5 Things to Think About When Blogging to the Bank

There are multiple ways of making money online. One cheap effective way is to make use of blogs. Even if most people know what a blog is nowadays, the general view is that they are only used as a fun "diary" to share people's opinions. If someone makes money it's a schoolgirl that happened to have luck writing about a popular topic.

For those who know the full potential of this money making medium also know that it?s not just setting up a blog and watch the money flow into your bank account. Yes, it takes a bit of luck as well as a lot of work and effort in order to be successful but if you are consistent, determined and work for a long term strategy, you will be rewarded.

For people that haven't a clue about blogs and blogging, a free blogging service like blogger.com is advised to start up with and learn the ropes. However, if you are serious about blogging, you should look at registering your own domain and get a hosting account for your blog as soon as possible.

I will hereby grant you 5 secret steps to build a money making blog. You need a good mix of research, setup, optimization, monetization and traffic driving in order to make your blog successful.

1. Researching your Niche - First you need to find a Niche to blog about. A good tip is to check out popular magazines in Amazon, popular products in Ebay and most viewed/published articles in Ezinearticles. Don't go to general but pick a subniche that has at least 10-500 searches a day in Wordtracker and under 10.000 competing pages in google. While doing Niche research also check Clickbank and Commision Junction for good niche specific products to promote as an affiliate.

2. Setup - Create a domain name with the main keyword included to maximize SEO efforts. For the niche golf swings you might choose improvemygolfswings.com. Setup Wordpress as it?s the most recommended blogging platform and optimize your blog with plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack, Feedburner, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet, Google Analytics and Auto Social.

3. Finding Blog content - Pick out 2-3 main keyword phrases from the research phase to start optimizing your blog for. Search these phrases for content in Ezinearticles, technorati, PRwebs, forums, magazines and books. It's also a good idea to setup Google Alerts in order to receive daily keyword specific articles. Strive to make daily quality posts by rewriting the content in your own style or just adding your comments under the article. Don't just copy other peoples work. Make sure you include keyword phrases in the post title, body and header tags, but don't overdo it. It's more important that it's readable to the user.

4. Monetization - Join and search both Clickbank and Commission Junction to find suitable products to promote. You could also find affiliate merchants by searching Google for [main keyword] + affiliates (or affiliate program). Sprinkle affiliate links in your posts and put some banners in the sidebar. Just don't make it look like a big advertisement blog that will scare away the users. 1-2 products to start with are enough.

5. Traffic Generation - Start submitting articles to Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Isnare.com and other article directories. If you want more exposure, consider using an article submission service. Submit your RSS feed to RSS services such as Feedsubmitter.com, Feedagg.com, Feedage.com and Feedfury.com. Make a bookmark of each post in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Propeller. Socialmarker is a resource that automatically posts to all these sites with a click on the mouse. For more backlinks comment on other people's blogs and create article pages on free webservices like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and Blogger.

To reap the rewards you need to work with the above traffic generating tactics daily, at least for the first months. Be consistent and strive to post helpful quality content that the readers find interesting.

If your blog doesn?t perform as well after doing all of the above tactics for a month or two, you could turn down the effort and some Adsense on it instead. Repeat the process on a new blog. All blogs does not become successful and some take a long time to do, by having a couple of blogs out there you will spread your chance of hitting a gold mine.

You can learn more about blogging strategies in Rob Benwells latest e-book: Blogging to the Bank 3 and most of the techniques mentioned in this article can be automated or simplified by using the most powerful blogging tool in market called Firepow. If you are at least a little serious about blogging, it would be a sin not to take a look at what you can do with Andrew Hansen's Firepow.