How To Start A Blogging Business
I want to make this guide as simple and as easy to follow as possible. If you are wanting to know how to start your own business based on blogging then I can most certainly help. There are a million routes to success with blogging, so you don’t have to follow a precise path, but you do have to follow certain rules which will be revealed later.
What is blogging?
Blogging is just the same as having a personal diary stuffed in your bedroom – you write things in it for safe keeping, except people all over the world have the chance to see your blog, so it’s a good way to share ideas, articles and thoughts.
Blogs represent you and your innermost thoughts so they can be as personal as you’d like them to be.
How do I start a blogging business?
Well in a nutshell you write about products and services, with the view to making money out of them.
Millions of people every day of the year log on to the internet search for things to buy.
Your job is to be that website that they click on to in order to get the sale. they are going to buy anyway, so why not from you?
Where and how do I start?
(Quick note: Starting any business is likely to incur some costs up front, but if done right you can soon recoup those costs. Blogging is no different, if done correctly – don’t be swayed by offers of totally free hosting – the pitfalls are numerous – many people have lost entire blogs when hosting has gone down, so buyer aware is the advice I can offer to you!)
Ok, let me help by explaining all to you. First of all you need a blog to write in right? Just like you need a diary that you have to go to the store and purchase you need somewhere to write electronically.
There are many places you can start, some are free, some are paid. Personally I’d say keep it free. However I strongly suggest you get your own paid hosting to host the blog. Hostgator is my first choice. Their customer service is outstanding and you can get started hosting multiple blogs all in for one price of just $7 a month which for a business expense is incredible.
Then you need to decide which blog to use – in other words, what kind of diary to use.
You want one that Google can easily find, and likes a lot, and is likely to put high into the search engine results page(SERPS). The one I recommend the most, and in fact the only one I use, is called Wordpress. It’s got a technical name called a CMS(content management solution), but suffice to say Wordpress is one of the best, and its free, and it can be installed on your hosting easily by clicking a few buttons!
Once you get your hosting, go into your control panel, look for a button called Fantastico, then choose a Wordpres installation. I wont go into it in detail here (but ask me if you ned help).
How do I make money?
Well, you are going to need products to sell, or recommend aren’t you. They can be your own products or you can recommend other peoples products and make a commision for each one you sell. This is called Affiliate marketing – whereby you are an affiliate for other peoples products.
You can also build websites/blogs that have nothing but content on them, ie words, phrases, thoughts, product reviews etc, and then ahve advertsiing appear on your blog. Google offer advertising called Adsense which places adverts on your blog, and those adverts will be relevant to the content on your site.
How do I actually make money in my blogging business then?
Well, you can have a nice loking site with 10,000 pages of content, but if those pages arent anywhere to be seen, then nobody is looking at them and you wont make money.
To do this you have to try and find the people who are interested in your topics and try to get them to come to your site.
How do you actually DO this though? Well, think about it – where do people go when they want to know something? They open up their internet and type into Google or Yahoo or Bing etc, what they want to know.
When they hit the enter or return button, a load of websites show up – these are called the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
If your blog was to show up on those results pages then there is a chance that some of those people will click through and look at your site – hey presto your first visitor!
Your job is to find what phrases people are typing into the search engines.
Imagine if you realise or discover that 1000 people every day earch for a phrase, and they type in “Pink Fluffy Slippers For Sale”
If your blog was called Pink Fluffy Slippers then your blogs content is HIGHLY RELEVANT to what the searcher is looking for.
The search engines like to show HIGHLY RELEVANT CONTENT to the searcher. If they can master this then they keep their searchers using them – basic business sense.
If Google shows information on Blue shiny shoes each time people want to buy pink fluffy slippers there is a strong chance people will get annoyed and fed up and go to another search engine. So it is important top Google(etc) that they only show relevant content in the SERPS.
What are the steps involved to grow a business in blogging?
Find the phrases people enter into the search engines. Googles external keyword tool will help – go to it, enter a general phrase relating to your topic and it will list the phrases people type in, along with how many times a month that phrase is being searched for. You will also get an idea for how many competing websites also want to get onto page 1 for the same phrase – so look for phrases which high search volume and low comeptition. This can take some time to learn but you can learn more about it by joining me at Wordpress Goldmine – a membership based forum Ive been at since October 2009. It is one of the friendliest places I have ever been lucky enough to come across.
Once youve discovered a suitable phrase, write a article about that phrase, at least 300-500 words long, and then make sure you include the phrase in the topic about 2 or 3 times, no more. Then create a hyperlink. Link that bit of text that is the phrase and link it to your product you want to sell.
Rinse and repeat, and eventually your page should start to show up in the SERPS for when people type that phrase in.
If you are excited and want to get started, I can wholly recommend you do one mroe thing right now in your life before you embark on the journey.
Join me at Wordpress Goldmine – right now you can try it out for just $1. Why am I pushing this?
Because, for me it has been the ONE THING the ONLY thing that has helped. It’s the only place where I ahve elarned the ins and outs of starting my own blogging business.
Join me today and I’ll see you in there – I am in there almost 7 days a week talking and answering questions.
Stay on the right path and I promise you’ll not regret it.
Thanks,
Shaun
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Filed under Random Thoughts by on Jun 9th, 2010. Comment. 
Last night I watched an episode of How the other half live.
It’s a show where some rich family sponsors a poor family who deserve breaks in life. It’s just another way to be charitable but with a more direct approach.
Last night featured David Abingdon was the rich man, along with his family. He sponsored a woman called Cal and her 8 year old daughter Iris.
Cal has been a traveller all her life, never having a permanent address until her daughter was born. She wanted to do all she could so she went and did a masters degree in law which she passed, but because of her background she found it impossible to do her “pupillage” with an already established barrister. This is essentially a 1 year understudy before she could do it for herself.
Anyway, that was that program.
I was inspired by the kindness and generosity of David Abingdon and family that I looked him up online and saw he has written a book, which I have now gone and ordered:
out of the box marketing david abingdon
If ever there is a book you should buy this one would be in, in my opinion anyway.
David Abingdon grew up in a terraced home in Birmingham, uk and made his career helping businesses become “mega” successful.
He actually helped 3 businesses go from zero to incredible multi million success storiesd within just 12 months.
One time is a fluke, 2 is lucky, but three is a real success.
David talks a lot about the tall poppy syndrome. Something I am personally familiar with. It’s when people try to cut you down through resentment because you are aiming for your dreams. Its actually listed in wikipedia.. so its a real concept.
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Filed under Random Thoughts by on Apr 9th, 2010. Comment.
It’s kind of a logical thought process that we all end up going through at one point or another.
What would you “personally” prefer to handle yourself, 50 websites or 5000 websites?
When you’ve got 50 websites you can tend to one or 2 almost every day. Add a new post to them and create a couple of new backlinks.
When you’ve got 5000 websites it’s impossible to do by yourself. It can be done with help from outsourcers, and when you’ve got a very solid infrastructure you can make as much money as you wish. The concept would be scaleable and all you need to do is ramp things up. Simple.
However for a very large number of people they may not even be able to think that far ahead.
So, maybe 50 websites suddenly becomes more appealing.
However if you’re only hitting 30 cents a day per site this isn’t quite so exciting – $15 a day…
I’m going to ask you one simple question and the answer needs to be understood as a two part answer..
PART 1: Is your domain in the top 3 in Google (or at least on page 1)?
PART 2: How many “indexed” backlinks point to your site?
If you have a group of sites, say 5 sites, and all you get is 30 cents a day from all five then you can either create hundreds of new sites or think differently.
Positions 1,2 and 3 get a significant boost in traffic levels via the search engines so you need to be there.
You also need to work out how many backlinks you’ll need to get there, and how many maintenance backlinks to create to keep you there.
That, my dearest friends, is the answer.
More backlinks(articles) gives more direct traffic and moves your site higher in the organic search engine results.
So.. do both…
Spend a full week, 40 hours creating backlinks and backlinks to just one site… create backlinks to inner pages as much as the main domain.
Each site can yield as much as £1 a day just in adsense ($1.52).
This could get you to $70 a day, or $490 a week… passive income within 1 year.
50 weeks.. one a week = $76 a day.
2 years you could hit 100 sites, still managing them yourself, and pulling in $152 a day.
Imagine now if you paid someone part time to take over then maintenance of article writing and backlink creation for $70 a day.
You are now getting a “hands free” utterly passive, ever-growing income.
Yes you may be giving away 50% of the money but you are gaining most of your personal time freedom back…. and still getting paid… for “nothing”… ahem…
In 5 years time, if you do the ame thing over this could mean an income of $350 a day for YOU… passively… witha team of people growing your websites for you.
So…
would you rather go to a job for 5 years or grow your websites for 5 years and go to the beach?
I do think 5000 websites is better than 50… but I also think you have to get to 50 yourself… first.
Learn it.. immerse yourself in it, go for it.
Don’t forget that this is just based on adsense. You can make a lot more if you sell products (liek on Amazon or clickbank) and boost those numbers by a factor of 3, 5 and 10 or more.
If you want to do the same as me, join wordpress goldmine on a $1 trial – and send me a PM (my id is: shaunbaird).
I’ll happily answer any questions you’ve got, although the forum itself is far too good at doing this…
Thanks
Shaun
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Filed under Random Thoughts by on Apr 7th, 2010. 1 Comment.
Benefits Of Wordpress
Here are some primary benefits I advocate people to consider when choosing which site builder to opt for.
I prefer to use Wordpress as my primary source of creating websites.
- Wordpress is quick, easy to use, easy to set up and the search engines love what it does.
- This makes it an extremely viable option in my opinion.
- Wordpress sets up from a standing start to fully complete in about 2 or 3 minutes. How many other site builders can claim that?
- Wordpress allows me to have comments on my content – this turns the content into conversations, and Google lives conversations.
- Wordpress is open source so I can have any or all of the sites fully edited as I see fit.
- Wordpress is used by thousands and thousands of people every single day. This means that if there are any bugs that crop up, they are normally picked up and dealt with quite often.
- Wordpress means you can work at home online and make an extra income.
The thing is, Wordpress ticks so many boxes it’s hard for me to see why anyone would not choose Wordpress to build websites with.
Ive been using a self hosted version of Wordpress now for 6 months and am making lots of new micro sites – each one generates me more money every single day. How’s that for loving Wordpress!
If you want more traffic and need a better place in Google then choose wordpress goldmine to get you there. It’s working for me.
Ciaou!
Shaun
If you’ve not yet used Wordpress then maybe it’s about time you got into it as a viable source to drive more traffic to your own websites.
I use wordpress goldmine myself.
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Filed under Random Thoughts by on Mar 16th, 2010. Comment.
