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Softly, softly, catchy monkey
It seems everywhere you turn nowadays, there’s always some self-proclaimed guru offering advice and “free” information on making money online. It can be difficult to decipher who to believe. There will be people claiming they earn thousands of dollars each month from internet marketing through various affiliate programs and AdSense campaigns.
But, if they are telling the truth then these guys you can be sure have worked damn hard to get where they are and it doesn’t come easy. Avoid getting swept up in ridiculous promises of making thousands in your first months. As unless you happen to stumble on a niche that nobody is doing, and turns out to draw thousands upon thousands of visitors on a daily basis realistically it’s going to take a while before you start seeing a decent return on your investment. But, the great thing about niche blogging, is the initial investment is relatively small.
Factor in costs for domains, web hosting and maybe some other small start up costs and you’re really looking at below $100 to start your own business. Which I’m sure you’ll agree isn’t bad these days.
First thing you have to do is decide upon your first niche campaign. This is where a lot of people will spend hours and hours over and perhaps over analyze. Your first niche should be something that you know a little about so you can create unique content. It should focus on what people, your customers have a pressing need for. The niche shouldn’t be too competitive so look at Adwords for getting a picture on the search volumes, between 1,000 and 5,000 for your first one and not to many web pages out there with the keyword. For an idea on search volumes, and CPC, look at Google Adwords Keyword tool. But, also check out this cool free tool for 30 days.
Google Cash Detective
If you do a Google search to see how many results come up. If it’s millions, I wouldn’t bother. The niche can be as unusual and bizarre as you so wish, but as long as you think people are desperate to buy products related to your niche you are writing about. I would avoid competitive niche areas such as poker sites, cruises, cars and holidays. Far too competitive and saturated. This next bit is very important. Want you want to focus is on buying key terms, and the longer the better. An example would be Sony Ericsson W380i phone as oppose to Sony phone. Someone who types the latter is just an information gather, and is more likely not to buy. I would usually go for a three word term rather than a one or two word key term. Look at the Cost per Click stats, to give you an idea on what the advertisers are currently paying per click.
Once you’ve decided upon a niche, the next stage is content and lots of it. Resource sites such as Wikipedia can help you if you’re completely stuck. But ideally you want to create your own original unique content. If writing isn’t your forte, then there’s plenty of freelancers out there that can help. Don’t be afraid of outsourcing work, as this business can be full of time consuming activities such as tweaking HTML coding and if you’re not confident in doing it, always get someone who is.
So the content’s done, and your blog is looking good. As far as platforms go for blogs, I’d recommend WordPress and buying web hosting and domains. Yes, Blogger is free but if you run too many blogs with AdSense, Google is soon going to catch on to what you’re doing and close your accounts. And if you didn’t have them backed up. It’s back to square one.
The next stage is to get traffic flocking to the site and this is done through web promotion or SEO. Again if you don’t know a thing about this then get a freelancer or company to do it for you. Typical SEO activities nowadays include link building (quality is always better than quantity, get related themed links if possible), meta tags, alt images, sitemaps, crosslinks, social bookmarking sites, article submissions, blog comments on blogs that allow Google to follow links, press releases and so on. Usually this is best done after your site has built up a bit of maturity of say at least 2-3 months.
After the majority of SEO work has been done, although it is an ongoing process, then it’s up to you to decide on which affiliate programs you’re going to sign up with. There’s so many out there to choose from. Have a look at what other blog sites are using and ask for the owner’s advice. Major ones include Clickbank, Netpartner, MyWorld and many more. So go and do some hunting and start making money from the comfort of your own home!
