the meantime, here is my written list of steps to follow:
- Define your niche. This needs to be something that you're genuinely interested in, since you'll be reading, writing, and otherwise dealing with it a LOT. Plus, this will be a hobby for a while until it starts to make money.
- Do some research to make sure that your niche is narrow enough to be a true niche, but broad enough to have a good sized market.
- Create a Google account. This is the launching point for all tools Google.
- From your Google services page, create a Blogger blog. You'll need to pick a template, layout, color scheme, and all that jazz.
- On the "Customize" page of Blogger, click on "Add A Page Element" and select an AdSense unit.
- You will be walked through the process of creating your Google AdSense account.
- Pick your ad options and put up ads. You can have up to 3 AdSense blocks on a page - see my sample yoga site above for suggested positioning.
- Sign up for a Feedburner.com account. Activate the features that feeds your blog content to other sites, and also enable the feature that allows people to subscribe to email updates.
- Using the Blogger template editor, add the email subscription form as an element to your blog. See my sample yoga blog for suggested positioning.
- Write articles for your blog. Cross post these articles to article directory sites to attract visitors.
- If relevant and permitted for your site's category, post ads on Craigslist, Backpage, and Kijiji to advertise your new site.
- Comment on related blogs, leaving a link back to your site.
- Become an active participant in discussion boards, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc., relevant to your blog, leaving links back to your site where permitted and appropriate.
- Create YouTube videos relevant to your blog. Embed the video on your blog as content, and put a link the YouTube description field back to your site. YouTube is free, and also owned by Google!
- Repeat steps 10 through 14 to maintain and grow your site.
There you have it. A fairly simple business plan that takes less than 2 hours to get up and running.
NOTE: Please check with Google, Blogger, YouTube, FeedBurner, etc., for help on using their individual components and features. They each have well documented, user friendly help pages to show you how to do all the things I've mentioned, you just have to look them up and use them.
To your success,
Jassen Bowman
Working from in an Internet business is the ultimate way for everyday people to achieve their dreams of leisure time and financial freedom. We live in a truly exciting moment in history where nearly anyone with determination and good sense can make money online.
Sadly, many people never realize this because they associate Internet business with the kinds of companies they saw during the first 'Internet boom': big companies with generous investors, lots of fancy technology, and heavy advertising campaigns.
This vision of what it means to own an Internet business is far from the truth for most people, however. It is easier than ever now to go into business online, and I'd like to share with you the top three easiest ways of doing so.
Method #1: Affiliate Business
An affiliate marketing business is the easiest type of Internet business to start. As an affiliate, you promote other people's products and earn money (in the form of 'commissions') when you generate a sale.
The reason this type of business is so easy is that you don't have to own or create the products yourself. You can find products to promote in just about every market niche out there, too, so you aren't limited in terms of what you promote or how much you can earn.
Method #2: Digital Product Business
A digital product business is the second easiest type of business to start. In this type of business, you create your own products in the form e-books, software or other types of content that can be downloaded directly onto the customer's hard drive after the sale.
This type of business is good if you are prolific at generating product ideas, enjoy the 'status' of authoring your own products and don't mind handling customer service requests.
Method #3: Auction Business
An auction business is the third easiest online business model. You can sell both digital and physical products at sites like Ebay, Yahoo! Auctions, Ubid, Amazon, and others.
The drawback with this type of business is that much more work is involved, trust me. You've got to manage multiple auctions per day to make real money, and then you also have to handle product packaging, shipping, inventory, customer service, refunds, etc.
If any of these methods interest you, I recommend reading up on each of them in the appropriate work sections here on the site for more information. They are all very legitimate, income-producing techniques, and one of them is sure to be the right one for you!
Take care!
~Jassen Bowman~
Why Internet Businesses Are Simple
Anyone looking for a simple work from home opportunity should consider starting their own Internet-based home business. Don't believe it? Think the Internet is too complicated? Keep reading and you just might change your mind!
Why Internet Businesses Are Simple:
1.Low overhead/low start up costs.
It doesn't cost a lot to start an Internet business, nor does it cost much more to maintain one. You can get set up for under $200 in most cases. Also, as with any business, you can use the principle of leverage for growth by investing your profits.
2. Plenty of market opportunity.
Almost every conceivable market has a home online these days. You can reach potential customers all across the world, any time of the day or night.
Plus, there is a range of options when it comes to what you sell and how you sell it. You can sell physical goods to people, or you can sell 'digital' products that customers download to their hard drives.
You don't have to own these products, either. Instead, you can earn money promoting other people's products via affiliate programs for the most hands-free type of business possible.
3. Ability to automate most business functions.
The Internet allows you to automate just about everything, including: lead generation, payment processing, product delivery, follow ups and more. This means more time for you to spend doing the things you really enjoy, as your business (once properly set up) will virtually run itself and make the sales for you.
4. Proven money-making methods already in place.
Tactics such as affiliate marketing represent proven money-making methods that rely on the fundamentals of real marketing. There's no question about what works, how it works or why it works. Once you understand how to target profitable markets and get your offer in front of those markets, you practically have a license to print money.
The only way an Internet-based home business could be any simpler is if you could just pay someone to do all the work for you, then send you the checks. But, seriously, I think that doing it yourself really is half the fun.
To your success,
Jassen Bowman
In my quest to bring my own costs down and also find "new" things to share with with my readers, I recently revisited the wonderful world of finding free web traffic.
There are some great free things you can do out there, and many of them that I've been learning about myself lately center around the concept of blog promotion. While I've converted most of my own web sites to blog publishing platforms of one type or another, I've never really gotten into the learning about RSS feeds, content promotion through blog rings, pinging, and that sort of thing. Now that I've started to implement it, I'm really fascinated by the possibilities, and have added some blog feed based marketing methods to my list of things to always do. Speaking of which, if you don't have a marketing playbook or checklist of things you do regularly, then I encourage you to adopt one.
Content is, and always has been, the king the any media source. This includes television, newspaper, magazine, radio, Internet, and any other medium. The only reason that people tune in to a medium is for the content. With that in mind, you'll notice that most of my basic, free marketing methods in my playbook revolve around providing content, and using that content to build my lists (the money is in the list!).
Without further ado, here is my marketing matrix of free methods:
1. Ads on free classified ads sites, such as Backpages, Craigslist, and Kijiji.
2. Posting articles on article directory sites, such as EzineArticles.
(a) Corrolary: All articles are blog posts, and most blog posts are articles!
3. Creating educational YouTube videos and putting URL in the video and link in the description text.
4. Posting content to industry hubs and networking sites. For example, ActiveRain is a very popular blogging and online networking community for real estate brokers, in much the same way that Facebook is for college students. Networking with other people expands your sphere, also.
5. Discussion board participation. Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or "groups" on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
6. Comment on related blogs, leaving a link behind.
7. Automatically submit your content to aggregators. The easiest way to do this is to burn your feed to FeedBurner and enable the feature to distribute your feed to blog aggregators.
8. Place links in your blog posts to allow readers to submit them to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Fark, and other such "best of blogging" sites.
And last, but definitely MOST important, the number one web traffic generator of all time...
9. Build your list! Get people to subscribe to your email list or blog feed to receive announcements of blog updates, product promotions, tips, tricks, secrets, and anything else your readers might want to know about.
I recently became a huge fan of Feedburner.com, a Google product. It allows you to automate several functions listed above, as well as BUILD A LIST for FREE! You can add a "Get email updates" subscription form on your blog and they will be automatically notified whenever you put up a new post. While lacking the significant power of a sequential autoresponder, it's a great way to build a list without subscribing to a service. Feedburner will even let you export your subscriber list in Excel format, so you can take it with you if you move beyond it's capabilities.
These 9 free marketing methods should get you thousands of unique visitors per month to your site, which is sufficient to generate a small but significant Adsense or affiliate revenue stream.
To your success,
Jassen Bowman
The Difference That $8 A Day Makes
My goal with the whole HowToEarnHQ.com project is to show people
how to make a few extra hundred dollars per month. I'm not promising
people that they'll make ten bazillion dollars in 30 days with no
work - it doesn't work like that.
Since I don't charge anything for access to the job lists, work
tips, etc., I often get asked why I do it. One is to share what I
know, since so many other sites that claim to do this type of thing
either suck or charge too much money. I love teaching, I love
writing, and I love helping other people, so I get to do all that.
Of course, I'd be lying if I said I didn't make any money from doing
this. You know all those Google ads you see on the site? Well, I
make a tiny, tiny amount of money (we're talking nickels and dimes,
literally) anytime somebody clicks on one of those ads.
Big deal, right? Well, actually, yes, because it adds up! Those
nickels and dimes add up to about $8 per day, on average. That's not
steady, sometimes it's double that, sometimes I go days without
anything at all, period. But, it averages out to $8 a day. That
all comes from the folks, just like yourself, that read these emails
and go check the job board for updates, read the blog, etc.
OK, so 8 bucks a day. No biggie. Nothing special. Right??? WRONG!
Think about it. Eight measly dollars a day equals $240 a month.
That's over $2,800 a year!
So, what does $8 a day REALLY get you? Well, let's think about some examples. For some of you, $240 a month might make the difference between paying your rent and having to live in your car. For some people, $240 means the difference affording their life-saving prescription medications or not. Now for other people, $8 a day pays for the latte and bagel that they just don't want to give up every morning. $240 a month is a fairly decent car payment. $2,800 a year can buy a vacation just about anywhere in North America for a small family.
So why am I telling you all this? I promise that it's not to brag or anything like that. It's simply to illustrate how you can take something you like to do, and do it, but also monetize it by contributing something to the world. Seriously, this web site started as a hobby, and it's a decent percentage of my monthly income.
Action Plan
Here's what I want you to do:
1. Make a list of your favorite hobbies, interests, etc. Your list can include ANYTHING.
For example, here's my honest to goodness interest list from my Facebook profile:
Humans, extraterrestrials, areology (planetary geology of Mars), geocaching, Australia, Israel, wonderment, real estate, change, hiking, driving, alternate realities.
2. Take your list and start thinking about which of those things you would most enjoy writing about.
For the sake of this example, I'm going to pick Australia, since I've recently become fascinated with everything to do with the country, since I'm planning on visiting there this summer.
3. Go set yourself up, either on your own web site with your own domain name, or visit Blogger.com (a free Google blogging service) and create a blog for yourself to write in.
Following my example, check out http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com for a GREAT example of somebody that took there passion and created a great web site about the Australian outback. This is NOT my site, but read through it and notice what they did - it's a good ol' travel site, but with Google Adsense ads!
4. Create a Google Adsense account, and then just start writing! The great thing about doing this on a Blogger.com blog is that your entries automatically get indexed by Google.
5. Learn how to do other things to intentionally drive traffic to your web site, and start gathering in those clicks and get paid YOUR nickels and dimes!
Now, this is by no means meant to be a comprehensive guide to creating what is often called an "Adsense site." This is just a basic example of how to turn an interest or a hobby into a small side income.
Take care!
-Jassen
Most Important Factor In SEO
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) for a web site, many people think that items like your keyword density and whatnot are the most important factors that determine your rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
However, this simply is not true. The absolutely most important factor in determining your search engine ranking is having numerous links to your site from other, high quality sites, and where the link text to your site is the keyword phrase you’re targeting.
You can buy software programs or subscribe to web site services that assist in automating the process of link building, or you can do it manually by querying the webmasters of sites that are relevent to your industry or product/service category. Either way, you need to make sure that the link back to your site is anchored by the keyword phrase you are trying to optimize for.
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