Blogging Elements

Key Elements for an Income Blog

Posted on 18. May, 2010 by Brandon Connell in Blog promotion

This is a guest post by Brandon Connell who’s blog you can find at http://www.BrandonConnell.com

Creating a blog with the intention of generating a regular income is a noble task. When you start out with a marketing budget of zero, that task is more difficult than working a regular full time job. Actually turning a profit on such a blog takes time, and you must work with that intention from the beginning.

Your biggest asset from the start is wordpress because it has a wide variety of search engine friendly themes and free plugins at your instant disposal. You can easily find a free php hosting account through google that allows ftp access and sometimes c-panel. Having this type of hosting will allow you to easily upload new plugins, and additional stats tracking called webalizer within c-panel itself.

Once you have your blog installed and ready, you need to choose a design that allows widgets, and has ad slots in it. I recommend using a plugin called MyAdManager which will allow you to accept paypal payments, and instantly publishes advertisers upon receiving payment. When your blog gets popular, you can just sit back and collect the revenue without having to manage any of the ecommerce aspects.

Additional plugins you will need for seo, stats tracking, and expanding your functionality are:

• AddToAny: Subscribe Button - Help readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader or feed service.
• Akismet - Comes with the wordpress install but requires an api code to work. This protects your blog against spam.
• All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• CommentLuv - Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.
• flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site.
• Follow My Links - Do not automatically add the rel=nofollow attribute to links in comments by the post author, strip nofollow from links to the post author’s web page. This encourages blog comments.
• Global Translator - Automatically translates a blog in 48 different languages. Brings in traffic from other countries and non-native speakers.
• Google Analytics for WordPress - This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
• Google Sitemaps - This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• BM KeywordLinks - A SEO plugin that helps you to automatically link keywords to articles.
• LiveJournal Crossposter Remix - Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog.
• MyAdManager – Manages 125×125 ads automatically. Also allows the ability to add new ads and make them live on the confirmation of payment from paypal.
• Newsletter - Newsletter is a cool plugin to create your own subscriber list, to send newsletters, to build your business.
• nStatistics - This plugin generate complex blog statistics for users and robots.
• Please Link 2 Me - This plugin adds a text box containing all the code necessary for visitors to easily create links back to your article from their website.
• SEO Friendly Images - Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
• Smart Youtube - Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.
• Static Toolbar - Static Toolbar displays a static toolbar in the bottom of the page, like the facebook’s one. The toolbar may contain last posts, rss feed, search engine, social network and sharing links.
• WP-Sticky - Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.
• WP-UserOnline - Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).
• WP to Twitter - Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.

These are some of the plugins that I include on all of my blogs. They provide advanced functionality that allows me to build and maintain traffic, as well as enhance the media capabilities of my blog. Making your blog generate an income is more than adding a few plugins though.

Blog marketing is a huge deal, and something you must do on a daily basis if you are taking your blog seriously. I understand that it is discouraging to run a blog and post daily for months without making an income, but you are using that time to build a foundation for success. Persistence is what pays off, and you cannot lose sight of that. Keep in mind that while you cannot see an immediate income, things are going on that you cannot see which will make your blog a huge success if you just keep going with the routine.

Key blog marketing techniques include commenting on other blogs and including your link in the url field. Actually take part in the blog’s conversation and avoid spamming. Assume that the blog owner will notice spam right off the bat and delete it immediately, so it was a waste of your time to do so in the first place.

Forums are also a great way to generate some traffic and build links. Forums usually let you include your link in your signature. Your signature appears beneath every single forum post you make. Because the link is included in your signature, you don’t have to post it in your actual post because it will look like spam.

One of your biggest traffic sources will come from guest posting on other blogs. If you post a quality article on another blog which has traffic, you will bring in a new group of readers to your own blog. You can easily find blogs to guest post on by doing a google search for “guest blogging”. There are forums, social networks, and other sites dedicated to guest bloggers. This article you are reading now is a guest post, and I wrote this article specifically for this blog.

You can generate even more traffic by writing articles and posting them on article publishing websites. You can find a ton of such sites by doing a google search for “free article publishing”. You will establish yourself as an expert this way, and those kinds of websites always get good rankings in search engines. Some of them even allow re-publishing and any webmaster that does so is required to maintain a link to the authors website in order to use the article. This will help you build one-way links to your blog and increase your Google PageRank.

If your website is also in place to generate service business, you can publish press releases on free press release websites.

There are lots of free marketing methods available on the internet today, and it just takes a little research to find them. Start now by looking at what you have already done, and how you can improve upon it with the tips I provided. Don’t forget to stop by my blog for a free newsletter, and lots more tips.

Tags: blog marketing, Blogging, creating an income blog, free wordpress plugins, guest blogging, monetizing a blog