I get emails like this every other day - now, I have replied to most of them, but having received three of them on the same topic and being the complete lazy ass that I am, I figured out why not write up a post on this and let everyone learn something they already know useful.

This will pertain to the make money online niche, as that’s the one I’m most familar with; but the tips in here will help with most (blogs).

Choosing a domain name

If you don’t have a domain name, you don’t have a site. Yeah, you could use a subdomain at WordPress (which doesn’t allow affiliate links or advertising or Blogspot, but a) those are pretty long and b) those are extremely unprofessional. For your personal blog, you must get a .COM - if the one you’re thinking of isn’t available, think of another one. .COM is the core domain - one that everyone goes to first, and it would be a lot, lot better if you had it.

You can get a domain at GoDaddy - a .COM there only costs $7.15 if you use the coupon code OYH3 (which is my personal favourite).

Getting Some Hosting

Y’all know who I recommend; anyways, it’s the same people I use - HostICan. I’ve been with them for a while now and they are always responsive to questions and requests for help - their Tera Host package is well worth the money, and if you use the coupon code University-12 you’ll get $40.00 off. You can also try HostGator - I’ve heard a lot of mixed opinions about them from various forums but considering they offer their first month at $0.01 (with the coupon code jury) you don’t have much to lose.

The Actual Blog

I will recommend WordPress until I’m blue in the face; it’s simply the easiest and most professional content management system out there for anyone looking to create their own blog. You can download WordPress at www.wordpress.org - if you get hosting with Fantastico (see HostICan above ) then you can have a one-click install and don’t have to deal with databases and similar crap.

Wordpress also have a range of themes that you can tweak to suit your needs - Adii’s WP-Polaroid is a great one, while you can also buy the sexy Milk It theme from John Cow if you’re willing to spend. Let’s not forget that most of you are cheap bastards though, so you can find some pretty sexy free themes on this page (sponsored by yours truly) or ones specifically created for Adsense by Dosh Dosh.

You can eventually fork out for your own custom one - for the beginning, if you’re not happy with the ones above just do a simple Google search for WordPress Themes and browse to your pleasure - there are thousands of them.

Now, you can start out with just a theme - I recommend a few plugins that you can use to ’soup up’ your blog.

All in One SEO Pack - you know how often you hear that SEO and meta tags and all that is one of the most important things for a website? Well, this plugin helps with that and it’s pretty easy to use - no dealing with code whatsoever.

Dofollow - people are more likely to comment on a fresh blog if it has the dofollow plugin enabled - everyone is greedy for link juice to their sites. This will only be useful if you have a blog with PageRank.

Google XML Sitemaps - another thing to help your site - this plugin will get you indexed in the search engines within a day or two. The quicker you get indexed, the quicker you’ll start receiving search engine traffic.

Subscribe Remind - this plugin places a small line of text at the bottom of each of your posts reminding people to subscribe to your blog. Eventually it will get so annoying that people will give in.

Top Commentators Widget - i personally use this instead of a blogroll. Rather than a one off link exchange, the top commentator widget makes sure that only people that contribute to your site get links in your sidebar. Links are dofollow (I think!) which is an added bonus.

Permalinks - this isn’t a plugin, but it must be done for a blog; it’ll give you search engine friendly URLs and look a lot cleaner and professional. To enable permalinks, go to Options ==> Permalinks and enter /%postname%/ under Custom Structure. It’s a lot better to do this at the beginning, rather than wait a bit and suffer for it.

Content

The point of a blog is not just original content, but your original content. If you’re going to just report news or rehashed crap that’s been discussed thousands of times without adding your opinion into the mix - don’t start one, an autoblog will save you time and money. People read blogs to see what the person writing them has to say - without personality, and better yet uniqueness you are going to crash and burn. For a better, more elaborate post on this topic read the one by William Montanaro.

Another thing to do would be to keep most of your content relevant to your niche - no one is going to want to read about break dancing when you’re running a make money online blog. If you aren’t relevant at least 60 - 80% of the time, people are going to go somewhere else.

There is nothing wrong with discussing the ideas of others, or even common topics - how many blog posts have you seen on Adsense, PageRank or *cough* starting new forums *cough* ? I’m not saying you shouldn’t discuss those topics, but make sure you’re adding your own viewpoint - no matter what it is. With the actual blog posting itself - make sure it’s consistent. Whether it’s once a day or once a week, make sure you follow that pattern - go a while without posting (and without warning your readers that you won’t be) can kill a blog. If you can’t do so yourself, ask someone to fill in - there are plenty out there that would do a guest post and steal your valuable traffic.

Monetization

Google Adsense - I would never use Adsense on a personal blog because I think it looks tacky as hell - a lot of people do use it though and considering it is probably the biggest ad network around it has to get a mention. If you want to use Adsense on a WordPress blog, download the Adsense Deluxe plugin and you’ll find it pretty easy to put in.

Private Ad sales - You will be able to sell ad space when you become established - you can start out offering it cheap for the beginning. I personally have raised mine to a pretty high level - yes, none of them have sold but that’s not the point . Private ad sales bring it a lot of income for some of the bigger bloggers out there - the 125 x 125 ad is a common seen one in the sidebar of most larger blogs.

Text Link Ad Network - TLA works pretty well for me - their affiliate program pays out a decent $25.00 per free referral and considering you can make some decent money just by showing their ads on your site, it’s not bad at all. They can get a little bit confusing when you’re looking at how to set them up - read this guide on what to do.

Scratchback - I came across this one a few days ago and recently asked them to create a customized widget for TUK - they do them for free while in BETA ($50 normal price) so if you want to join, get in their quick. Scratchback allows people to ‘tip’ you - something that is a lot better than the standard ‘Donate’ button as they will get a link on your site as well. The only bad thing about them is that they don’t have an affiliate program .

Buy Me A Beer - this is Wordpress plugin just for donations - there are Buy Me a Milk, Toast, Coffee etc as well. It allows people to donate if they like your work - don’t expect to make a living off them though .

Affiliate Products - If you have any products that you feel your readers will like, feel free to push them if they have an affiliate program. Make sure that they will benefit your readers just as much as they will benefit you though - I push HostICan and TLA because I personally use them and I know that they’re good. Pushing over-hyped crap may get you some sales in the short term, but will not do well in the long run.

Your Own Products - If you have a product of your own, why not sell it (or have a link to buy it) on your site? This can be pretty successful, especially if your readers like you.

Promotion

 

You can have all the above - quality content, well placed ads and a killer domain on a hosting package that won’t crash, but if you don’t promote your blog, it is worthless. I do not blog ‘for fun’ (although it definitely is so) - I blog because I hope to offer some advice to my readers and eventually make some (decent) money off it. Without traffic, there’s no way you can do that - so how do you get visitors?

Forums - you don’t know just how much traffic forums can send you - Digital Point is my largest referrer with around 1,500 visits - were I not a member, I would never have received those (and would probably be a couple dollars short, but I’ll talk about that later ). If you post informative stuff, forums can be a gold mine - remember, they allow you to display links in your signature (which show up as backlinks to your website) as well as in your Recent Blog Feed - post up informative titles and you will get visitors.

Stumble Upon / Digg - they are going to shit, considering the traffic bots, exchanges and all that but while they’re barely living you can still extract some traffic out of them. Getting a story on the front page of Digg guarantees at least 10,000 visitors to your site (and probably a server crash too) while Stumble Upon can send 100 - 200 uniques a day if you work them right. There are plenty of social bookmarking sites around - use them when you’re just starting up.

MyBlogLog - this is what I use; it shows the recent visitors to your blog. Have a decent looking avatar and people will click through to see what it is - if you visit 100 sites daily (while you’re doing the EC card dropping - see below) you will have your avatar show up on 100 sites. You can also join communities and spam promote your site by leaving messages on the ‘walls’ of other bloggers.

Entrecard - yes, it is junk traffic but any traffic counts at the beginning (or so I’ve heard) and thus you can use Entrecard to gain a few visitors to your site. Most of them will not stay and only come to drop their card, but make sure you put it below the fold and have a killer header and a few of them just might stick around long enough to read a post and better yet comment on it.

Guest Posting - John Chow has 15,000 RSS readers. Problogger has 36,000. Send in a guest post to one of those or similarly trafficked blogs and even if 1% of their readers visit - you’re in business. You can of course also do swap guest posts with ’smaller’ blogs -they’ll generally be more willing. For a guest post, make sure you send in a quality one - no one is going to accept one that is written crap and even if they do, the only thing that will happen is that you’ll embarrass yourself in front of thousands. Guess that’s why yours truly hasn’t sent it a guest post to the bigger blogs yet

Buy Advertising - for a new blogger, this may not be financially viable but if you can get cheap advertising then go for it. With Entrecard you can get some decent advertising for free, of course

TrackBacks - Ever wonder why a load of bloggers do ‘Top Five Weekly Posts’ or ‘Best Blog Posts From The Blogosphere’ posts? It’s not because they actually want to give you something good to read - it’s so that they can get trackbacks on the most popular posts of a particular blog . I’m joking, but you’ll find that this works pretty well as an evil way to send you some traffic - link to popular posts with controversial anchor text and you will get visitors.

Commenting - most blogs have the top commenter widget nowadays, meaning that if you do enough you’ll get on it; even just leaving interesting comments can send you traffic, especially if they’re on half decent blogs.

Social Networking Sites - I don’t mean SU/Digg. If you have a Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut or similar crap account, you can link to your blog from there - it might send you some traffic (and definitely will if you’re masquerading as a hot girl ).

That’s all for now. It’s long enough! If you like this post, feel free to Stumble It, and I’ll probably add it to Digg later. Hopefully it’ll become fairly popular, so link to it and gain yourself a trackback…

By the way, the stumbles I mentioned yesterday are in the process of going through and will go out within the next 6-8 hours. Thanks for the hard work you put in to participate in the contest

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