Actually even many corporations would use one of those free wordpress themes for their companies blog with just some slight modifications…and just few months ago BOOM everyone was lurking for a personalized wordpress blog theme. Everyone wanted to stand out from the rest of the fellow bloggers with a unique design that would reflect to their personality.

I have been thinking now and then to get a new blog design for this make money online blog but I just feel really comfortable enough with the current layout I am using (yeah, it is a free wordpress theme so what?) that I don’t even find the hassle to sit down and open photoshop and design me a new layout.

It makes sense tho to hire a company for your website design even tho sometimes prices are just too high, especially if you think that return on investment won’t be that good. Speaking of this I ended up seeing the website designing page of Hosterio.com.

I have to admit I like their layout, actually I love simplicity, even tho they are a hosting company actually they also offer website design services too. The first thing that caught my eyes was their pleasant design, so Ok i thought, it is worth reading maybe I get convinced and hire them to do the work for my lazy self (some times it is harder to design for yourself if you are a designer, rather then designing for a customer).

The page looked nice, well written content and most important the price was really cheap, I quote from their own website

Our website design services starts from as low as USD249 only. With that package you will get a complete website of upto 10 pages with free domain name and web hosting

Intrigued me, it does intrigue you too right? So what should stop me for hiring them? Well there is one thing that stops me from hiring, actually it stops many, I presume, from hiring a website design firm to work on your personal website design if they don’t have a portfolio show case from where I could see the quality of their work (let me remind you, their site already looks nice..but one example is just not enough).

That was the first thing I did notice, the second, being a semantic code maniac, i checked the source code. I think I will better refrain my comments, after all very few are the sites that satisfy me from how the layout is structured and how the elements are being used, but I can’t stop myself repeating to everyone that tables are meant to be used for displaying tabular data, and not structuring the websites layout.

From that, I can tell that there are few things people should and do look at when they are thinking about hiring a website design firm or even a website designer as freelancer, let me name them

• Companies Design
• Read the whole sales letter, it will help you understand a lot about how serious they are.
• Portfolio of previous work, this is a must and inspires/convinced people to hire you even more
• Code structure. Using semantic correct markup? Is the code search engine friendly?

However, I hope the folks at Hosterio.com will read this blog post and will take their time to build a nice portfolio showcase.

Considering these stats and the performance of the keyphrase search for how do I start blogging I find a sense in writing this simple tutorial on how to start your first blog and start blogging not depending on the fact if you want a self hosted blog or one of the free ones provided from several providers like wordpress.com, blogspot.com, typepad.com and many others. Lets start discovering things you need to know before starting a blog.

Identify your self and your blog

This is a simple rule which many lose to achieve because they are influenced from other factors, one of which is make money blogging. The fact is that blogs were not made for making money online, but blogs were found as a great way for monetizing your passion which later on passion vanished and all what remained is pure business and money online. If you want to start a blog purely for making money online then you will fail and I am telling you stop reading now this post because it is not for you. But if you have a passion which you are willing to start share world wide then welcome.

Now lets take the steps of these first rule, identify yourself and your blog. The first question you should ask your self is “Why do I want to start blogging” , this question should help you understand the topic you want to blog about, is it sports, fashion, hairstyle, glamour, cars, or anything you have enough knowledge with and would want to share your experience/knowledge with the others for one or another reason.

Once you have identified your blogs core identity and have defined the main topic of your blog it is time to expand slightly your blogs nature. By expanding I mean to identify other topics that somehow or closely related to your blog. Lets take as example your core topic is “fashion”, th expanding topics for fashion would be: man fashion, women fashion, shoes, skirt, dress, hairstyle, fashion news. Expanding your blog into several other topics which are closely related to your core topic will give you that freedom to write on several topics and still remain in your core topic and will permit you not to remain without a post to publish for your readers, in addition you will expand your readership for those interested in man fashion, women fashion, shoe lovers, hairstyle freaks or model gossip eager to know folks.

I would also suggest you free keyword tools to find more “content related” keywords based on which you can expand your blog. Just pick them carefully, here is an example for “fashion options“.

Picking Up Your Name

So far we have identified your and have learned how to expand your topics and reach a wider range of readers. What we need now is a name that will distinguish us from the rest of the “fashion blogs”.

Regardless if you chose to use a self-hosted blog (is it wordpress, drupal or even joomla) your second important issue will be to give your self a name, a name that will be remarkable and distinguish you from the rest of the crowd. Now a days that internet is being more and more used, new websites and blogs are being released, domain stalkers have already played their game finding the most appropriate domain name for your blog is not going to be easy.

Since your blogs core topic is going to be fashion it would be nice, but not necessary, that the word fashion is included in your domain name, for example, cathiesfashion.com myfashionblog.com, fashionblogging.com, fashiongossip.com etc etc, it all actually depends on how creative you want to be with your name, what you want your blog name to actually be and if that domain name is actually available. But as I said, having the word “fashion” within your domain name is not really necessary, you can even go with domain like: cathiesblog.com cathieblogging.com etc etc, but you will definitively want to re compensate this lack of keywords in your blogs title tag.

Why I am reminding you about keywords in domain is mainly for seo purpose, something that might sound Alienist to you at this moment but later on you will realize how important search engine optimization would become for your blog. You can already learn some more about wordpress seo since the early stages, but too much learning all at once it will certainly not do any good.

Installing Your Blog

The preferred blogging platform now a days is wordpress, so I will take wordpress as example. If you have already identified your blog, found your domain name and have already purchased your hosting space you are ready to install the blogging software.

If your hosting company uses cPanel it is very possible that they also use the Fantastico DeLuxe plugin. With Fantastico you get presented with several pre-installed softwares, one of which is wordpress, that can be installed within just a few clicks. After the install is done all you need is a theme for your blog, you can even search for “free wordpress themes” on google to find thousands of results.

Setting Up Your Blog

Your blog is already installed and its up running now with the default post and the default about page. There are few technical things you need to get them done properly before we proceed.

• Your Blog Settings There are several blog settings you would want to setup, by clicking in the Options tab you will be presented with several sub options. The first option is the General options, where you have to setup the blog title and the blog description. Since the other options are already okey (but in either case you might want to check them) we can pass with this tutorial on the permalinks.
• Setting your permalinks The permalinks are actually the URL your posts should have. By default the URL of your posts would look like ?p=ID , but wordpress has been build with seo in mind and have given you the option to modify your permalinks for better search engine performance. Once you are in your permalinks chose the Custom option and write down: /%postname%/. By using that small code for your permalink your posts will now look like your-blog-post-title/, the URL is now of real words which people can read, and even search engines love this too

Now that we have setup the technical settings we can proceed to create categories for your blog (remember, expanding your blog to several sub topics). Go on Manage > Categories and a table will be presented from where you can add/modify/delete categories. Categories are like a organizer, and you can mark each of your post to which category it belongs (you can even mark a post to 2 or more categories if it suits). What is required in the table to add a category is the category name, the category slug (which would be the URL for the category, example your category name is: fashion models, then it would be nice to have categories slug as: fashion-models) and the description for the category. The description should be not longer then 160 characters and should be well written to intrigue visitors reading to visit that category.

Categories are already been settled up. With WordPress aside the posts which would be market under categories you can as well create pages for your blog. These pages can be used to talk about your self, a contact page or anything you actually want.

Now you are ready to start blogging. To write your posts you need to click on Write and chose Write Post (and NOT write page unless thats what you want to do). Now that you have clicked to the write button you get presented with a table and two inputs where you can write. One is the title where the title of the post should be written, the second is the body where the posts content should be written. Once you are done writing your first post, on your right side of the screen you will notice some blue tabs with a + sign on their right end, click on the tab name categories and it should open a list of categories that you have created, select the proper category for which your post classifies and then hit the publish button.

Thats it, now you don’t need anymore to ask how do I start blogging, at least not the technical side. For similar tutorials on how to continue effective blogging you can subscribe to my RSS feed

In order to be able to make money online you have to walk through several steps starting from creating a website, being able to write articles, the use of PPC programs or even affiliates, mentioning these grades is worthless if you don’t have your first goal, the visitors which will be clicking on your PPC programs, buying products through your placed affiliate links or even those same people that will be interested advertising in your website.

There are several techniques how to bring visitors to your blog and just to name some

• Organic targeted traffic from search engines
• Targeted PPC Advertising Campaigns
• Advertising on other sites (banner advertising or textual advertising)
• Word of Mouth , etc.

As for every online money making dreamer the investment to achieve your first goal (bringing visitors to your site) needs to be as cost effective as possible. This means to spend as less as possible to bring readers to your site, from which you might be able to make money from your site.

One of the most precious traffic you could get to your site is the organic traffic from search engines. The search engines are a great source to get some targeted since they do present a list of sites for each keyword query people type in in the search bar. This means that the users are looking for that exact same product/keyword, and the more competitive the keyword is the more search queries that keyword receives and in return the more traffic you could get.

One of the competitive keywords of making money online is the phrase make money online, by playing smart and with some hard work you could get in the first page of the SERPs for that keyphrase and receive roughly 200 unique visitors a day. There is a guy that recently obtained the first position in the search engines for that keyword, Carl Ocab. Carl managed to bring his site in as first result for the query make money online, but to my appearance he is not honoring that result.

What makes me think he is not honoring his first position
The reasons are simple, he worked hard and put his effort to rank for that keyword and gain more organic targeted visitors to his blog and make more money online. Thats right, he’s site is a blog, just like this one. But what Carl is failing to is to be a blogger, and this means to feed your readers with fresh content which they would love to read. He’s last post results around 20th of January, thats two weeks without feeding his readers with content, using the content to pre-sell products under affiliate links or even clicks on his PPC ads. Whats worst is that each day he is missing to feed his readers with new content he is losing a reader (would your cat remain at your house if you don’t feed it?).

The Lesson
If you already achieve the first goal in your life or online marketing or simply making money online don’t forget to honor it, keep on going and set yourself a new goal and if you are a blogger, feed the people with what is most precious for them, fresh content, because if new visitors are precious for a site or blog, the returning visitors are twice more precious.

But what is targeted traffic. This blog talks about money and as so, it will have better success if it gets traffic from search engine users that perform a search query with keywords “make money online” “make money blogging” “online money making” “how to make money” “make money from home” etc etc (could name a bunch of keywords). Now, visitors that land on this blog via search engines after they have performed a search with those keywords they are more likely to read this blog more in depth to find ways how to make money online.

It is also known that search engine traffic (or also known as organic traffic) is more likely to convert into a paid customer since they are specifically searching for a term, and if you are selling that exact product a visitor coming from search engines is more likely going to result in a paid customer (of course this depends of other aspects too, but the chances are higher).

Search engine optimization is the “science” (even tho it is not actually categorized as a science) that studies how search engines determine a ranking in their search engine page results (SERPs) and how do the search engines give authority to one website and to another. Aaron Wall, a great search engine optimizer and search engine marketer wrote the SEO Book which is considered as the Bible of search engine optimization.

The book is more than 300 pages in PDF (Photoshop Document Format) with useful informations and guide how to obtain high search engine rankings as well as it teaches you some really valuable search engine marketing techniques. With the purchase of the eBook you also get access to some really useful bonus files which are, a list of useful directories that Aaron uses and a good list of SEO tools he recommends and he actually uses.

I have read the eBook and have applied most of the tips on a new website, and I can assure you that I slowly see how the organic traffic is increasing on my site and my sales and money increasing as well.

If you are more serious about your blog or your website, I recommend you to buy the SEO Book and learn how to increase your organic traffic as well as increase your online sales (or simply to make more money online through affiliate sales or PPC ads).

But in case you are short in creativity, let me highlight some ways you could use to promote your website and drive traffic.

• Community Promotion

  Community promotion is cost effective way to promote your website, or better to say costs $0, but in return it is time consuming and it is not going to happen just through one single day. The community promotion is nothing else but having a signature link in forums you participate or linking back to your site on blogs you comment at. As i said in the blog marketing post, you will see the effect of this type of promotion mainly if your participation has value to the community and your ideas or discussion makes sense.

• Textual advertising

  Textual advertising is yet another way of promoting your service or product and it has double benefits. First textual links can drive a good amount of traffic and can be easily acquired if not even exchanged (but will speak about this concept of exchanging vs acquiring on a different post) as the links look more natural to visitors and don’t look as spam at all, second benefit is the SERPs (Search Engine Page Results) and high rankings in the search engines. A textual backlink is practically a VOTE to your website for the search engines, the more backlinks you get with your desired anchor text the more higher you will be ranking in the search engines and higher rankings will drive more organic traffic, but keep in mind that your priority is traffic before all and than SERPs (as long as you can manage to concentrate and acquire links from websites that do actually drive traffic the search engine rankings will come by later on). And to make things even easier there are dedicated marketplace for textual advertising (text links) such as Text Link Ads or LinkWorth, both (competitors) have a huge database of websites categorized on niches from which you can acquire backlinks on monthly basis. If it is your FIRST time signing up with Text Link Ads than follow this links to get $100 in free textual advertising as long as you spend $25 after you signup, you will get $125 on textual advertising by just spending $25 which can become a GREAT start for your advertising campaign.

• PPC Advertising

  PPC (Pay Per Click) is yet another effective way to drive traffic to your site, but not always cheapest. The leader PPC advertising company Google AdWords (
  ) is one of the best known companies that drive the most traffic to your site. Their system is based on bidding, the more you bid for your ad the better ad placement your advertising campaign will have, but if you don’t know much on this type of advertising it is easy that you can lose money as it requires lots of work (monitoring your ads, where your campaign is being displayed etc), but mainly it depends from the answer of one important question Why do you need traffic?, if it is for your site which sells product you would rather want ads to appear on related sites that can drive quality traffic that will actually convert. In combination with Google Analytics you can track your ad campaigns and measure your profits.

• Entrecard

  Entrecard is another scheme of driving traffic to your blog. Even tho many state that is not effective, I would say it IS from my own experience. To explain what Entrecard is and how much does it cost advertising through entrecard, Entrecard is a system where anyone can participate and the cost of participation is free (thats right, $0) by dropping E-Cards (Electronic Business Card) of the size of a 125×125 banner (or better to say, a 125×125 banner). How does it work, the whole system is based on credits, if you drop a card on someones site you earn 1 credit, if someone drops a card on your widget you earn 1 again (a win win situation), the system determines how much credits is worth to advertise on your site and once purchases an advertise from you you earn credits again. Simple no? And the good thing is, it works and it does drive traffic.

These are just few of the ways you could use to drive traffic to your website even tho I said the ways are unlimited, for this moment I will stop here and write again about more ways another day. If you would like to add more ways to drive traffic, please feel so by commenting bellow on this post.

Ok, we touched the argument, secret tips, or rather as you have read in many others blogs unique and useful content. It is not a big secret, it is not something that you can’t really understand or that does not make sense. Think about your blog for a moment and compare it to a bar, what does your bar need to have in order to make money? People aka clients, now it comes in game that secret which is not that secret.

You have most probably seen in your neighborhood a bar that opens under new management this month and it closes for ever the next month. The problems could be; the place where the bar was located is in wrong corner, the bar is not well dressed up, the owner of the bar is not passionated at all on running a bar but he thought it could be a good business or simply the owner of the bar doesn’t have enough friends.

In blogging some of those rules apply as well, the first thing it requires is, to be passionate about the topic under which you are building your blog, if there is no passion and you are running the blog just to make money online you will most probably fail, if you have the passion of that subject you will most probably write more in depth articles and discuss arguments from your point of view, thing which will touch the readers that share the same passion and jump on board to discuss that argument from their point of view, so there we go, we got people to our blog. Your post and the commentators will explain that argument from different point of views, and don’t lie yourself that readers won’t be reading the comments, they will, and actually it is possible that they will agree with one of your commentators statement and jump on board. A good post with useful informations will most likely intrigue readers to see what other useful arguments you have wrote about, and here comes another regular reader to your blog.

As you can see, the whole discussion is directed to traffic, readers, and whoever tells you that traffic is not necessary to make money online than let me tell you they are filling you with crap. You need people to sell your products, and you need visitors to click on your ads.

Now enters in scene the big part, when you have already build credibility to your readers because you are passionate on what you are writing and your arguments do make sense which reflects to the fact that you do actually know what you are talking about. Why do you need all this credibility thing? If you remember I told you that the big money makers actually make most of their money from affiliates, it requires less work but more credibility so that your readers can trust you and sign up for something you are referring them. Most of the readers will not actually mind if you are using affiliate links when referring them to another site or you are using simple URL structure.

Another point that I would like to highlight is the fact that bloggers that are passionate on their topic do have a huge readers base or rather, they do build a huge readers base as time passes. All this results in decent traffic, a traffic which you can only THAN monetize at the point you were always dreaming, private ad sales. It all becomes your game now, you got the reader base, you got the active commentators, you get the visitors and all these are things which advertisers note, and if they WILL note than they will most probably like to advertise on your site, and private ad sales is the biggest money maker ever existed, as you manage the rules, you approve the ads and most important, you get 100% of the revenue.

But to achieve all that road, we need to get back to the core of this post, putting your passion online, running a blog about which you are passionate and you do actually know what you are talking about. Before you make money online, have you started really a blog under a subject you are passionate of?

The Flock browser is built on the Mozilla FireFox open-source browser, which gives me the credibility to a trusted and semantically correct browser. With the quality of FireFox browser in mind and the faster browsing experience which Flock has preserved they have also added some GREAT social media features and make the bloggers blogging live much, and I mean MUCH easier.

The Flock Social Web Browser has built in some great social media functions such as, facebook integration, flickr, twitter and YouTube, all functions which make possible you keep in touch with your friends without really the need to go to the site and check which of your friends is online, share pictures with your friends by dragging and dropping photos, videos, feeds and text from the Media minibar and web pages, interact instantly by jumping on their profile, sending message.

The Flock browser has a well organized features which appear as sidebar, it doesn’t disturb your navigation or even slows it down, yet it places all your needed things right on hand.

But what I like more about Flock is the possibility to setup a blog account, on all the next named blogging platforms

• Blogger
• Blogsome
• LiveJournal
• Typepad
• WordPress.com
• Xanga
• Self-Hosted Blog

Under self hosted blog it includes WordPress platform as well as other type of platforms. Once you have setup your account, you can directly write and publish a post from within the browser, no matter what you are surfing and without the need to go to your blog and login. Once you finish writing your blog while watching a video on YouTube you can click the publish button and you get your blog post published, on which category I have no clue, I believe under the default category and still have to figure out if this can be setup to pick the category or not, will check on later on their numerous extensions (aka addons).

I have to admit I am liking this browser, even tho I am used to firefox I think i will pass to Flock or flick a flock, oh well, after all it is based on Mozilla FireFox, so it has the fast browsing, security and semantically correctly displaying xHTML sites just as FireFox it does, just that it has some GREAT features for bloggers that can make things much easier.

Hope you did enjoyed this blogging tip, and if you like you can go and flick Flock.

Drive traffic to your blog

So you got that strategy of how to make money, the products you can write about and make top dollars from affiliates, but what you lack at is traffic, audience, readers that do read what you have to write and advice them.

One of the ways most blogs are able to drive traffic is search engine optimization, there are loads of seo blogs you could learn more about seo and title optimization and how you could better optimize your blog for search engines. I would recommend you reading my seo blog.

But other than search engine optimization, I will write today about promoting your blog through the cheapest and easiest way, communities.

Blogs and Forums to raise Traffic

Blogs and forums give you the opportunity to interact with other fellows in a better way than the social media sites, usually blogs and forums treat one argument at a time and you are free to join that discussion and share your thoughts about that argument.

So how do you promote a site through blogs and communities? Both blogs as well as forums, give you the opportunity to use links and linkback to your website. Would that be as signature (forums) or as name of the commentator (blogs). Participating in discussions gives you that passport to share your knowledge on that topic and say what you think regarding that argument, people that read a healthy response to a topic will most likely follow your link in the signature or used as name to see what other sensed topics you have wrote about on your blog.

Few tips tho how NOT to promote your blog:
- Do not comment on sites that don’t share the same topic as yours, for example if your blog is about making money online than comment on make money online blogs or forums rather than on fashion
- Don’t comment just to comment, if you have nothing worth to say spare yourself.
- Don’t spam on each comment or post you make and link to your inner pages, only link to inner pages if the argument can be better explained with your link

What to do:
- Comment on topics you know well and only if you can contribute to that post or thread. Contributing will most likely create a feeling to other readers of the blog that you know what you are talking about and follow your link to read what you got on your blog.
- IF need, interlink with your posts (not more than one link) to better explain the subject which the blog owner posted or the thread is about.

Promoting your blog or site on other blogs or forums which share the same topic is really a powerful method to increase readership and increase traffic to your site.

If you like this post, subscribe to my RSS feed

Blogs are such a powerful tool because you can easily and in many ways spread your word among the others and get notice. And thanks to RSS it is easier than ever to spread your word, to make things even easier there is a recently open site that spreads the word for you, all you have to do is burn your feed with them, I am speaking about rss Hugger.

RSS Hugger is a new feed burning service website where you can burn your feed and get some juicy traffic to your blog. To burn a feed with rssHugger costs only $20 for 10 years, but if you don’t think it is a good investment than you get to burn your feed for free if you blog about them (and with this post I qualify for a 10 year free feed burning). Even tho rssHugger can’t directly help you make money online, it will definitively help you indirectly by sending you some healthy traffic through the feed you burn with them.

The service is new, so not much feeds burned as of yet, and being one of the first it has its benefits. The first people always get noted, and if your content on your blog is good, those visitors will most probably return in your blog and read whats new and what else they can learn from you.

If you haven’t yet, than it is the right time to burn your feed with rssHugger and get listed in their Top 100 feed read list.