It's 2010 and you'll have to have been living under a rock to avoid discovering about the concept of blogging for a living. And perhaps it is because you are considering blogging as a possible source of income that you are reading this. I have been blogging for a few years now and am sharing some of the things that have helped along the way. When all is said and done, what you get out of your blog depends on what you put into it. Loads of people get excited and jump in to blogging but few succeed at it

Before you get started

Niche. . Who is your market? It really is important to determine this before getting your domain name or hosting. Does the niche you selected have a need you can fill? It determines what your content is going to be and helps direct how you speak to your audience in your posts. Also if you know the market then it is easy to identify the breaches in the market and fill them


 
Work Schedule.  You need a schedule to work to. Treat your blog like a business. Have a set number of hours everyday that you work on your blog and stick to it. Obviously your schedule will vary if you do this part time from if you are going to be a full time blogger.  I would suggest dividing your time into three. One part for generating content, one part for your own education and the last part for generating traffic to your blog


Commit to a posting frequency. There is no doubt in my mind that the more frequently you post high quality content on your blog, the better it does in the search engines and visitor allegiance is improved. I would suggest posting at least three times a week to start with and once you have your audience you can slow this down. Having said that only post as frequently as you have useful information to share.

SEO from The Start
Search engine optimization should start before you put the first word down. Good SEO means a ton of search engine targeted traffic to your blog. It's the difference between looking for traffic to your blog and having the traffic come looking for your content It should be reflected in your choice of domain name, the titles of your posts, the categories you use to archive your posts etc. It could actually determine the blogging platform you decide to use. Wordpress we all know has a fair amount of search engine optimization enhancing plug ins. Having said that though, the best SEO you can do on your pages is in the choice of words you use

Become The Go to Guy In Your Niche
As a newbie blogger, you do not need to be that guy in your niche i.e. the guy ith all the answers.  As long as you are enthusiastic about learning about that niche and aim to become an expert in the niche. We have all seen those hurriedly thrown together blog posts that just do not make any effort to make a connection with you the reader. You know the blogs we never go back to. And we also all know the blog posts that excite us when we are reading them. The ones that you read them and you feel energized and motivated. This is the style of writing you want to aspire to and choosing a niche you are excited about is a big step towards achieving this


Jump Right in

Perpetual Newbie. You really want to go through the planning stage of your new blogging career very quickly and then jump right in. You have to keep in mind that no blogger started off with all the knowledge in his or her head. We all learned as we went along. And the best way to learn is by doing. So get that blog up and running.  Do your niche selection and determine which blogging platform you want to use but get stuck in. The risk of being a perpetual newbie is you never get anything done. 

SEO Is Crucial. Good SEO must be the start point of each and every post you write on your blog. Select the keywords you want the post to rank for. Different posts should be optimized for a different set of keywords so that your posts cover a larger section of your niche in the search engines. Include your keyword or keyword phrase in your post title and early in the content of your article. Keep this concept in mind when you are generating backlinks to your blog. You want to use anchor text backlinks that contain the keyword you are optimizing that particular post for. Also aim to write about 350 to 500 words per post. To rank well in the search engines the spiders prefer to find a lot of words on your pages. The content must be original. I would advice not to use PLR articles or other content that can be found elsewhere on the internet. Write your own posts or outsource your content creation but make sure that your content is original

Social Networking. Your reputation is only as big as your network so you need to get busy building a network of friends in the blogging world and in your niche. Mybloglog and technorati are good places to start networking with other bloggers. Blogcatalog is another decent option Facebook and linkedin are social networking sites that are popular with internet marketers. They have a wide variety of groups and you could find one or two in your niche. See what other bloggers are doing, learn from them and their mistakes.

Blogging Platform. The two most popular platforms are Blogger and Wordpress. A lot of internet marketer and professional blogger swear by wordpress. It's great because of the versatility it provides.  Blogger does not have the advantage of a whole host of plug ins but it does well in the search engines and the learning curve is not neck breakingly steep. The question may also arise as to whether to purchase your own hositng account or to use the free blogging platforms. As a professional blogger the aim is to host your own blogs. However as a beginner you could opt to use the free blogging platform and then migrate it to your own server once you have started making money from the blog. The one major disadvantage of this though is the loss of your backlinks you would have generated to the free hosted blog. Also a domain name and hosting service are not prohibitively expensive so for a few dollars, it certailnly is worth starting with your own hosting account

Getting Traffic

Search Engine Optimization. This has been mentioned before but highlights how important SEO is to getting traffic to your blog in the long term. Each post must be optimized on an individual basis

Keynote articles. These are articles that comprehensivey and exhaustively cover a particular subject in your niche. They are so thorough that they become the reference articles on that particular subject. Every once in a while, find out what people in your niche are most concerned about, what is giving them particular difficulty and write a pillar article on that. This article will act as a magnet for visitors to your site and could help establish your reputation as an expert in the field

Blog carnivals. Blog carnivals are a very effective method of getting the word out about your blog. A blog carnival is a blogpost on someone elses blog that collects the most relevant articles on a particular subject. When published, the carnival post has a short intoduction to what the carnival is about then has snippets of blog posts that have been accepted on the carnival. There is then a link under each snippet to the blog where the original post is i.e your blog  If your post gets accepted in someones carnival it's a good thing both for SEO and direct traffic

Article marketing. No article on traffic generation os complete without at least a mention of article marketing. Article marketing involves writing high quality articles and submitting these articles to article directories online. If the article is accepted, there is a bio box or about the author space where you can put an anchor text link to your blog Do not use the same content on your blog for your article marketing campaigns

Guest blogging. A little like article marketing because you are generating articles and submitting them to other peoples' sites. Instead of submitting your article to an article directory, you submit it to someone else's blog. You must make sure that the blogs you submit to attract visitors that are targetted to your niche, commands a lot of traffic and have a decent reputation

Social Bookmarking And Blog Directories. Most of them are no follow so the backlink is not worth much from the SEO perspective but it does tell other people that your blog is out there. Social bookmarking sites need a little work to build a reputation. The earlier you start building a reputation or a network at the social bookmarking sites the better it will be for your bookmarks when you eventually start bookmarking your blog posts


Back to school

Apart form learning as much as you possibly can about your niche, you must also keep up to date with what's going on in the world of blogging. People come across novel methods of getting traffic to blogs every so often. There are new software being developed, new rules regarding sharing of information and a myriad of things.Staing abreast of these developments can be daunting. A great way to get information is to join forums in your niche, forums about blogging and internet marketing forums There is a wealth of information shared in the forums on a daily basis. For tips on internet marketing, the warrior forum has a lot of marketers sharing tips and ideas. Whatever you do, keep learning and keep implementing what you learn

Monetization
So you now have a blog with a few high quality posts that are getting a decent amount of traffic to it. The question is how do you make money from your blog.

Google Adsense. Requires you to register with Google adsense and acceptance to the program is not automatic. adsense is an ad serving program that allows you the blog owner to make money by displaying ggogle adsense ads on your posts.  Google gives you a code to place on your blog. This code leads to the display of adverts relevant to your blogs content on your pages. You get a small amount of money each time someone clicks on an adsense ad on your pages. With a large number of visitors per day and a large number of clicks, the earnings soon add up Adsense is quite popular with blog owners and webmasters because it is easy to use

Affiliate Marketing. One of the leading methods of making money online and a really cool business model As an affiliate marketer you promote other peoples products and get paid a commission if a desires action is achieved. This could be a sale or a sign up. In affiliate marketing, you do not have any physical contact with the product so no storage or shipping required on your partYou role is simple to send buyers to the merchants site through a special affiliate link unique to you

Promote your Business. It may well be that you have a business that you are trying to promote. Or perhaps a product that you wish to sell. The reach of your blog increases the audience to which you can market your business or product to Your blog could be your internet portal to get the word out about your business or product

These are just a few of an infinite methods of making money from your blog.

So that was a crash course on getting started with blogging.