Blogging For Money

So you started a new blog, and now you want to start blogging for money? 

That’s great!…BUT…

One thing I see bloggers do, and maybe do without realizing it is “Stealing Their Own Sales”.

I know your thinking, “John, I would NEVER steal my own sale that’s silly”  and normally this is true, but what if your stealing your own sales and not even realize  your doing it?

Affiliate Products vs AdSense

Many bloggers who are blogging for money choose affiliate products to sell on their site, I do this too and it’s a great way to make money.

So is Google adsense, simple quick way to make money on a blog without much effort.

Ok John I don’t see the issue.. Well my friend here is the issue. Have you really looked at what google ads are being displayed on your blog?

Chances are they are the same or at the least in the SAME niche as your blog and of your affiliate products you sell.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather make a 20, 30 or even 50% commission on a affiliate sale then a 20, 30 cents on a Google ad click.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Adsense is a great way to make money on your blog, you just need to keep your eye on what ads are being displayed.

I stopped running Adsense on my blog, instead I run Chitika Ads

The cool thing about Chitika is the ads only show on your blog when that visitor comes from Google search, and the ad will show products that target their search.

Example: search for dog collars, when they get to your blog, the ad will show them ONLY dog collar products.

This way your regular readers won’t see the ad…Very Cool!

Selling Ad Space vs Affiliate Products

Now this is pretty much the same as affiliate products vs adsense, but the main difference is selling ad space can make you a nice monthly income.  So it’s hard to say no to selling ads on your blog. 

With this again you just need to watch for what products or services you are showing ads for and what your affiliate products are.

You don’t want to lose aff sales to your banner ads and you don’t want to lose banner ad sales to your affiliate products because then your ads will not renew month after month if they don’t see results.

How to fix this you ask? Simple, run different affiliate products that don’t directly compete with your banner ads. This isn’t hard since there are 100’s of affiliate products and services in every niche to promote.

Your OWN Products vs Affiliate Products and Ad Space

Ok, this is the BIG NO NO!

Once you have your own product or service to sell then I recommend you stop selling ad space and fill it with your own product ads.

Yes selling ad space is a nice way to make a monthly, but in the long run, selling your OWN product and filling your ad space with your OWN ads will make you a lot more money in the long run.

It will also brand you a leader in your niche, give you credibility, and over make you and your blog a place people will gravitate to.

If your serious about blogging for money, then YOU want this!

This applies to affiliate products too. The way to do this when you have a product to sell of your own, it’s ok to also promote other affiliate products just make sure they are NOT in competition with your product.

I would much rather make 100% of a product sale then a 20% commission, Wouldn’t You?

Example: If you sell your own SEO book, then you obviously do not want to have a affiliate product anywhere on your site that will compete with your own product. 

Well there are 3 ways to stop stealing your own sales and be more successful at blogging for money.

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<p>I just wanted to make a quick post to first say Happy Holidays to everyone, and Thank You to all my readers and Twitter followers and my twitter RT Faithfull’s.

Without any of you, none of my success on Twitter and on this blog would be possible. 

With your support I have taken this blog to Alexa score of about 400,000 down from about 2.4 million in less then 7 weeks, not bad for a “amateur” blogger

I plan to continue my learning so that I can share EVERYTHING with you so to better OUR businesses and blog’s.

My 2010 Plan

I am working on releasing a Twitter Guide, and a Blogging Guide to better explain what it is I do everyday to advance my success.

”As long as you move forward it doesn’t matter if it’s a small step or a big leap”

Ok this cartoon is Hilarious..lol and a great way to say..

 “Always Keep Your Eyes On The Things You Want Most”

Happy Holidays

John Paul

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Make Money Blogging Tips

Everyone today wants to make money blogging. Blogs are very simple to setup and anyone with a business or product should have a blog. With a blog you can talk about anything you like, share your thoughts on different topics, you can also use a blog to promote your business or products to make you extra income online.

How can you really make money blogging?

Here are simple and effective ways to make a profit from your blog.

Set Up Your Own Blog

It’s easy to set up a blog, there is a lot great info online on how to do this, you can find some here if you look up   You should go with hosting your own blog with wordpress. This gives you full control of what you want your blog to do.

Choose Your Niche For Your Blog

You need to know what you blog will focus on, if you have a blog about scuba diving, then all your content, ads, affiliate products SHOULD be all about scuba diving, makes sense right?

This way when people come to your blog and are looking for anything to do with scuba, then you want them to see a lot of info about scuba.

This is especially true with search engine traffic, they are searching for something specific, they want info on that search so if they come to your site from Google and are looking to buy a wet suit, then you want them to know they came to the right site.

Introduce Your Blog To The Online World

Ok if you have read my blog, you know that I am a fan of social media, primarily Twitter. If you are on twitter you can find me at @JohnAguiar

Once you have a nice blog set up and you are reading to make money blogging then it is time to promote promote promote.

Social media sites like facebook, Linkdin, Twitter, and 100 others are a great way to find targeted traffic for your new blog.

You can find people with the same interests as you, and your blog have like our example earlier of a scuba diving blog. You can search these sites and find people, groups to connect with are also into scuba. Now you just need to join the conversation and slowly they will visit your blog.

Right now twitter is the best free way to get targeted traffic to your blog. I am in the process of releasing a twitter e-book on how I got over 50,000 followers and drive 100-300 targeted people to my block each day, using ONLY free services and techniques.

Now the bad news about social media.

To get the MOST out of it you will need to “be there” and WORK!

Yes I know we are all here to work less and make more, but social media only works if you put the time into it.  I use some great FREE tools to automate “some” tasks and that is fine, makes me more efficient, but you can not automate it all!

Ex: I use one site to post one message to about 25 sites all at once, this is a huge help since now I don’t have to sign into twitter, facebook, linkdin, myspace etc..

I promise you if you try to use a fully automated twitter program you will not get the results you really want from twitter.

Once you have all this in place it really isn’t hard to make money blogging. All you need is a blog to start.

It’s 9am do you know where your blog is?

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Blog Traffic Tips

There are so many ways to increase blog traffic out there, but today I wanted to cover 6 simple steps you can do to optimize your blog, and up your ranking.

My last post How To Get An A+ On Your SEO Blog Page Report Card talked about optimizing your posts.  Today I will go over steps to optimizing your whole blog.

Create Pretty Permalink Structure

The permalinks Wordpress uses by default are not search engine friendly. You can make this simple change by inserting %postname% instead of the default that is already there.

This will successfully create URL’s that include your post name which should include your targeted keywords.

So instead of having a page URL look like this..

http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com/page=2 “Not Pretty” Right?

Your URL will now look like this..

http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com/how-to-get-an-a-on-your-seo-blog-page-report-card/

Ahhh So Pretty..  Now this look’s a lot better.

Install All in One SEO Plugin

This plugin allows you to specify a title, description, and the keywords for the search engines. This will make your life a lot easier..lol and trust me any tool that can help my blogging, is a great tool for me.

Once you have it set up, it pretty much works automatically for you, the only thing I do once I make a post, is change the title if needed.

Install Related Posts Plugin

Search engines love it when you interlink your pages and posts. The plugin will automatically add your previous posts at the bottom of your new post that are relevant to that post.

This is important because for one, you are interlinking your content, SE’s love this and will increase blog traffic and second, you are giving your readers more related info and a place to go at the end of the post.

Now I personally stopped using a related post plugin, since I have to many plugins installed as it is, I use Zamanta.com to add my related posts.

Research Your Keywords

When people search, they search by keyword or keyword phrases. It is important that you know what these keywords are if you want to rank at the top of the search engines. Your posts should be written around these keywords.

Make Your Blog User Friendly

Make your blog clean and easy for your readers and search engines to find information. That means including your blog’s archives, categories, recent posts and pages.

This also means having a nice clean design, now this is where I can see both sides of clean user friendly, and attention getting design, I have tried to do both..lol “I hope”

Expand the Ping List

When you make a new blog post Wordpress will “ping” the blog search engines. This alerts them that content on your site has changed and ready for readers to view. This can help you get indexed fast and increase blog traffic.

Do a Google search to find an expanded ping list you can include in your wp-admin so you make sure you get as many of these sites to update you as possible.

Increasing blog traffic can be the most challenging part to to a new blogger.

These 6 simple steps will help you on your way to optimizing your blog, increasing your blog traffic, and making your blogging tasks a little easier.

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