Affiliate Tutorials
Making Money with Blogs
I have no doubt you've heard the buzz about blogs wafting around the mainstream media for the last few years - despite my loathing for buzzwords in the IT industry and Internet, the fact is that blogs are here to stay and they're a great source of search engine traffic. If you are unfamiliar with the term Blog - Wikipedia has it defined and it reads like stereo instructions.
So what's important?
All you really need to understand about the wide world of Blogs is that they're an easy way to put whats on your mind onto the web. Over the years certain search engines have shown favoritism to content (your writing) published to Blog websites – namely Google.
While there are differing theories about why this occurs, none of them really matter to us as long as it continues to occur we can continue to take advantage of this free traffic source for profit.
Simple Unrefutable Facts of life:
- Google likes blogs
- Google has a lot of traffic
- Blogs are easy to create
So how do we make money with these blog things? Well, for starters it's important to recognize that there are different types of money making blogs. Choosing your starting point really depends on your ability as a writer and how much time you've got on your hands.
Two roads diverged in a wood.... AND I TOOK BOTH.
"Splog" Blogs
Quantity not quality. The ten-thousand page blogs with junk content not specific to any one topic a.k.a. Splogs (a clever derivative of Spam + Blog). Quantity is the name of the game for a splog webmaster, the faster you can produce splog sites the more money you'll make. There are lots of helper applications out there to create splog sites using articles scraped from other websites rewritten to make them unique.
Mostly these splog sites end up being unreadable to an end user - which doesn't really matter since the purpose of a splog site is to drive the traffic to another site that can monetize the visitor. The goal is getting many thousands of pages indexed (included in search results) by search engines in hopes that the sheer volume of crap tossed at the wall some will stick.
The average lifespan of these splogs can be as short as two weeks or as long as a few months before they are either removed from search engine listings or pushed so far down in the results that they receive no traffic.
The positive thing about splogs is the speed at which you can start to get traffic. Since you don't put much thought into churning these type of sites out you can create 50 in the time it takes to create one quality blog. Rather than waiting for that single blog site to begin receiving visitors, you've got 100 sites slowly receiving visitors.
"Blog" Blogs
Quality not quantity. The more focused, regularly updated, hand(re)written blogs in which the author spends time focusing on quality control and not quantity.
These blogs usually don't reach into the hundred pages-per-blog spectrum let alone the thousands, but the pages that are there are well written using cognitive thought. The point of these sites are to drive as many visitors to your one or two quality written blog pages to gain readership (notoriety), bookmarks (people returning), and natural link-backs from others who reference your articles and posts in their own writings due to their extensive quality.
The average lifespan of these quality Blogs is indefinite, but usually ends when you get sick of writing.
The positive thing about quality Blogs is that they're – well – quality. You will gain readership, bookmarks, and positive natural link-backs from other sites which means what you build today more than likely won't be removed by Google tomorrow. While not as fast as the devilish splog site at garnishing visitors, once they do gain traffic it's slow to fade away.
So which to choose?
Both. No one ever says you can't have your cake and eat it too. Quoting a fellow high-volume Internet Marketer on his stance of choosing Blackhat (spammy) or Whitehat (quality); “The only color hat you should choose is green.”. While there are benefits and pitfalls of both types of sites, the best combination is a good mix of both.
Where to start
Always start by researching a niche to target. If you're unfamiliar with what niche marketing is, wikipedia has a great definition.
Most affiliates who fail at online marketing have one thing in common, they did little to no research on what they were about to promote!
I prefer to promote things in the Health & Fitness sector exclusively because it's one of the easiest to sell to and there are thousands of sub-sets to it. People are always interested in self improvement and the cross-promotion ability is really a great bonus, not to mention I run an herbal affiliate program.
Deciding how to promote a niche market isn't hard to do, in fact, just using Google you can determine whether or not there is enough demand for a product to merit your digital-labors. If no one is looking for purple-three-winged-widgets, good luck selling them. I suggest you read my tutorial on Niche Marketing if you haven't already. For time's sake, everything I write about is promoting my one primary niche of "weight loss", more specifically "hoodia diet pills".
My niche researching results...
I pick my niche to promote "Hoodia" and using the methods I mentioned in my "Niche Marketing" tutorial I prepare to choose a set of keyphrases to target within the target niche. Keywords and keyphrases are terms that people use to describe words or phrases that the Average Joe surfer would type in while looking for a product or website. For the hoodia sub-niche of weight-loss, we list 400 or so in our keyword tracker, making it easy to find a good set of related words.
What you're looking for are keyphrases with a decent amount searches monthly, but not incredibly over-saturated with competition. In this case I found some 3-4 word phrases such as "free hoodia diet pill" that have very little competition in Google but have some monthly searches. Seems like a good place to start, but we can expand on it a little more.
As I mentioned in my Niche Marketing guide, an easy way to enter into a competitive marketplace is by targeting mis-spellings of popular search terms. People type in search terms incorrectly all the time either by accident - or by phonetically spelling out the words as they sound. This is prime untouched real-estate for Sploggers and Bloggers like yourself.
Luckily, we have a typo-generator tool built in to the site to help you generate a larger list of keywords to target, I suggest you make use of it to expand your list of keywords for whichever keyphrases you decide to choose.
Splog Setup
Personally, I prefer to setup the Splog network of sites first just to get them pumping in some hits while I develop the main focal point of their links – the quality blogs. Depending on your personal feelings towards nearly useless web pages, you might want to skip this setup and only focus on your quality Blogs. To each his own but keep this in consideration; There are roughly 14 billion pages indexed, not all of them can be good.
To start your splog sites you need hosting and bloggin software, and there are dozens of ways to approach this. Again, my personal preference is to take the free option whenever I can and since these splog sites are only going to last a very short amount of time what's the sense paying for a domain and webhosting for them? Truck on over to one of the many free blog services out there and sign up for a few free splogs using keyword-rich names and titles. Here are some of the services I prefer to use along with their positive and negative points.
I don't bother with hosting or buying domains when it comes to spammy blogs because they're not going to last for more than a few weeks anyway – why waste money on it?
| URL | Good | Bad |
| Wordpress | Sub-domain URLs, easy to use | Slow to be indexed, no internal traffic |
| Blogger | Sub-domain URLs, easy to use | Slow to be indexed, no internal traffic |
| Xanga | Quick to be indexed, internal traffic | Internal traffic is young (13-20 age) |
| Myspace | Lots of internal traffic | Not SEO friendly URLs, poorly indexed |
| MSN Spaces | Internal traffic, quickly indexed | Accounts closed quickly, hard to use |
| IBlogs | Sub-domain URLs | Stability questionable |
| Hoodiblog | Sub-domain URLs | Knock off of wordpress |
| Yahoo 360 | Haven't tested | Haven't tested |
| AOL Journals | Haven't tested | Haven't tested |
I should mention that at the time of writing this AOL Journals and Yahoo 360 look very promising, I just haven't had time to check them out fully. AOL Journals seems to be more search engine friendly - if you're willing to try something new please send me the results so I can publish them.
