Blogging In Your Spare Time

This post is about an easy way to get started making money online that only requires time and a little writing skill. While it will take a little time to get your first paycheck, it requires no money at all. Here are the basics:

Getting Started:
You need to start a blog and you need to get visitors to your blog. You can use google’s blogger to set up a free blog. If you want to make money on a free blog, make sure your host will allow you to place ads on your site.

The foundation of starting a successful blog that is going to make you money is simple. You have to write about something that other people care about. You have to provide USEFUL, FREE content that is going to attract an audience. It should also be something that interests you or you probably won’t stick with it. My father just started a blog called, The Online Mechanic . He’s been in the auto repair industry for quite a while and with a little prompting has started his own blog posting auto repair info and answering visitors auto repair questions. He has already had a great response and he’s only been doing it for a short time. I mention his blog as an example of USEFUL FREE information.

Getting Traffic:
This is the next most important part of making money from any online business. You have to have visitors. Just starting a blog and posting to it isn’t going to get you many visitors. You have to let everyone know you’re out there. One of the best ways to do this is by visiting other blogs that are similar to yours and posting thoughful comments on them. Make sure that your comments have real and sincere meaning. Don’t just say stuff like “Hey, Great Blog.” That’s not going to get you anywhere. Personal experience or insight that will possibly add to the value of another bloggers post is the best type of comment that you can leave. It will get you noticed not only by the author of the blog, but also by all of the regular visitors to that blog.  You’ll also want to add links on your blog to the blogs the you comment on regularly. That way, you can personally find them each time and blog trackers such as technorati will let other bloggers know that you are linking to them. The outcome? The bloggers that you are interacting with will begin visiting your site to see what it’s all about. If they like what you blog about, then they will likely add a link to their blogroll to help their visitors find you. Now, there lots of other ways to get traffic to your blog, but the way I just described is the most cost effective(Free) and in the long run will generate loyal visitors to your blog without needing search engines.

Making Money:
Making money from this is simple if you have done the first two steps correctly. If your blog has valuable free content and lots of people coming to it then you have everything you need to start cashing in. The last step is to visit google.com and sign up for an adsense account. Google with then give you some code to install on you blog that will display ads that are related to the content on your site. When visitors click on the ads, you get paid. That’s all there is too it. You can ask me any questions that you have by posting a comment. Good Luck!

Linkbacks- How Important Are They? Part 1

In the world of online business, getting traffic to your site can make or break you. You may have the best product, but if noone ever sees it, you can’t sell it. There is a lot of information out there about how to drive steady traffic to your website. I’ve already mentioned pay-per-click advertising using Overture as one method. The problem with paid advertising is that it doesn’t guarantee you any sales. The other option is to use a service like Commission Junction. I’ll talk more about CJ later, but it basically a way to have other websites drive traffic to your site, while only paying the sites driving traffic your way when you actually make a sale off of one of their leads.

Let’s step aside from all of that for now and talk about getting free traffic from search engines. I’ll start out by explaining a little bit about how a search engine determines who gets to show up at the top when a user does a search. Search engines are constantly “Crawling” through sites on the internet. “Crawling” is just a techi term to describe how search engine software or robots search through sites on the internet collecting data about each site it searches through. As the search engine crawls a site, it records important information about the site in a massive database that houses information about all of the sites it has crawled. Each site in the database is then evaluated based on the collected information and then compared to the other sites in the database. This evaluation and comparison determines what site gets to show up first for any given word (often called a keyword) or groups of words that someone enters into the search engine.

Well, one of the most important factors in determining what site will show up first for a keyword is how many other sites link to a particular site. The search engines essentially treat these incoming links as a vote for the site.

Now, here is where things can get a little more complicated. Not all incoming links are valued the same. To determine how valuable an incoming link is, search engines evaluate the site that the link is coming from. The search engine will determine how many sites are linking to that site. The search engines will also evaluate all of the sites that are linking to it to determine how valuable the links are. All of these links are traced back as far as the search engines are capable of tracing them in order to determine how valuable the links are that point to any given site. 

There are some other very important factors that search engines use to determine what site shows up first, but I’ll discuss them further in another post. Suffice it to say for now, that if you want your site to show up at the top of the search engines and thus capitalize on all of the free traffic that they provide, you have got to get other websites to link to your site. Before you run out and start trying to get links to your online business website, you’ll want to read Part 2. There are some important steps that you will want to take in order to get the very most out of the links to your site.

Get Immediate Traffic To Your Site

If you have set up your ecommerce site selling your own products or products that will be drop shipped and you are anxious to get your products out in front of  a targeted audience, you can try one of the pay per click advertiser networks out there. The largest and  farthest reaching program for small home internet businesses is provided by Google. When I launch a new website or product, I like to get immediate results to see what the consumer response is to the product I’m offering and the price I’m selling it for. Google adwords is a great way to find a happy medium for pricing a product. You can advertise your products for one price to start with and then adjust it to see if it sells better at the adjusted price. If it sells well at the price I’ve started it at, I can increase the price to the point that sales slow. This helps me know exactly how much I can make on each product. It does cost good money to do this, but in the long term, my internet based business makes up every penny in sales plus a lot more.

The reason that I suggest you use this method of advertising your home business products as  a starting point is because it can get expensive to use Google Adwords long term. You really have to be an expert Google Adwords marketer in order to use their advertising program as a permanent way to market your internet business. Take a look at my Google Adwords page on my free videos website for a text explanation and visual demo of how this program works