Secrets to Making a Six Figure Income from Blogging

One of my all time favorite bloggers on the Internet today is Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger. Darren, from Australia, has many blogs with various topics and had begun making 6 figures while doing it. Now, I am sure a lot of you know who Darren is, but for those who don’t, should spend some time reading his material. He is honest and at the same time inspiring. You soon learn it’s possible to make money from writing blogs, but like anything, it takes time and dedication… and lot’s of hard work.

Darren is also one of the founders of the largest blog networks on the Internet today… b5media.

Well, Darren a while back, unleashed his secrets onto the average blogger in a book called ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income… Co-Authored by Chris Garrett.

For those of you out there who are looking to monetize your blog may want to swing by Amazon and pick this up… Right now in paperback you can pick it up for only $16 or so.

Review
“Both authors are successful and profitable probloggers and here they reveal at last some of their secrets.” (The Bookseller, Friday 14th March 2008) “You’ll learn about the essential steps involved…if you think blogging could be the business opportunity for you - buy it!” BusinessOpportunitiesAndldeas.co.uk Monday 19 May 2008 “You’ll learn about the essential steps involved…if you think blogging could be the business opportunity for you - buy it!”BusinessOpportunitiesAndldeas Monday 19 May 2008

Product Description
Problogger.net is where bloggers worldwide go for advice and information on enhancing their blogs presence. Whether youre just starting out or have been blogging for years, these two professional bloggers show you how to turn your passion for blogging into extra revenue. This practical guide to creating and marketing a blog with the potential for generating a six-figure income shows you how to choose subject matter that works for you, handle technical issues, and evaluate your blogs success so that you can use your blog to generate income indirectly.

Blueprint for Starting a New Blog

If you surf the Internet long and hard you will find many articles with tips on how to start a new blog. Successful bloggers always provide tips because they know it is not an easy thing to do to maintain a well organized and insightful blog. Of course it takes commitment and a lot of drive, but if you begin reading all the tips out there it can become very overwhelming.

Sometimes it’s better to sit back and keep things a bit simple and follow some of the basic formulas in order to move in the right direction.

A new Adventure Network I have been in contact with and is actually in partnership with Skinny Moose Media, wrote a nice article on their main blog called, “What is Important When Starting a New Blog?” The article focuses on a few major facets to blogging that is extremely important in the early stages of a blog’s development.

The article breaks these down into 4 stages:

1) Have A Plan
2) Reach Out
3) Tip Off
4) Social Networking

Read the full article here >>

Taking Advantage of Black Friday

Yes, Black Friday has come and gone, but it will be back again next year. The neat thing about Black Friday is that most shoppers rush out to the stores, trample people, while racing for those deals. It isn’t until the days following where shoppers look for the deals online. So how can you benefit from this and take advantage of shoppers during the Holiday Season?

Put yourself in the shopper’s shoes. Pretend you are a shopper online and envision yourself having to seek out gifts. Some questions you need to ask yourself are:

a) What are the new and hot products?
b) Can these products actually be purchased online?
c) What do you know about these products?
d) Can you offer advice on any of these hot new products?
e) Is the Internet already saturated with content about these hot new products?
f) Is the product related to your blog’s niche?

Once you ask yourself these questions you probably can narrow it down a bit better if it is worth writing about an item or not. ipods are a cool topic, or the new iphone, but more than likely the Internet is saturated with information on this. Finding products to talk about can take a lot of research. So what can you do?

Look around at other blog’s in your niche. What types of products are they discussing? If you have run a parenting blog for the last 2 years and have been all over the Internet reading other parenting blogs then you probably have a good idea what types of products have been talked about and what the new hot items are for this year.

Write a review about it. Maybe go out and actually buy the product and test it out. Write about it. Tell people how it functions. Did it live up to your expectations? If not… why?

Link to other reviews. Maybe you don’t have all kinds of money to blow on the product or you have your doubts about. Do a roundup and link to what others are saying about it. Put 80% of the links to blogs in your niche. Then try breaking out a bit and see if other blogs outside of your niche have blogged about it. Link to them. Pingbacks may drive traffic back to your article.

Make sure in your articles you are using nice keyword rich text. Link often and liberally to sources. You never know… you may get on the first page of Google for those searching online for information about the hot new item…

Comment on other blogs talking about the same product and make sure to link your name to either your blog or that specific blog post. Remember, people search the Internet heavily by topic. If you can stick with the same crowd and get some links coming and going you will see a rise in traffic naturally, as long as the topic remains of interest.

Now what if you wrote about a product and more traffic comes your way? How do you jump on this opportunity? Maybe one example would be to post a link at the end of that article inviting readers to subscribe to your feed via email. Feedburner offers a great service that will deliver your posts via email to those who choose to sign up for this feature. As a matter of fact, if you want to subscribe to my feed via email you can do so right here at this link.

What other things can you do? You can provide links at the end of your article leading them deeper into your blog with other related articles. Maybe you blogged about that product on many occasions. At the end of the article tell your readers if they enjoyed this post why not try reading a few of these… and leave a list of about 3 or 4 other articles that may interest them.

Another option would be to provide a link to any referral type programs. The downside of this is you are providing a link which will lead people away from your blog. On a good note, some of these referral programs can earn you a bit of cash. It’s really your choice. If you can find the right program which is closely related to the topic being discussed in the article then it should only benefit you since you are sending targeted traffic to a program potentially making you money. Any random program is a bit risky and you could probably benefit by keeping the reader at your blog longer.

Any other ideas? How can you benefit from added traffic on a blog article that is attracting people? Don’t forget to open those comments up and get conversation going. Readers will be back to see if anyone replied. This can boost traffic momentarily. The key is to get these new readers to come back and stick around.

Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank

Most of you who have been blogging for a while or who have been online for some time now, understand that Google ranks each website. It is more of a rating 1 through 10. I believe that no site out there on the Internet has been ranked 10. Naturally, the higher your rank the chances of you being higher in the search engine is greater.

Alexa is similar to Google and they provide each website out there on the Internet a rank. How it works, though, is a bit different. Alexa ranks the top site with a 1, which is actually Yahoo. CNN Money ranks number 2. So the lower the number the better you are. There are ways to get a lower (better) ranking with Alexa. If you rank 235,000 then you know that there are 234,999 other websites out there that rank better than you. Now since there are millions of websites on the Internet, getting as low as 200,000 is extremely good. Alexa’s ranking is based on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

So how do you rank lower and better with Alexa?

*The most basic step is to Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage.

*Try puttnig up an Alexa rank widget on your website.

*Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar, like friends, fellow webmasters, and your readers.

*Write or Blog about Alexa. Others enjoy reading about ways to increase their Alexa ranking and, in turn, will hopefully like to your article sending you targeted traffic. Hopefully they will have the toolbar already installed. This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.

*Get one of your articles submitted to Digg or Stumble Upon when you can. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer volume will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.

*Use Pay-per-Click Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in traffic. It will be more useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters, who are more apt to be using the Alexa toolbar.

*Optimize your popular posts. If you have a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines, include a widget at the bottom of the post and then link to your Alexa post.

Earn Money With InfoLinks

InfoLinks is an In-Text advertising program we are currently testing out on the Skinny Moose Media blog network. How InfoLinks works is once you are approved you can place one line of code in the footer.php file of your site just before the < /body > tag. Everything from there on out is automated. Certain Advertisers can purchase keywords on your site. Those links, in turn, will be hyperlinked to those advertisers. If you hover over the link a little window pops open displaying information about the destination.

It looks something like this:

As you can see in this particular case the link is green in the first line of text. Once you hover over it you can see a little box pop-up and show you a little information regarding the destination of that link. How you get paid is when people actually click on those links. I have heard some really good things about this program and I have heard some bad things. When it comes to your readers it is a judgment call. Depending on your audience will probably be the biggest indicator as to whether or not it is worth it.

There are people that despise this sort of thing, as they feel it is misleading. Others tend to brush by it and if it interests them then fine, if not then they move on. When trying InfoLinks, it is best to be honest and publish an article letting people know this program exists on your site.

As far as making money, I can say with my experience it earns much better than Google Adsense. From just testing out the program over the last few days it looks to be bringing in 3 to 4 times more in revenue than Google Adsense.

So if you are interested in giving this a whirl on your blog, website, forum, etc then head on over to InfoLinks.com, sign up for their Publishers program, and then you should be contacted within a day or so if approved. As long as you aren’t promoting pornography or illegal material you should be fine. I would be interested to know how much in revenue you are making in comparison to Adsense. Let me know.

Also what do you guys think of this program from a reader’s perspective? Do you think it is deceiving? In another month or so I will probably do another post making a final assessment on what I think of the program, the potential to earn revenue from it, and some pros and cons all around. So stick around. More to come on InfoLinks.

It’s the Economy Stupid

Do you think I could have gone a week with a new blog and not discuss the current economic situation? Of course not. It’s one of the things I follow, as I believe the economy truly effects all of us, rich, middle class, or poor. Of course this society has turned into the government helping the middle class bail out the rich. Is this not a good way to put strain on the middle class?

But most importantly how is the economy effecting our lifestyles? Are sportsmen hunting and fishing less?

Maybe we should be giving ammo out as Christmas gifts this year:

More videos here >>

So are you buying more guns and ammo? What kind are you buying? What is your motive? Is it in fear of never getting a chance again to walk into a store, grab the ammo you need, pick up a shotgun and walk out? Is the motive that you feel guns and ammo will be taxed to death?

Also have you changed any hunting, fishing, or outdoor plans in the last 6 months, or any upcoming events because of the state of the economy? I would be interested to know. What thing I do know that has surprised all of us is the price of gas has been cut in half. I have been hearing possibly $40/barrel oil soon.

Those who follow the economy and enjoy the outdoors should check out Mike’s site at Treestand Investor.

REI Outlet: 50% Off

One of the things about this blog I want to do is make sure I can point people in the direction of any deals I see at certain stores or mention any new products out there that you may find interesting. There is always a deal running somewhere. And where it is just prior to the Holidays we are looking at some good buys. Currently there is a deal at REI where you can get 50% Off on Hiking, Camping, Climbing, and Ski Gear.

I was just over and browsing the Outlet and saw where there is also free shipping. So check them out. You may not need to go out shopping for Christmas. Stay in, order a present at REI, and do some blogging…

Next Page »