The basic steps:

Step 1 – Start a blog! 

If you want to make money blogging, you’ll first need your own website! You can purchase your own domain name, which is definitely recommended. On your own domain you have total freedom to do what you choose, plus your website will get favored by the search engines and ultimately rank better.

If you aren’t ready to commit to your own domain, you can start a website on any free source. My recommendation? A free siterubix website is definitely the way to go – it’s fully WordPress functional and you’ll be able to transfer the content to your own domain at the click of a button.

You can make a siterubix site SUPER easy – with just a few clicks!

Step 2 – Blog regularly, and blog for a purpose

The trick to monetizing any blog is to direct it at a target audience - a niche market. You want to appeal to a certain group of people that have a reason to want to read your blog – think about popular blogs on the internet, what are they about? They probably mostly have one thing in common – they aren’t a personal blog.

Think about all the blogs out there – cooking blogs, dessert blogs, weight loss blogs, healthy living blogs, electronic blogs, gaming blogs – the list is endless! The narrower your focus the easier time you’ll have targeting an audience.

Once your blog is up and running and you have some content created – don’t stop there! You need to regularly write and publish content to keep your readers interested!

Step 3 – Get traffic to your site

Another reason posting regularly is going to greatly benefit you is because it’ll give you more chances to obtain traffic to your website.

So, how do you gain traffic from blogging? If you know the power of keywords, you’ll be able to drive a very successful web campaign. Keywords are very powerful, and if you use the right keyword tools you’ll have the secret to LOTS of traffic.

Another way to gain traffic to your blog is through social media – make sure you share your content socially on networks such as Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

Step 4 – Monetize your audience

You can have all the traffic in the world coming to your blog, but you won’t make a dime if you aren’t monetizing your audience!

The way a lot of bloggers do this is through programs like Google Adsense, (or similar ad networks), or selling ad space on their website.

Personally, however, I’d recommend affiliate marketing. It’s the simplest and most lucrative way to monetize the traffic coming in.However, some blogs are harder to monetize with affiliate marketing and may benefit more from things like adsense or selling adspace.

It’s important to figure out before you start how you’re going to monetize your traffic.

Step 5 – Whatever route you choose, treat it like a business

Just because it doesn’t seem like a real job doesn’t mean it isn’t – the fact is if you want to make money you’re going to have to be serious about it. Come up with a business plan, set goals, work consistently and be professional. Knowing what you aim to accomplish will help you focus on the task and be successful at making money with your blog!

Step 6 – Have support and help along the way

This is perhaps one of the most important steps along the way! Make sure you have people who support and help you every step of the way – it’s easy to get confused or stressed out when you’re trying to accomplish something on your own. Frustration is a huge reason people give up, so don’t let it be your reason!

Want to know the best place to access a community of people who will help you on your professional blogging journey?

Meet Wealthy Affiliate – an online training program for online marketers, as well as a thriving community of a range of professional marketers – anywhere from beginners to the most advanced in the industry. It’s an awesome place to get help and seek connections – and we all know how important connections are in the professional world!

You can join and get started with the training for 100% free, no credit card required. This is going to be the ultimate secret to your success for making money with your blog!

Click here to join for free!

Any questions or comments, please leave them down below and I’d be more than happy to help you out!

-Wendy

So, you’ve found some great keywords for your website. (If you don’t know how to find good keywords, I suggest you check out this training here). The question is, do you know how to add keywords to your website the correct way?

It’s really pretty simple, however there’s a lot of outdated/misinformation out there on how to do it. Read further as I reveal how to properly place keywords into your content in order to receive good search rankings!

Keyword density, meta tags…what?

You may have heard things like “keyword density”, “meta tags” or “hash tags” But do the search engines like Google really use such factors in determining what is relevant to the search? The truth is, no. Search engines want relevant content, they want the searcher to have the best experience possible and would like the chosen results to actually help them. Things like keyword density and meta tags used to be a determining factor in the ranking process, however they are no longer used as part of the formula in determining a good search result–therefore you need to net worry about them!

What you really need to do is relatively straightforward and there are only 3 steps. This is so simple it will blow your mind.

1. Include your keyword in the title of your page/post. For example, if your keyword is “how to stop smoking” you could make your title something like

• Learn how to stop smoking easily in 5 steps 
• How to stop smoking once and for all

You ideally want to make the title catchy and grab your reader’s attention. I’m sure you could think of something even more interesting but those are just off the top of my head.

2. Include your keyword in the first paragraph.

Have you been desperately seeking advice on how to stop smoking but nothing ever seems to work? Have you tried and tried and failed? Quit failing and kick the habit once and for all with this easy step by step guide.

3. Write the rest of your content naturally.

Don’t worry about how many times “how to stop smoking” appears within your content. Too many instances of a keyword is seen as “keyword stuffing” and that will not help your rankings at all.

If the phrase how to stop smoking enters the content again after the first paragraph that is okay as it flows smoothly. A good rule of thumb is to read the article back to yourself and if it sounds unnatural you probably have too many instances of your keyword.

Okay, 1, 2, 3 – you’re done! That is the correct way to add keywords to your content and really, that is all there is to it. 

What you want to aim for are LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing)

LSI keywords are simply words that are relevant to your keyword–like “cigarette” “smoke” “nicotine” or “quit”, for example would all be related and relevant to how to stop smoking. Using lots of these types of words will help the search engines better understand what your content is talking about. However, LSI isn’t something to really over-think or worry about, it’s really just something that will happen when you write naturally!

Keep writing content for maximum rankings potential

The thing about search engines like Google is, well, they’re not always going to rank you for the exact key phrase you want. They may examine your writing and decide it should be better ranked for different keywords, and give you better rankings for those ones instead. It also could just take a lot longer for your content to be picked up and ranked for the exact keyword you were hoping for.

However, don’t get discouraged–just keep writing. Write lots of articles and keep them coming. Some will rank easily, others will take some time, others will never rank for the exact phrase you were hoping for — but what I find is that they all end up ranking in some way or another. And as long as you keep writing content, you will keep ranking.

Watch this being put into action!

If you’re still not convinced this process will actually be enough to get you ranked within the search engines, check out this live case study here and see for yourself (plus while you’re there, feel free to sign up for a completely free account to get more awesome material like that).  If walks you through the process of researching a keyword for an article, writing the actual article around the keyword, and having it rank in Google within 20 minutes! No keyword stuffing or meta tags required!
Wendy
Owner, SurvivingAfterCollege.com