Blogs are so powerful that it can back an online business towards growth and building an interactive community around your business. At the same time, you can also build only “blogs as business”. Best example being this blog where you are reading now is build like that – the model is “blogging as business”.

You can blog about anything you know and anything you love – however, when you see it as a business you can’t leave it as “anything”. The blog topic or what we call here as “Niche” matters a lot. The niche decides many stuffs right from identifying the problems, providing your own solution and building traffic around your site. It also decides the amount of money that you make from a niche site.

Indeed, niche sites are profit making always provided you have chosen the right niche and doing the right work. In this article, i will take you through the steps to build such niche blogs right from finding the niche to making money from that niche blog.

Nice chat on blogging (for niche blogs too)

Step #1 – Find Profitable Niche.

The very first step is to find a profitable niche for your blog. This is one of the crucial step however, using the right tools you can make it possible. Basically, you have to identify where is the demand for information. When there are high demand for information on a particular topic, you can easily find more people to visit your blog. At the same time, when you are able to identify such demanding topic with less competition then that’s the gold mine. With less competition, you can easily penetrate into the market and show your blog as a top one.

Have a look on my another article, how to find niches which helps you further in detail (i don’t want to repeat the same stuffs here). To conclude, identify demanding topic with considerably less competition.

As an added note, you should also have interest on the topic you choose because you have to work (share useful information on your blog) about it.

Step #2 – Setup Your Blog.

Once you have the topic ready, you can straight away go to setup a blog using WordPress. You have to register a domain name and web hosting to store your blog content. WordPress is one of the famous content management system which is Open Source and you will find lot of free to use plugins, themes required to build a great blog. Further, it is easy to manage a blog with WordPress, you don’t need to be a technical geek.

• The first step, picking a domain name for your blog. For niche blogs, it is good to have keywords in the domain name. For example, if you take my blog it is having the keyword “money making online” in the domain name. It is required for SEO benefits (see here).
• Secondly, you have to host your domain on a reliable web hosting service.
• You can take Dreamhost service and you don’t need much technical knowledge to setup your blog (you can take discounts from here).

To help you further, i am sharing you the below video on Dreamhost WordPress installation.

Once your blog is up, you can make elegant designs using free WordPress themes – there are lot of free themes on the WordPress directory. You can also search Google for “free WordPress themes” and few sites i recommend to download great themes are MagPress, theme2wp. The next step, install the required plugins to make your blog fully up.

Step #3 – Content + Value Generation.

Blogs are built around content – text, images, videos and the value of content decides the growth.

How far your blog has useful information and how far it helps the visitor decides the success.

You have to write articles on the blog topic indepth, look what people really wants in that topic. You can simply list down the problems in that topic and you can discuss them in the articles. In this way, you can attract the real visitors who are looking for information and slowly, your blog becomes a resource center on that topic.

For example, i have made this blog as a resource center for online business tips for individuals helping them towards making money online.

The demand for information matters, when there are more demand you can easily attract more visitors to your blog. With great content, search engines will become the major source of traffic especially Google. It is a slow process however, once established you can see the real power of search traffic.

Keeping search engines aside, you should focus towards adding value to the visitors every time. That’s it.

Also, learn what kind of content makes money ?

Step #4 – Monetize Effectively (with less Ads).

The interesting step is monetizing your niche blog. For all your hard work, you will be paid back soon and that depends on how effectively you are monetizing your blog. There are variety of ways and i recommend you to go through this article on how to monetize your new blog.

In short, you can promote products related to your topic and you get commission for each sale that you drive. There are lot of affiliate networks available in the market (famous full list here) and you can join them to pick related products.

Read my another article on how to select clickbank products ? that helps you to start now.

Google Adsense is another way of monetizing your blog however, it requires lot of traffic to earn and hence to begin with you can promote products where the commission will be higher, and also you can earn more than Google Adsense. One of the hot advice from every Internet Marketer’s is that, promote products inside the content instead of showing banners or images. That means, you have link to the products so that your visitors will find it easily while reading.

• I recommend you to get a copy of AffiLinker Affiliate wordpress plugin which helps to quickly monetize your blog, it actually converts the given keywords into affiliate links through out the blog.
• You can also track the clicks and configure the style/behavior of each n every link uniquely.

When you want to earn a lot, you don’t need to put lot of Ads instead you should monetize effectively on the right place (that means, monetize within content).

Step #5 – Learn SEO.

When it comes to blogging, one of the greatest and unavoidable dependency is SEO.

Search Engine Optimization plays a major role in attracting search traffic especially Google which is having the major share in search industry. I recommend you to read this SEO tips from Google and also, follow their webmaster guideline’s to great extent.

Don’t over do it and don’t work too much for it, it happens naturally when you focus towards the visitor needs (considering SEO too). Keep in mind that 50% to 80% of blog traffic comes from search engines (in general).

Have social presence through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ around your blog, build an email list.

Step #6 – Rinse and Repeat.

That’s the process. You understood the basics and when you put your hands-on you will face lot of issues/confusions. You can always get help from similar people around there using web master forums like Digital Point, SitePoint, Warrior forum etc. Further, you will get solution for any WordPress problem by just searching Google.

• Based on the availability of time and knowledge, you can follow the same steps to start another niche blog. One of the important thing is you have to keep your blog active always, so have a writing schedule and publish articles periodically on the topic.
• You can read my another article on how to schedule your blog posts which helps to better manage your time and efforts.

Step #7 – Build a Niche Product.

Finally, once your blog starts growing and you are seeing income, you can focus on the future. You can build your own product related to your blog.

For example, if you are blogging about web apps, you can release your own web application for sale Or if you are blogging about cooking, you can release your own cooking guide for sale.

This way, you could build a reputation in the market and people see your blog as a great resource center, this actually builds Trust and they do come back again n again. More information on selling your own product.

Money rolls in every day….

This is a slow process however based on the right effort you put, the amount of time you spend for a blog and the blog topic – decides the rapidness of growth and income….always have a simple plan and stick to it.

You also learn how to brand your blog and market it to great extent.

Good Luck !

image:isaak

1. Make Sure Your Content Is Worth Sharing

This is a fundamental requirement, without which there’s no point in encouraging sharing. Make sure your content impacts readers powerfully; when this happens, readers will believe that others will also be similarly impacted. Ergo, they share.

2. Include Statements That Are Worth Remembering

Be a little outrageous, a little scandalous on your blog; make statements that people will remember even after they’ve left your blog. Humans look for stimulation; edgy information is more often shared than regular stuff.

3. Make Sure Those Share Buttons Are At Hand

People read exciting blogs, experience that initial thrill and the desire to spread the word and then lose interest. Why? The content is not easy to share. Leverage those 3 minutes of hyper-attention and make sure there’s a big Retweet button at hand, along with all possible social sharing buttons

4. Enable Social Sharing In Your Newsletters

It’s not just about enabling easy sharing of content from your blog site but also the content in your e-newsletters. Include links to Facebook, Twitter and all other social spaces you can think of. Use an email service provider such as Constant Contact; they provide a social share bar to enable content sharing.

5. Give Them A Gentle Nudge To Share

Just ask people to share; let them know you want more people reading your content and you’ll be surprised at the response. Be direct; ask for a Retweet if you’ve already tweeted it, or ask users to Stumble or Digg your content.

6. Put Your Content Out There

Keeping your content on your blog site won’t get it out in front of your entire reader base. Put your content out into the social space; post links to articles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter to get more people reading.

7. Grab Their Interest Using Engaging Titles

With so many blogs out there, you have to use every weapon in your arsenal. Hook those fish with engaging, curiosity-provoking titles and half the job is done. People respond positively to ‘how to’ articles, list articles and ’15 ways to’ articles.

8. Let Your Content Be Easy To Read

Many people just skim headers and content in a few seconds to check readability. This means if your article has long unbroken paragraphs, long boring sentences or unpronounceable words, no one’s going to read it.

9. Don’t Forget To Add A Few Jazzy Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. Not everyone thinks in terms of words alone, which makes a great image absolutely irreplaceable. Place your attention-grabbing pics at the top of the post so the reader gets an eyeful of color at first instance.

10. Make Sure Your Content Adds Value To Readers’ Lives

A reader will share content only if they feel the content presents some value-add to them. Your content should either impart knowledge, or make them laugh, or make them think. Sharing comes naturally when a person is pleased with something.

11. Find Out What People Need And Give It To Them

Conduct a poll and find out what your users want to read in your blog. Focus on making your niche blog a one stop shop for all the content needs your readers have. They shouldn’t feel the need to visit any other blog in the same niche!

12. Increase Your Social Network Size

Do what you can to get more subscribers and followers for your blog. People don’t subscribe unless approved of your content and attitude, and are therefore more likely to share content.

13. Allow Direct Content Sharing From Social Spaces

Make sure you have your own page on Facebook, Google +, Twitter and so on. When you write a new article, post it on all your social pages, and provide easy content sharing options for your followers.

14. Place Bookmarking Buttons In Feeds

Add bookmarking buttons for Digg, Stumble Upon, Technorati and Delicious in your Feeds, just after your article. No matter how many subscribers you have, making it possible to share content via feeds is good strategy. The idea is to make it easy for people to share content no matter through which method they get it.

15. Use The ‘Read More’ Tag

Using up an entire page for just one article is not good strategy, because readers will just leave your site if they’re not interested. When multiple article choices are provided along with the ‘Read More’ tag, users have the option to browse and share.

If are expecting your readers to share your content, you have to encourage and educate them. Get back to your blog, see how you are encouraging, follow these methods now definitely you will see great results…Good Luck.

image:lisa

There are a lot of bloggers who make a fair living out of blogging. A very tempting activity, I have to admit. But to get there, there is a lot of work to be done and simply writing content is not always the way to go. Your content needs a little technical help especially if you are using WordPress.

Being the most used CMS out there, WordPress offers a fair amount of plugins that will definitely help you monetize your blog.

1. Smart Ads. This is a very simple to use plugin and what it actually does it automatically adding ads before and after your post’s page content. It features a built-in shortcode which allows you to add custom ads.
2. Ad Squares Widget. This widget allows you to display eight ad squares of 125×125 into a sidebar. This plugin supports AdSense and Javascript and you can add as many widgets as you want.
3. AffiLinker Affiliate. A premium WordPress plugin to monetize your blog instantly. It converts the given keywords into profitable Affiliate Links through out the blog post, pages. You can also show colorful Affiliate Link as a Tag Cloud on the sidebar. There is a built-in tracker which shows stats on total number of clicks, unique number of clicks on each Affiliate Link.
4. SEO Smart Links. This is actually an internal linking plugin. You would ask “what can this help me with in monetization?”. Well, the interesting thing about this plugin is that it also allows you to link to external affiliate offers or even your own sales pages on other websites. A very effective idea I would say.
5. Ad Rotate plugin. This neat little plugin analyses the conversion rate of all your ads and it rotates them according to their effectiveness. You can also see the clickthrough rates of every banner. You can simply insert a bunch of banner ads and test them for …let’s say a month or two and after that you can decide which of them really help and which of them you should eliminate.
6. Yoast WordPress SEO. I really hope that it’s clear for everyone that high quality traffic results in a higher conversion rate in the end. Nothing beats organic traffic coming from search engines. But to get there, you need to optimize each and every post and page of your blog/website to be search-engine friendly. I’m talking about meta tags, page and post titles, keyword placement and density, sitemaps and other such aspects. Yoast’s SEO plug-in makes editing these settings a lot easier by allowing you to do this right after you write your posts.
7. Ad Injection. Simply the best monetization plugin for any kind of ads. It helps you add either text or banner ads. The real innovation of this plugin is the ability to control who can see certain ads on your website. You can control which ads are displayed based on the length of the posts, the referrer’s address, the visitor’s IP address and more. You can also display category-targeted ads for each of your posts, giving a huge boost to your conversion rate by giving each reader category exactly what they want.
8. W3 Total Cache. “What? A caching plugin? I thought we were talking about monetization here, what the deuce is this?” Well, we ARE talking about monetization. Let’s make a quick exercise: Imagine a website which loads in around 20 seconds. Now tell me the conversion rate it has for the ads. Exactly, you can’t. We can’t even think of monetization on a blog that is not optimized for speed in the 1^st place. A classic among the WordPress plugins, W3 Total Cache is recommended by various hosting companies around the world and it deserves the recognition. This little plugin caches every little part of your website  and significantly increases the loading time, saving up to 80% of the bandwidth your website would normally require to load.

I would say, monetizing your blog is an easier task but when it comes to making money, you have to work a lot for your blog. Add lot of useful content, spread your blog link as much as possible, drive lot of visitors then only you can make money from your blog !

You can also check out some other plugins which can really help your blog grow, on my personal website.

Not all blogs are making money and not all bloggers are becoming rich – many people quit in the middle because of the simple reason, they don’t know the right steps/approach of profitable blogging.

In this article, i will take you through those reasons or you can call it as mistakes so that in the end, you will be clear with what you are currently doing and what you are not doing !

You Don’t Select the Right Niche.

The very first step in blogging is finding the right niche (or the topic) and the very first mistake: you found the wrong topic for your blog. The niche highly decides the success of your blog and its income.

• For example, you could not make even a cent by sharing your personal life in your blog – instead, if you start focusing on “something where people are willing to spend”, you can definitely make a lot from your blog.

You Don’t Write Often.

Blog has to be live and alive. You have to write often almost every day. This actually adds value to your blog every day and it becomes an information resource sooner which attracts lot of regular visitors. In other words, when you started sharing more information, more people will come to see it. In fact, every new page opens the way for visitors from search engines.

• For example, you should have a writing schedule say, “i will publish 5 articles per week or 10 articles per week”.

If you see most of the tech blogs around (like Techcrunch, engadget, Mashable etc.) they used to publish 10-20 articles per day, think why they are publishing like that ?

You Don’t Write In Detail.

Not only the quantity of articles, it also depends on the “quality of writing”.

With the latest changes in Google search algorithms, it is clear that you could not rank without great content. In fact, detailed content is always appreciated by people as well as search engines. So forget all these conceptions and focus towards your reader – provide as much as useful information to them.

• For example, you can pick a particular (narrow) topic and cover everything A-Z on that topic – this actually adds real value to the reader and people do come back again looking for same kind of information.

You Don’t Monetize It Well.

When it comes to making money, the most important step is: effective monetization. If you don’t monetize your blog, you can’t make money – if you monetize it well, you can make well – that’s simple.

Contextual monetization works the best – i mean, showing the right product/ads to the right people which converts the best. At the same time, don’t over do it and never hurt the visitor with too much of ads.

• For example, you can have income goals say: i will make $2000 per month. Plan for it and start the action immediately !

You Don’t Diversify the Income Source.

Diversification is important for any business to succeed and to survey for the long term. You should not stick to one method of earning, instead when you diversify it, you can drive more profits from various sources and you don’t know how one source of income is potential than another source. Learn to diversify your income source.

• For example, don’t stick to PPC ads (say Google Adsense), instead promote affiliate products from various networks, sell ad space, write product reviews, paid reviews, build your own product etc.

You Don’t Do SEO Correctly.

SEO is the heart of blogging, without SEO you blog can’t grow – this concept is well proved with the Google Panda updates. Most of the blogs are hit by Panda and many lost their business.

SEO has the power to grow and even to kill your blog. So play it safely.

• For example, you should not over do SEO. Don’t build too much of backlinks, don’t over stuff keywords, don’t write on vast topic (write on niche) – keep it natural, it works the best.

You Don’t Attract the Audience.

Building regular visitors to your blog is one of the toughest part of blogging. You have to build trust – attract the audience with great content, great blog design and initiate interaction with them every day.

• For example, you can conduct a contest in your blog, quickly attract new visitors and hold them in your social account (facebook, twitter, G+) or into your e-mail list. This makes them to come back again or you can also ping them to come back anytime.

You Don’t Diversify the Traffic Source.

Like income source, you have to diversify the traffic source also. Not only SEO and search traffic – you can drive visitors from social networks and from other sites (by spreading your blog link every day).

For example, you can have a plan to write 1-2 guest posts every week, plan to build social followers every month by 1k+.

You Don’t Have a Plan.

Blogging is a business. It requires proper planning and you have to strategize the work. Plan everything, your writing schedule, income sources, traffic sources – do experiments, try out new strategies and tweak your work every day.

Blogging is a slow process however, when you plan it well and follow all these tips you can easily make it an agile process. Keep on going, never give up – soon your blog will be making a lot of money.

Good Luck !

image: oliv

There’s the process of buying a domain name, naming your blog, installing WordPress, picking a theme, and more.

But even before that, there’s choosing a right web host for your blog.

It is the first step of creating any blog, and because it can affect your blog greatly it requires time and attention. It’s not the most glamorous of tasks, but getting it right can save headaches in the future.

Why your web host is important ?

Before we dive into the process for finding a web host, a quick word on why it’s important to find the right one. This is probably best accomplished in list format.

• Anyone reading E Money Making Online has financial motivations behind blogging. If your blog has trouble staying online, it will be exceedingly difficult to make money. Pick the wrong host, and you could be dealing with significant downtime.
• Dealing with downtime means spending time on the phone with the host. That’s time you’re not actively making your blog better and making money.
• The host is essentially offering you data center services, and so you want to make sure that their actual data centers are acceptable.
• As your blog grows your needs will change. A good host will help you grow. A bad host will hinder you and put you offline. That loops us back around to the beginning.

Essentially, picking the wrong host can throw a huge wrench into your business plans. Finding a good host means not worrying about hosting and focusing on what will make you the most money. It’s worth the time and effort to get it right.

Researching your host

It might seem obvious that you should research web hosts before you purchase a plan. Any time you spend money you should do at least a modicum of research, and web hosting is no different. Yet it’s not as simple as running a simple Google search or asking a friend.

• For starters, there are many issues that go into web hosting, and that makes it a personal choice. What works for a friend might not work for you.
• Second, there are so many biased views of web hosts out there that it’s tough to mete out what’s genuine and what’s financially motivated.

The former point is pretty simple. You might have friends who host blogs, and they might have their preference for hosts. Maybe they’ve been through a few and speak from deep experience. You should absolutely ask your friends and acquaintances which hosts they recommend. But don’t act directly on their advice. What works for them might not work for you. Additionally, it’s tough to tell whether their experience was general or isolated.

Additional research will make clear which hosts are best for you.

is this badly hosted ?

Starting with simple Google searches makes sense, but you need to dig deeply in order to find the truth of a host. Many hosts have affiliate programs, which pay bloggers who refer new users. This isn’t a problem in itself, but it does mean that you have to be wary about any website recommendation. If they’re making money off potential sales, they are incentivized to say good things about it. Maybe they use said host and speak from experience. But you have to click around further to know.

On the flipside, many negative reviews can be just as disingenuous. People have a tendency to write scathing words when they feel wronged. And, honestly, there’s not a host out there with a completely clean record. Hosts screw up, as do all humans and companies. That means they’re necessarily angering some percentage of their users, and those wronged users are more likely to write a review than someone who has received quality service.

Reviews should be taken only so far when conducting research. You might find an interesting nugget or two, but no decision should be based solely on reviews, just as no decision should be made on personal recommendations. But now that you have both, you can start to dig into what the company offers.

What to look for in a host

Now that you have your reviews and recommendations in hand, you probably have a handful of hosts in mind. When researching them, though, you shouldn’t necessarily be looking for features that benefit you currently. Most hosts, good and bad, offer basic services. You should be looking for a host that will allow you to grow.

When you first start your blog, you’ll be on a shared server with many other small blogs. Most of the time you won’t experience any issues. You’re not using a ton of bandwidth, so there are little chances of an overload. You’re also not using many resources in general, since your databases aren’t very big yet.

But it’s when your blog grows that the host becomes more important.

Clearly you plan for your blog to grow. Once you reach a certain level your host will move you to a virtual private server. This is still a shared server, but it is shared among fewer sites. When you conduct your research you’ll want to find out prices for this level of service. You might want to also find out how much bandwidth they allow at that level and other statistics, so you can compare them to others.

It might not be of great importance to you right now, but it will be as soon as your blog starts to grow.

You can also take this opportunity to think big and look at dedicated hosting prices from these hosts. It might be a long way off — you need considerable traffic and bandwidth consumption to justify a dedicated server — but it’s always nice to know you can continue growing with a company.

• That’s really the key to this all: finding a host that will let you easily move up the ladder. That will make life much easier now and in the long run.

Changing hosts is a pain

With one of my blogs, I thought we had it right. We found a host that we knew was reliable, from multiple recommendations and plenty of research. In fact, when starting a different project I didn’t go with this same host, and I regretted it. They had quality virtual packages, and we felt we could grow with them onto a dedicated server. Alas, that was two hosts ago.

We actually tried to switch hosts, to a dedicated provider, at one point along the way. That went terribly. We lacked the technical knowledge to make the switch ourselves, and the money to pay someone else wasn’t in the budget. And so we had to eat the three-month contract we had signed.

Still, the need to switch was there, and so in late 2010 we did just that. Things went well enough at first, but eventually we realized that the hosting package we paid for was not sufficient for our needs. That meant we had to pay more than we had intended for the service.

For all this money we were paying, we were told the host would help us optimize the site so we could stay within our bandwidth limits. That never came, and it led to more downtime than we ever imagined. In late 2011, we made yet another change.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It’s a long, drawn-out process that almost always involves a price increase. Moving the site is also a process that necessitates downtime. And yes, chances are you’ll have to pay someone to take care of the move for you — though if you pay your new host enough they’ll probably take care of it for you. We can only hope that this last server move is the right now.

The point is, we never had these problems in our halcyon days. The entry level package was easily good enough, and even our jump to a virtual server worked out well. It’s only when we really started to grow that it became an issue.

• Learn from my mistake: do your research up front so you can stick with the same host for as long as possible. No one wants to make the move, whether they know it now or not.

image:zenia

• how to choose the right blog

All the great bloggers read and contribute to the field as a whole, not just their own website. Here are some of the tips and etiquette to ensure that everyone comes out on top when writing guest posts.

Why Make Guest Posts In The First Place?

The first question to ask is, “Why write for this blog in the first place?” There are almost as many answers to this question as their are writers on the internet. The reason behind posting will help to determine the quality and style of the post itself, so it is imperative for bloggers to take a closer look at exactly why they are sharing their work.

For The Love Of The Blog
Being able to glance through a list of contributors and see one’s name can be a reward in and of itself. Even though this relatively insignificant in the grand scale of the business, these types of posts can lead into a very profitable and rewarding future.

Help Them Help You
Search engine optimization can mean the difference between a successful website and a dead end. The higher ranking a blog has, the more visitors it receives. One great way to boost ranking is to contribute to other websites. The easiest way to find these high-yield blogs is through Google’s Analytics which tracks worldwide trends or to simply search the internet for other websites that are hitting the topics that interest you. This tip I consider as one of the most important.

Friends Work Together
Most children are taught to play nice with other children, and this old adage fits the world of blogging perfectly. Just as with SEO, collaborating with another blogger can be a huge boost to both websites. Many successful bloggers can confirm this tactic. Most of my posts is placed on my friends blogs. Without making friendships with other bloggers your chances are not so good.

What Do I Write About?

Now, the real writing comes into play. Writers need to find pertinent and useful topics that are going to boost search ratings and attract readers. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Here are some useful tips to find the perfect topic everytime.

Skim Their Articles
This is an easy first step, but one that is often overlooked. Guest bloggers need to move beyond the homepage and start to looking at some of the topics that the website is geared for. While a blog may call deem itself an automobile fan page, the readers may gravitate towards imports or classics.

Keep Up With Their Trends
The internet moves at an astonishing speed. Both readers and bloggers produce, read, and then move on within days. Finding current topics, debates, or news is key in producing the perfect guest post. When unsure, look for a “wish list” page. Many of the top sites include an updated page on the topics that they are looking for at the moment.

Delve Into The Comments Section
A very popular strategy for many bloggers is to leave an unanswered question to bring in more comments. These questions and the ensuing comments are the perhaps the best place to find inspiration.

Just Ask
Last but not least, it can be fruitful to just ask the owner. Coming up with a handful of topics and then sending over a short list of the top choices is a great way to begin building a relationship with the blog owner.

It can be an uncomfortable step for writers to give their work away to another website. Luckily, with these few tips in mind, this can be one of the most efficient ways to boost popularity, website traffic, and experience.

Jeff writes mostly about blogging, internet marketing, Pay Per Click Strategies and Search Engine Optimization techniques and best practices. He is also a consultant and content contributor for Queens homes NY community.

image: ctina

• intitle: guest post
• writing guest posts

The process of turning traffic into customers is called ‘conversion’ and it’s one of the hardest things you will ever have to do in the online world.

Knowledge is power here and knowing how to convert people is extremely important. These three steps are excellent if you want to have people go from ‘eh’ to ‘yeah!’ and start buying from you.

1. Show What You Have to Offer

Banner ads from huge stores and shops are created so that they are easy to read and easily identified by the viewer. They also take advantage of the fact that people on the internet are looking for a quick answer and so the banner ad provides that answer and acts as though it’s the only answer to your question. Banner ads should also be bright, cheerful, but non-intrusive and may or may not have little additions such as the ability to search for something through the advertisement without having to navigate elsewhere.

Should your offers follow the same sort of pattern? Of course! Your ads should be clear, simple and breathtakingly obvious.

Start with your product and then add in ‘extras’ and then a little bonus item at the end of it to make the consumer feel special. It’s all about bringing the customer in and making him or her feel as though they are exclusive and well liked.

You can always do a bit of research on large stores and how they do their ads to get an idea of how to design your flash banners. It takes some practice.

2. Build Trust and Rapport With Well Written Content

It’s easy to copy/paste from others (particularly the supplier of the goods you are selling), but like many so called short cuts, it is often more damaging than helpful. Readers will quickly see that you took no time out to actually talk about your product and so they will lose faith in it as well. Take the time out to write content that is informative, interesting, and not simply revisions of keywords over and over again.

• Interesting, relevant content is one of the major keys to conversion because it builds trust, a rapport, and makes people more likely to buy from you as opposed to someone else.

Remember, if you are truly passionate about what you are doing, others will pick up on it and will become passionate about what you are doing too. A copy/paste job will just drive people off.

• Studies have shown that business owners and website owners have, on average, seven seconds to get a user to decide whether or not to buy from a business. SEVEN SECONDS! And to business owners’ collective horror, that time is dropping.
• Some studies pin the attention span of a web browser at four seconds.

illustration showing conversion on-time

Sites which take longer than four seconds to load are often abandoned. Seven seconds, four seconds; no matter how you look at it, that’s not a lot of time and you don’t want to waste it. Your content should grab your reader from the first sentence and then carry them through to your final phrases; and with luck, to the Buy Now button!

On the other hand, once you have grabbed a viewer, they are far more likely to stay and read more about you which is good news for your business and makes good content even more important.

3. Have a Goal for Each Page

The main goal of any site and many of its pages is to get across your ‘call to action’.

The call to action refers to the final bit in your site where you lead your reader and your traffic to buy whatever it is you are selling. It is sometimes as simple as the link to your product at the bottom of an article to a line such as: If you are sick of blankety-blank, try XYZ.

Some businesses don’t want these on every page though and that’s ok. After all, you don’t want your site to become a walking advertisement; users will get annoyed and the search engines may drop you like a hot potato. Google in particular has been growing tougher on sites with only ‘fluffy’ content and no real benefits to users.

• Each page you put on your site should have a goal in mind, the overarching one being of turning traffic into consumers.
• You can do this by committing some pages to doing things like building trust and giving reliable information on something related to your product.
• A page can also be dedicated to things like getting followers for social media, a contact information page and a way for people to communicate.

The more goals you have in mind, the more likely it is that people will come and stay and thus meet one or more of your goals. In this way, your website will be come a success and you will see the maximum number of conversions.

Remember that converting people into consumers can be a complex process, involving the building of trust, rapport and loyalty, but these three steps will put you well on your way to doing all of those things.

image: dan

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1. Interact In The Comments

One of the most frustrating things for a new blogger is looking at a post that receives zero comments. It’s easy to see comments as a form of validation, that your post inspired someone to respond. But comments suffer from the experience paradox: in order to get comments you need to have comments. It’s a long cycle that some bloggers never break.

Once you do get comments, though, make sure you respond. On the BlackBerry blog this worked mostly as technical Q&A. We make posts that dispense advice about the BlackBerry. People then ask related questions, and we make it a point to answer every single one of them. People then realized they could get their questions answered if they asked in the comments, and that fostered more comments. Our interactions made all the difference.

On the baseball blog the comments took the form of a discussion about the post, but it operated in the same manner. People would comment on the post, and we would make sure to respond if it was warranted. That continued conversations and encouraged other people to chime in. This would not have been possible if my co-authors and I hadn’t been proactive in commenting.

Bonus Tip: Once you do get comments, you are going to get flamed. Take it in stride. Remember, even if you get a lot of comments, commenters typically account for a small fraction of your readership. That means nasty comments account for less than one percent. Let it go.

2. Don’t Overdo Content

At some point along the way someone — and I’m pretty sure it was Nick Denton at Gawker — decided that more posts was better. And so for a while we had popular blogs pumping out 15 to 20 posts per day. We still see some of that lingering effect. Honestly, it’s overwhelming and probably not for most bloggers. It’s absolutely not something that a single blogger can handle.

You’ll have more time to create valuable content if you stick to one or two posts per day. One well-constructed and thought out post trumps a dozen short, meaningless ones any day. Putting your focus into more in-depth posts helps keep you motivated, too. Nothing causes burnout like overwork, and posting every little bit of news or minutiae is an easy way to lose interest and shut down your blog completely.

If you have multiple authors, that’s great. That will allow you to post multiple times per day without burning yourself out. But make sure that everyone is committed to one solid, unique post per day. Otherwise you’re not doing anyone any favors, and you’ll likely lose audience and interest quickly.

3. Go Mobile

Post ideas will not always come easy. Even some ideas that come easy will not easily develop into posts. Blogging might seem easy, but maintaining a high quality blog is anything but. It takes a certain ingenuity to come up with post topics day after day. Sometimes chancing your environment is all that you need.

If you visit a coffee shop like Starbucks you might see, at any given time, plenty of people with laptops open. If they’re tapping away at the keyboard, they might be writing a blog post. This is one way to get away. I find that park benches are great for really clearing my head and getting to the heart of a new post.

There are plenty of ways to take your blogging mobile. You might prefer your laptop. Some people blog from their smartphones. I personally prefer my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It’s easier to carry around than a laptop, it has a bigger screen than a smartphone, and because it has a data plan I can access the web from anywhere. However you want to do it, make sure you change things up. It keeps the mind fresh, which will keep your posts fresh.

4. Accept That You Will Be Wrong

Every blogger, at some point in her career, will write something that is completely, unequivocally wrong. That might happen in her young days, when readership is scarce and comments are nonexistent. That might seem like the best time, but in the long-term it might be the worst. There’s a learning moment there that might not pass if the blogger is not held accountable.

It might seem like a bad thing to be wrong when you have a readership and comments. People will remark about how you are wrong, and many will do it in a nasty, demeaning way. Do not fret about this. Take the opportunity to learn why you were wrong. Where in the process did things go off track? Then take that lesson and learn from it, so it doesn’t happen again.

This is why new bloggers might not recognize the opportunity. They might think no blood, no foul. But that’s the opposite of the truth. We can’t sweep our wrongs under the rug. It’s only when we learn from our mistakes that we grow. Embrace that. Your readers will appreciate you even more for it.

image: kristi

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If yes, then you are into the right page. Most of the bloggers start blogging as a hobby work and used to write personal stuffs right from their cats to girls, everything they like.

However, now you are looking to turn your blog into a business – yes, it requires lot of refactoring work. And don;t worry, that’s not a tough job. Simply follow the below ideas you can definitely turn your personal blog into a business one.

Blog Topic Matters (Identify Primary Topic).

Whenever a person blogs, she or he is actually making an article or a composition about something and that something is the most important part for you to turn your blog into business. Topics must be interesting, it must get the attention of the readers and not only to get their attention but also to force them unconsciously to read the whole blog and after that they will surely wait for more stuffs from yours.

Bit confusing ?

Choose the right topic, you must take down several unwanted topics by eliminating those less catchy ones.

Just go through your list of existing articles and find the most covered topic in your personal blog. You can turn your blog to cover more on that topic – because you have already loved that topic to share with every one.

Basically, for a blog to become a business, it has to be on-topic focused on a market (or we call it as Niche).

Simply, make your blog specific to a primary topic.

Learn how blogging on specific topic helps you to grow your blog towards income.

Re-categorize Your Existing Articles.

Re-write old articles and make them look as if they were not different from the primary blog topic. By doing this, you are actually changing the impact of the article to your readers while maintaining its essence or its original meaning.

he is trying hard to bring up his business....

If you see a non-relevant article (widely differed from you primary topic), delete it from your blog. Or simply move those articles to a new category “miscellaneous”.

Re-write the articles which are closely related to your primary topic. If you have already written great then don’t touch them.

• Make a hierarchy of categories keeping your primary topic as the main category.
• Put all the sub-topics of your primary topic as a new blog category.
• Revise every blog posts you already published and now put them into the right category.
• This way, your personal blog gets structured according to its primary topic.

Hope you are getting my point.

Add more “Purposeful” Articles.

Since now your blog is becoming a business, you have to focus on the audiences from today.

Identify the purpose of your blog, whether you want to sell digital products or to you want to make ad revenue.

Keeping that Purpose mind, write more articles on the primary blog topic.

This way, in few weeks your blog will get its target audience who are willing to buy products from your blog or meeting your purpose. You should learn to write profitable blog posts which helps to earn good from your blog.

Traffic is Key to Business.

Traffic is the driven factor for any online business.

For your business blog to grow, it needs lot of traffic. The visitors should also be related to your blog’s primary topic.

There are many ways to promote your blog and search engines are the major source of traffic. Even this blog gets lot of traffic from search engines especially from Google.

Read this another article to Get more blog traffic. Learn SEO and Social media marketing to widen your blogging knowledge.

Launch Your own Digital Product.

If you think you can, then why not?

Compile all your articles, categories and launch it over the Net as an ebook or write new articles only for your ebook. It will not only make you known to many people as well as online but you will also earn big cash.

I tell you that it is worth the risk you already gave everything for that, didn’t you? so why hide it, if you can show it to the world. There are lot of sites to create ebook online – go through that list and pick one to publish your first ebook.

Promote that ebook from your blog, you can also promote through affiliate networks like CB, CJ – Niche ebooks are always profitable !

Brand Your Blog.

Go and kick out your old design.

Pick a great and premium design for your blog.

Create a logo, create a slogan and choose wise color for your blog to make it branded.

Have a look on this another article on steps to brand your blog !

Conclusion…

Finally, you have made a right decision today to turn your personal blog into business. More important, make a plan and decide, what you want to achieve from your blog.

Keep the plan for long term and break it into short term goals (day-to-day activities).

It takes time to build a successful blog, you have to write persistently with useful articles every day. Learn to market your blog from scratch and follow the advices given in this article, in few months your personal blog earns your great income as a business !

Good Luck.

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Recently, I upgraded the Godaddy account to use Grid hosting (earlier i was using shared hosting) and the results are awesome.

One of the problem with shared hosting is: inability to balance load, as shared hosting will have thousands of domains served from single server. Hence the server could not manage multiple requests from various web sites and this results in low performing web sites.

There comes Grid Hosting that Godaddy uses, i am not sure whether other web hosting provider uses this technology or not today. However, Godaddy claims that they are only providing this kind of solution.

What is Godaddy Grid Hosting ?

As far as with Godaddy, they are saying that Grid Hosting helps to balance load on shared web sites. Again, it is shared hosting only but managed with multiple servers.

That means, the amount of requests coming from various web sites are served by multiple servers and hence your web site may not be low performing.

Definitely, it will be better than serving from single server. This kind of hosting service they call as 4GH (4th Generation Hosting).

To mention, you don’t need to manually control the resource allocation (CPU usage, memory usage), it is done automatically based on the amount of load (or traffic).

Godaddy says, they will add servers to the Grid based on the bandwidth requirement (add servers based on demand).

• The performance of your site never decrease, when traffic of other hosted site increases.
• Also, when one of the server goes down in the Grid, the other server stands to serve your web site – hence more reliable hosting whereas in shared hosting these are the serious problems.

The following diagram shows the pictorial representation of 4GH hosting and how it differs from standard shared hosting.

Godaddy Grid Hosting

Website Loading Speed vs Grid Hosting (with proof).

Before upgrading my shared hosting account to 4GH hosting, I was planning to go for dedicated server as this blog started getting more traffic and also, i have hosted network of blogs with single shared hosting account.

• Basically, with Godaddy shared hosting account i felt the performance was poor.

When i was looking for dedicated server plans across different hosting providers, i found 4GH hosting option in Godaddy itself (this i came to know, when it contacted Godaddy support complaining their poor performance).

• Once upgraded to Grid hosting, the performance of my web sites increases a lot resulted in improved loading speed. It is well known fact that your hosting server performance directly impacts the web site loading time.

In my case, grid hosting improved the loading speed by 4-5 times.

The following screen shot shows the Site Performance metrics captured from Google Analytic. You can see the drastic improvement in loading speed, this is a proof. Currently, it takes ~5 seconds to load this site.

Website loading time improved with Godaddy Grid Hosting

Even there are great improvement in loading speed with my tech blog, which used have lot of images in the home page.

As you are looking for Godaddy Grid hosting review, my recommendation is: go with Godaddy Grid hosting.

First time users: Sign up for Godaddy here.

What hosting provider you use already ? What’s your experience with Godaddy Grid hosting ?

Leave a comment below which helps to bring out real user experiences…..Thanks.

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