On one hand, starting a blog can be outright one of the most effective ways on the planet of establishing an online presence. The entire nature of a good blog encourages interaction from readers and creates a presence that people and search engines love. Blogging can help a person to establish credibility in most industries, in fact many industry experts have become known as such through blogging.

On the other hand, the sad truth is that by percentage, most bloggers create nothing more than a frustrating time-suck. Do you guys remember the 1986 movie “The Money Pit“? Walter Fielding, played by Tom Hanks, and his wife buy a beautiful mansion at a remarkable price. It turns out that the Fielding’s beautiful home falls apart, and the Fieldings are forced to spend all of their time and life savings to get the house into decent condition.

I created this article so that you can learn to create a successful blog while avoiding the traps that would make you continually frustrated and lacking in positive results. Please consider it as a discussion, I will be answering questions in the comment section at the bottom of the page.

I’m going to assume that since you have reached this article, you are interested in starting a blog. Some of you may have a blog and want to make sure that you haven’t missed any important steps in your blogging journey. Regardless of your level of knowledge and experience in this arena, I sincerely hope that this article will help you to achieve your goals.

This post is one that may take you a few days to process, so feel free to come back as often as you need to. Since I originally posted this, I’ve found that many of my readers and students have a hard time understanding some of the simple and powerful keyword strategies that make blogs such powerful marketing tools.

To help create the proper foundation for anyone looking to create a passive income with a blog, I’ve created an email mini-course called “5 Days to Success With Keywords.” In the course I explain how my blogs make money with keywords and search engine traffic.

The whole point of creating an article like this is to give you a resource you can use to learn about blogging. That means it will help you to get a blog set up and will show you how you can make money with a blog.

Since most of my business is online, I am asked this question almost daily, “How do people get started on the internet?” The first section of this enormous article will help you to see why you should be starting a blog if you’re new to internet marketing and why you should consider starting one even if you’re an experienced veteran in the online marketing world. After we go over why you should consider starting a blog, we’ll go over how to start one that doesn’t become a time sucking money pit.

Why Starting A Blog Is Probably Your Best Option For Online Success

The nature of blogs give you some very specific advantages over other types of sites. To best illustrate what these advantages are, let me explain in detail what a blog actually is. In the following paragraphs I want to go over important characteristics that make blogs different from other types of sites.

Blogs show the newest addition to the site on the homepage. This makes for quite a few specific advantages including:

• Ability to bring readers back for more information or more entertainment. Placing the newest material on the home page makes it really easy to find and helps to set the hook that will bring readers back again and again.
• Ability to get multiple links from sites. With a traditional site you will be consistently fighting to get links. With a blog, returning readers may link to 50+ blog posts that you write over the lifetime of your blog. Each time they do you will get some additional traffic and a search engine benefit. To get your readers to link to multiple posts that you write, they will need to be able to easily find your new material. This is why having your most recent work on your homepage is hugely important.

It’s easier to get search engine traffic from a blog than it is from other types of sites. Blogs have some very tricky ways to generate search engine traffic that are much harder to accomplish with regular websites. Here are some characteristics of blogs that help them to rank better in Google and other search engines:

• Blogs let search engines know each time new material is published. When you add something new, your blog sends a message called a ‘ping’ to blog search engines immediately. This lets the blog search engines know that your blog has new content, and gets it into Google and other engines more quickly. It also creates direct links to your blog website, which gives you a ranking benefit in Google.
• Blogs get linked to more often than traditional sites. Almost every search engine out there (including Google) uses links to determine which sites are the best. They will include sites that have the most links above sites that don’t have as many. This will give you an advantage over many of your competitors.
• People leave comments on blogs. Google and other search engines like to see constant updates from websites. Since people will be leaving comments on your blog, they will be doing a lot of the updating for you. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of your pages, Google will see that page as having been updated.
• Blogs structure content for you. One of the hardest things about creating a website from scratch is figuring out how to structure your content. Blogs do this work for you and create a search engine friendly structure.

Blogs become communities more easily than other types of sites. The process of bringing people back to a website again and again is hugely important if you want to make a large amount of money from one site. Blogs allow for 2-way communication and this makes them more interesting to visitors. They can leave their comments and ask you questions. Since a person that is interacting is much more likely to come back for another visit, this gives a blog a lot more upside. When people keep coming back it gives you more and more hits which will turn into more and more ad dollars and/or sales.

What Exactly Is A Blog?

The word blog is short for weblog. You can think of a blog as a type of website that is very much like a journal that shows the most recent addition on the blog homepage, which is often the homepage of the site.

If you take a look at the homepage of this site, you will see the most recent additions to the site there. Each time I publish something new, it’s placed on the homepage so that people can easily find it. This helps people to come back often to check for more material.

You may be getting nervous about the technical aspects of starting a blog. Don’t worry because there are some free software applications that can help you with this process. I will be covering the setup later in the article, so there’s no need to worry about this now.

Is Blogging For You?

No matter how effective a blog can be for establishing an online presence, you will have to decide whether blogging is the right business model for you. Every business out there requires unique abilities and characteristics and starting a blog isn’t any different.

Many people are attracted to blogging because it’s cheap and still provides a large upside. The extremely low entrance requirements for the business make it very cost effective, but also attract individuals that lack the persistence, motivation, and ambition to start a blog that can reach a high level of income.

I can tell you that almost every person is capable of starting a blog that makes money, but the amount that a person can make with a blog is determined by many factors including intelligence, passion, like-ability, and more importantly determination and self-belief.

You definitely don’t have to be abnormally intelligent or talented to create a blog that makes money. You do need to have a lot of persistence and determination. I’ve personally seen many friends that have the talent to make a full-time living fail at blogging simply because they quit before the fruits of their labors manifested themselves. I’ve seen other friends that have a lot less talent who have made very nice incomes through blogging simply because of stubborn determination.

Crucial Traits Of Successful Bloggers:

• Self-Motivation
• Determination
• Self-Belief
• Persistence

Some of you may look at those four character traits and wonder if you have enough of them to ever create a successful blog or business for that matter. I can tell you that there was a time in my life that I struggled in all four of those areas. I consider myself blessed to be able to say that I escaped from that negative cycle and turned myself into a person of confidence, ambition, and motivation.

You are the only one that can ultimately determine if you have what it takes to develop a successful blog. The best gauge of whether you can do it or not is whether you are willing to develop yourself as a person during the process. If you’re starting from ground zero, you have a lot to learn. However, there are plenty of resources that can help you during that process.

If you are thinking about starting a blog just to ‘try it out’, save yourself some time right now and don’t do it. In order to start a blog that won’t be a waste of time, you will need to make up your mind beforehand that you will do whatever it takes to find success, no matter the cost or amount of time required to reach your desired level.

Why Starting A Blog Is The Way To Start Online

There are literally hundreds of different methods that can be used to make money on the internet. There is e-commerce (selling products), blogging, traditional site operation, email marketing, pay-per-click marketing, affiliate marketing, social network marketing – the list goes on and on.

When people start learning about the internet and how to profit from it, they often have no idea what to start with. I can tell you that starting a blog will provide you with a much needed education that will help you in the future no matter what endeavors you take on. Free, easy to use software will help to simplify this process so that you don’t have to spend months learning all of the technical aspects of e-commerce and other methods for generating online income.

The Enormous Upside Of Blogging

I have to admit that I never would have started a blog myself if I hadn’t recognized the huge amount of upside that blogging provides. The ability to generate traffic with a blog website is much higher than it is with other types of websites, and this will of course allow the owner to create a substantial income as traffic equals money.

A huge positive to blogging is that some of your marketing is done for you by your blog. When you add a new article to your blog (called a blog post), your blog will notify blog search engines of the new material (called content). The blog search engines will then create links to your new material so that people who search them will be able to find you. This action provides for quite a few benefits including an increase in direct traffic from blog search engines, and also a search engine benefit for search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

The Monetization Potential Of Blogging

‘Monetization’ means making money. I’ve seen lists that have literally hundreds of different methods that people use to make money with blogs. Instead of providing one of those lists that’s full of mostly useless information, here is a short list of methods that actually work to make great money with blogs that have good traffic:

• Direct Advertising – No matter what industry or topic your blog covers, there will certainly be people and companies that can benefit from advertising on your site – as long as you have traffic. The amount that you can charge will depend entirely on your traffic levels but I can tell you that this can be a very significant method for creating an income. There are bloggers out there that are making over $15,000 per month from this revenue stream alone, and team blogs that do over $100,000 per month in direct ad sales.
• Affiliate Marketing – In order to be truly successful as a blogger that makes money with affiliate marketing, you should recommend products that you really use yourself. After you have people that have subscribed to your site you will be able to develop a reputation as a trusted source for information. If you want to do well with affiliate marketing, never betray that trust. Don’t recommend products that aren’t useful to you and your trustworthiness will benefit both you and the people that read your site. Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest revenue streams I have on my blog, and that is because I would never recommend a product that people can’t benefit from.
• Product Reviews – No matter what your topic is, there will almost always be companies in your industry that will be willing to pay to create buzz for their new products and services. In order to maintain your integrity as a blogger, you will always need to be 100% honest in your reviews. For me, that has meant letting companies know beforehand that there will be both positive and negative points that will be discussed in the review. The positive points will help people the see the benefits of the product, and the negatives will help companies to know what to change.
• Contextual Advertising – Programs like Google Adsense can provide bloggers with a simple way to make money. You can read more about how this program works here: Make Money With Adsense. The basic idea is that Google will allow you to place paid ads on your blog and will pay you when people click on those ads.
• Selling Personal Products And Services – The #1 revenue stream of Court’s Internet Marketing School is the sale of our services. We are able to provide people with the help they need to make their businesses grow, and that help is very valuable. If your blog is built around information that can help people to learn something, keep in mind that some people will want and need more help than you can provide on your blog. Some people, (myself included) would rather spend money than time to learn something new.

You can definitely build a blog into a full time income, however this will take time. The most self-destructive thing you can do is demand immediate, monetary results from your blog. This will only cause you to implode when they don’t come. The key is to be patient with your blog, while sticking to the success principles that I will outline for you in this post.

The easiest way to turn your blog into a time-sucking money pit is by quitting before you get the results you’re looking for. Don’t waste months of your life by quitting before you get results. If you decide that starting a blog is for you, make sure you are 100% committed to seeing it through before you take your first step.

I sincerely hope that by now you believe that by starting a blog, you can create income for yourself. If you don’t, I would recommend working on your self-belief and personal determination.

Choosing A Profitable Blog Topic

When the time comes to prepare to start a blog, the first and probably most important step is choosing a topic that can be profitable. In theory, there are thousands of topics that you could cover with your blog, but some will be much more profitable than others.

Although there are many different profitable topics, most people don’t realize that skills and interests they already have could translate into profitable blogs. When people talk to me in person about starting a blog, I ask them this series of questions before making any recommendations:

• Where do you work and what do you do?
• What topics are you interested in?
• What magazines and/or books do you like to read?
• What do you do with your free time?

I talk to people all the time that spend hours every day reading about something they’re very interested in without realizing that they already have their topic. If you are in this boat, I think you probably should blog about that topic, since the interest is already there.

Before making your decision final, I would recommend taking a look at whether you can actually make money with the topic you are considering. The easiest way to find this out is by looking for a similar, successful blog. If another person or group can make money with a given topic, you can too – as long as you have as much determination as they do.

To make this process a little easier, here are some random ideas that could be turn into profitable blogs:

• Make Money Online
• Investment Strategies
• Real Estate Investing Ideas
• Basic Computer Lessons
• Computer News
• Cell Phone News
• Computer Programming
• Teach People How To Diet
• Parenting
• Pets
• Celebrity Gossip
• Politics
• Sports
• Movies
• Exercise
• Humor
• Home Decor
• Books
• Travel
• Motivation
• Business
• Cars

Now I couldn’t possibly cover all of the possibilities for profitable blog ideas. If you have an idea for a blog, please feel free to use the comments in this post or my contact page. I would be happy to give you feedback about any idea you are able to come up with.

Another interesting metric that can be used to determine whether a blog topic can be profitable is whether or not there are off-line businesses that are profitable in that industry. Are there off-line businesses that do well in the pet industry? Absolutely. Are there off-line businesses that do well in the finance industry? Of course. Are there off-line businesses that do well in the industry you’re considering? If there are, there will probably be online money as well.

Once you have chosen your topic, you will move on to the next stage in the lesson.

Choosing A Domain Name

I’ve written countless times on this site about the enormously important selection of your domain name, which is the .com name of your blog website. In the spirit of being thorough, I would like to discuss this topic further. I would highly recommend taking at least a week to determine the domain name of your site. This will give you ample time to brainstorm and make an educated decision. Do not extend this process for more than one week. Procrastination will inhibit your progress and you need to get started as soon as possible.

When choosing a domain name there are a lot of factors to consider. To help you to make that decision, I would like to address a few of crucial ones here:

• Domain Brandability – In order to create a blog that is highly profitable, you will need to get people to associate your domain name with good knowledge and information in your industry. This process is called branding and is vital for any good blog. Using a name that doesn’t relate to your industry makes the process a lot harder. I have chosen to use my own name for the domain name of my site. It took a lot of extra work to get people to associate my site with internet marketing and if you go this route you will need to plan on putting in the time. Good examples of brandable names that fit well in their industries are ProBlogger.net and Techcrunch.com.
• Domain Extension – There are plenty of domain name extensions to choose from, including .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and many more. I would highly recommend going with a .com extension if you’re starting a blog. This will make your blog website easier to find and will also help you to get a better price if you were to ever sell your site.
• Domain Length – I wouldn’t choose a domain name that had more than three words in it. Using domain names that have 4+ words will make it harder for people to find and remember your site. Keep the name as simple as possible.
• Hyphens and Underscores – When choosing your domain name, stay away from hyphens (dashes) and underscores. These symbols will make your name much harder to remember and you will always be sending traffic to the non-hyphened or underscored version of your domain name. I have seen plenty of sites that were able to make it with these symbols in the domain, but why would you want to make it harder for yourself?

As long as a domain is available and doesn’t break any of the above rules, you should add it to your list of possibilities. After a week you should have plenty of possibilities on your list, and you will then choose the name that you like the best. Since each of them fits the criteria of a good name, it will come down to personal preference when you make the final decision.

Checking Availability Of Domain Name

Any site that sells domain names will allow you to check a name for its availability. Any name that is currently registered by another person will come back unavailable. The site that I use to check for the availability of domain names is called ProudDomains.com, but really any domain registrar will do.

Once you have chosen an available name that you want to use for your blog, you will of course register it. I use ProudDomains.com for this as well, it costs under $10 per year to register a domain name there.

Setting Up Your Blog

Once you have a domain name, you will then proceed to the setting up of your blog. This will involve setting up hosting, installing your blog software, and starting to add material to your site.

Web Hosting And Blog Setup

A web host is a server (computer) on the internet that your blog will be stored on. I use ProudDomains for most of my hosting because it’s pretty simple and straightforward to use. They also have a support number that you can use if something gets messed up. In another article that I wrote about starting a blog, I have included a walk-through that you can use to get your hosting set up properly. You can find that here: Starting A Blog. The article also covers the installation of WordPress, which is the blog software that I would highly recommend using.

Developing Your Blog

If you followed the instructions properly in the other article I linked to in the last paragraph, you should now have a blog set up. You still have a long way to go but are off to a great start. Congratulations, you have just started a new business with a few days work and less than $20 out of pocket.

Giving People What They Want

The biggest piece of advice that I could give anyone that is starting a blog is simple. Forget about what you want, and start thinking about what other people want. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when starting a blog is believing that people are interested in you personally. Unless you have off-line celebrity, this will not be the case. If you want your blog to be a business, treat it like a business. People will read your blog if it takes care of one of their needs.

Please take the time now to think about this concept well. If you owned a Radio Shack, would you talk to every person that came to the store about how you are frustrated with your husband and kids? Would you talk to your prospects about how you ate a really crappy burrito last night? If you would, I would never recommend buying a Radio Shack. People go into Radio Shack because they want help figuring out how to take care of their problems, not to deal with yours.

People that visit your blog will be there for one reason – because you provide or claim to provide something that they need or want. You need to keep this concept fixed in your mind every time you work on your blog. Forget about yourself and focus on providing people with information they need, or with information they enjoy. Stay on topic, stay on topic, stay on topic.

How Often Should You Post

This is a highly debatable topic to say the least. Some people believe that you need to post as much as possible, and other people think that you need to choose quality over quantity. I believe that quality is the most important factor to consider, but I also believe that people will lose interest in you if they have to wait too long for your next post.

If you desire growth for your blog, you will need to post quality articles as much as possible. If you can’t post a quality article at least three times per week it could take years for your blog to grow to the needed level. Start by posting 3-7 times per week and focus on providing value. If you have the time and knowledge to post more, by all means do it.

How To Make Your Blog Look Unsuccessful

More often than not, bloggers scream ‘lack of success’ from the mountain tops. They will plaster all over their blogs that the blog is ‘their journey to online success’. If you are in this boat, I don’t mean to offend you. What I do mean to do is tell you that you are basically telling people that your are not successful right now. You might as well say, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” because that’s exactly what you’re implying.

People are looking for blogs and websites that know what they’re doing so that they can learn. If you don’t know what you’re doing you will need to learn as quickly as possible. Think of it like a new job – do you know 100% of the ropes on your first day at work? Let’s say you start working at a Radio Shack and on your first day you don’t have the answers the people are looking for. Does that mean that you’re going to give up? You might be uncomfortable for a few weeks, but after that you’ll have a better understanding. In the meantime, you’re going to do the best you can with the knowledge you have.

If a person comes in to your Radio Shack and wants to buy a cell phone, are you going to tell them that you don’t know anything about cell phones and send them on their way? No, you’re going to do your best to sound professional and knowledgeable right?

No matter what industry you have decided to blog about, people will be evaluating nearly every word you write. Be a professional and people will treat you like one. Be an amateur and people will treat you like one.

Make Your Best Information Easy To Find

I could never stress enough the importance of creating an easy-to-see section that contains your best work. When a stranger visits your site, they will often click around a little to see if there’s anything that interests them. If they can easily access your best information, they will come around more often and may even subscribe to your site on the spot. I have such a section called ‘Court’s Best Work’, and I owe a large amount of my subscriber base to that section.

Other Tips And Tricks For Developing Your Blog

In this article, I couldn’t possibly include everything that you can do to develop your blog. Since I have written extensively on the topic of blog development, here are some links that I would recommend taking a look at:

• 10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie
• Related Posts Plugin and SEO
• Not Using Permalinks – Search Engine Suicide
• Using The All-In-One SEO Pack To Target Keywords
• The Three Personalities Of Exceptional Copywriters
• How To Trash Your Blog’s Brand In 5 Easy Steps
• 3 Reasons You Desperately Need RSS Subscribers
• This Worst Post In The Universe
• Looking At Keyword Stats Like An A-Lister
• The Obvious Secret To Never Running Out Of Post Ideas
• A Not-So-Often-Used Trick To Increase RSS Subscriptions
• Creating Landing Pages Worthy Of Getting Ranked #1
• How To Create Rippin’ HTML Title Tags
• 12 Ways To Get People Hooked On Your Site
• The Secret Of Building A High-Traffic Site

Promoting Your Blog

Once you have created and started to develop your site, you can start promoting it. Promoting a blog is not an overnight process but it shouldn’t take years either. If you are promoting correctly, you should be able to see increases in your traffic during each calendar month.

Since every blog is different, it is impossible for me to lay down exact time-lines for blog promotion. That said, there are certain methods that you should use in the beginning stages of blogging that you probably won’t use in the latter stages, and vice versa. In order to illustrate these differences, I would like to lay down a simple, estimated time-line that will approximate the process of promoting a blog. Please understand that this line isn’t meant in any way to be exact. Some of you will implement ideas more quickly than others. Additionally, some ideas can be integrated more easily in certain industries.
0-2 Months

During the first two months you have your blog online, you will have very little leverage. This means that other bloggers probably won’t really respect you and this means that they will probably not help you much with your promotion. During this time period, you will also get very little love from search engines like Google, who favor heavily sites with more age and more online presence.

Although these factors are working against you, there are still methods that you can use to promote your blog. Keep in mind in the beginning that each new visitor is a victory. Each time a site links to you during this time period is a huge success and should be treated as such. Here are some of the best promotion methods you can use during this low-leverage promotional period:

• Blog Carnivals – Blog carnivals are basically articles that people create on their sites that showcase other articles related to a certain topic. Usually all you have to do to be showcased on a blog carnival is create an article that’s on topic that you can submit. People that create blog carnivals will rarely exclude a decent article, so it’s a great method to use to build some links in the beginning stages of your blog. Each carnival will usually also deliver a small amount of traffic to your site. Here’s a post where I explained how to ‘carnival’: How To Get Links Using Blog Carnivals.
• Commenting On Other Blogs – This promotional method doesn’t provide you with a ton of leverage, but should still be used in the beginning stages of blogging. Some of the most important links I was able to get from other blogs in the beginning of Court’s Internet Marketing School came from people who found me because of a comment I left on their blog. There is a great post that I read on this subject a while back here: Do You Have A Blog Commenting Strategy?
• List Building – In order to turn your blog into a credible site sometime in the future, you will need to get to know some of the more prominent and mid-level bloggers in your industry. While this won’t help you during this time period, it’s a great time to work on building the list of people you know in your industry. I would start by sending a simple letter of introduction while letting the bloggers know that you would be happy to link to their valuable articles. Asking them for help or links at this point is almost ridiculous – that will come into play much later down the road.

If you have some regular traffic after your first two months (this amount doesn’t have to be huge), you know that you’re on the right track. By that time, you should have a few readers that visit regularly and you should also have at least a few people that read your site through RSS or email RSS. Since you started from ground zero and haven’t spent any money on promotion, don’t worry if the numbers are small. Later on you will be able to use higher leverage to create bigger promotional opportunities.

If you don’t have any regular readers at this point, it would be wise to figure out why. Either your blog’s content isn’t good enough or you haven’t been promoting enough. Continuing on without figuring out the problem would be a waste of time. Take an honest look at your site and promotional methods and try to identify areas where you can improve.

3-6 Months

By this time you should have some regular readers and hopefully some contacts that will be able to really help you to promote your site. While this time period will provide you with some additional leverage that you didn’t have during the first two months with your blog, you will still have relatively low leverage compared to what you will have in later time periods.

During this time, Google and other search engines will continue to show you very little love. This is normal and doesn’t mean that you are doing something wrong. As I stated earlier in this lesson, Google favors heavily websites that have more time online and a larger presence. Even though search engines aren’t going to show you a ton of love during this time period, you should be able to get some search traffic. You will also start laying the foundation that will lead to the big search traffic that’s down the road.

Additionally, this is a great time period to network with bloggers that are close to your level of success. Since it really doesn’t do any good to network with sites that aren’t related to yours, take some time to search Google and Technorati for blogs that cover similar topics.

Here are the promotional methods that I would be using during this time period:

• Aggressive Link Building – While your search traffic probably won’t be spectacular during this time period, you will want to use this time to build links, because that will help you in the future. There are a lot of different methods that you can use for this, but I would focus primarily on blogroll link exchanges (don’t do too many during this time period because later on you will be able to do exchanges with stronger sites – do 5 or so), blog carnivals, and emailing other bloggers when you create great content. You can supplement this with some good article marketing.
• Socializing With Other Bloggers – This includes commenting on other blogs, emailing authors of blogs, and just plain being cool to people. I wrote an article a long time ago for eMoms at Home and published some surprising side effects of being social. Here’s the article: My 8 Hours As A Blogging Socialite.
• Social Media – With the help of some of your friends and contacts, you can start to use social media for traffic during this time. You will need to take some time to research what kinds of content do well on each of the social sites that you decide to use. I would focus primarily on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and BloggingZoom. They are all open to bloggers and of course I have a preference for BloggingZoom because I own part of it. Your success with social bookmarking and voting will depend heavily on your ability to write interesting content. Don’t get discouraged when you aren’t a smash hit at first. You can and will learn to do well with social media if you keep working at it.

By the end of the first six months your blog is online, you should be able to get a significant amount of repeat traffic. Again, if the repeat traffic isn’t there you will need to re-evaluate your site. There’s no reason to keep working the same way if you aren’t getting the results you’re looking for. Make some changes and take a hard look at where you might be going wrong.

7+ Months

After the first six months are over, you will be able to make a lot more progress with your blog. Time will start working in your favor because of a few important factors:

• Google will stop hating you. If your site was placed in Google’s sandbox, it will likely come out at about this time which will mean that you will start getting the Google traffic that you deserve.
• You should have at least some name/brand recognition at this point. If not, you failed during the first two sections of promotion so you will need to start over with the list building and networking.

The use of these two advantages will give you increased leverage as you start this period of promotion. This will give you more and more ability to create traffic with your promotional efforts. During this time period, these are the methods I would focus on:

• Marketing Your Best Articles – By this point you should have friends and contacts in your industry. You should create mutually beneficial relationships where you help each other to market good articles. You will help your contacts by linking to their good work and they will link to yours.
• Guest Posting – Once you have established somewhat of a name for yourself or for your brand you will be able to approach bigger blogs about becoming a guest poster. As long as you have earned some respect in your industry these bigger blogs will probably be happy to have you. There are plenty of sites that accept guest posting, and many of them have tens of thousands of RSS readers. I’m sure that you can see the value in getting your name in front of that many people.
• Social Media – As long as you continue to provide value to the online communities you are targeting, you will find continued success with social media. You can increase that success by expanding your area of influence and networking.
• Link Building – During this time period you will continue your link building efforts. This will help you to increase your search engine traffic and direct traffic from other sites. You will use basically the same methods I talked about in the previous section.

Additional Promotional Information

Let’s be honest, I couldn’t possibly include everything about blog promotion in a single article. In order to help you guys to understand more about the successful promotion of blogs, here are some other articles that I’ve written on this topic:

• Increase Search Traffic With Effective Link Structure 2.0
• 10 Secrets Of Advanced SEO Copywriters
• The #1 Word Of Successful Bloggers And Copywriters
• Creating Landing Pages Worthy Of Getting Ranked #1
• How To Create Rippin’ HTML Title Tags
• Search Engine Optimization For Yahoo
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No matter where you’re starting out, no matter what you currently know, I believe that you can start a profitable blog. I sincerely hope that this article can help you to get started, while showing you how to avoid the pitfalls that could waste your valuable time.

Top 10 Mistakes You Can Make When Starting A Blog

Some of the best information I’ve read on blogging hasn’t focused on what I should be doing, but instead focuses on what I shouldn’t be doing as a blogger. Here’s a short-list of pitfalls that will waste your time and stunt the growth of your blog:

1. Choosing topics that aren’t interesting to you.
2. Failure in providing enough value to your target audience.
3. Quitting before your traffic comes.
4. Failure in learning about search engine optimization techniques.
5. Failure to make friends and/or make contact with prominent bloggers in your industry.
6. Failure to write with social media success in mind.
7. Relying 100% on Adsense.
8. Blogging too much about yourself, thinking that people are interested in you.
9. Failure in approaching your blog as a business.
10. Failure to believe that your blog will be a success.

Source: Courtneytuttle.com

In a previous post of mine I mentioned that it wasn’t the best idea to put all your eggs in one basket. The reason why this is is because if you do and you have issues with that income stream then all of your income will come to a complete halt.   So to avoid this issue I have diversified my income streams by using a few different advertising networks to increase my earnings. The newest thing I have added to my website is Amazon Associates.  How it works is you can put links/banners, widgets, and/or an aStore on your website and when a person purchases a product from Amazon you get a percentage of that sale.

Your initial referral rate starts at 4% which is a pretty good starting rate.  Once you refer at least 4 items your referral rate increases to 6%.  Your referral rate can eventually get up to as much as 8.5% (for over 251+ sales)!  Once you start making sales there are a few ways you can get paid.  You can get paid by referral fees as mentioned above and you can also be paid by Amazon gift certificates.  If you want you can get $10 gift certificates for Amazon as payment.  I however choose the check method to get paid directly to my location I work from.  If you select this option you need to earn at least $100 in referral fees before they send you a check.  This is the generic amount that most advertisers make you earn before they will pay you.

So I have just recently added this affiliate to my blog and we will see how much income it generates for me.  If I am lucky it will work as well as Google Adsense has worked on my blog and possibly even better.

So remember to always diversify your income streams and have a few of them at once and eventually you will be making all sorts of money from all the streams and live a happy life!

There are many ways to generate traffic to your blog and I have mentioned plenty of them on my blog already, but what I plan on doing today is giving you a list of the methods I found work best.  I have tried many different ways and some of them give short term results while others have given long term results.  I think it is good to have a little bit of both so you get the maximum amount of traffic to your blog.  So below I will split my traffic generation into two categories: short term and long term traffic generation results.

Short Term Traffic Generation:

Yahoo Answers - If you are interested in driving traffic quickly and easily this is a good one for you to try.  What you do is you post answers or questions with links back to your website and write them in a way that interests readers to come visit your website.  You will get hits right away but they usually don’t visit again after the question is gone.

Facebook - I would say that the links you put in your profile are short term.  The reason that is is because all your friends will check out the new link to your blog / website when you first post it up because of the news feeds but then after that it will die down and you usually won’t get anymore new traffic.

Forums - Posting on forums can be a good way to get short term traffic to your blog.  As long as you are posting useful information on the forums and have a good signature with links to your website you will usually get some decent traffic back to your blog.  Usually a lot more traffic then some of ideas mentioned above but then again it is still only be short term traffic.  However one of the other benefits of this type of traffic is the linkbacks to your website which can help raise your PageRank.

Blog Comments – This is pretty similar to forum posts.  Basically you can get a bit of traffic to your blog / website but you are better off doing this to increase your linkbacks which in turn will hopefully increase your PageRank.

Link Exchange sites – Link exchange sites such as linkreferral will generate traffic to your blog as long as you are using them but once you stop so will the traffic.  Most of the traffic generated with this method however is not very good traffic because people are just interested in getting more traffic to their own website.  Since everyone has the same idea in mind no one really sticks around a website to see what it is about.

Twitter – As far as I can see so far this is a short term way of generating traffic to your blog.  May be after getting a very large follower base you can get long term traffic from this but in the mean time you get hits every once and awhile from this.

EntreCard - This is like linkrefferal in that it is basically a link exchange type program.  You can advertise on other peoples blogs and they can advertise on your blog.  It does generate traffic but majority of it is just traffic where people are interested in getting points so they can make more traffic.  It is worth a shot to try but it might not be the best solution in the long run.

Social Networking - This is a awesome way to get a ton of traffic to your blog.  If you can get to the front page of some networking websites you can see up to 50K unique visitors in a day!  This traffic is awesome but it will not last forever and its not easy to get to the front page.  I definitely recommend doing this step but don’t expect to see traffic for months and months after you post something on the website.

PPC Advertising - This is not something I have tried on this website but is something I have done with my full time job.  PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising and what that is is when you pay for each click you get on your advertising to go to your website.  An example of this is Google Adwords where you see advertisements on the right of the search results.  If you click on them the advertiser has to pay for each click on their advertisement.  This is a very good way to get traffic fast to your website but it will cost you and you will only get it when you pay for it.

Long Term Traffic Generation (The Good Stuff!):

Search Engine traffic – This is really good traffic.  If you can do a bunch of SEO on your blog/website and get a bunch of your pages ranked highly in search engines for key terms then you will get a lot of traffic to your website without a lot of work.  This will always be constant traffic as long as you do not get banned from search engines.  So just be careful not to employ black hat SEO techniques and you should be fine.

Article Directories - This is another way to get long term traffic to your blog.  Once you have submitted enough quality articles to article directories you will constantly get traffic from them to your blog and it is good traffic because people are interested in what you have to say.  So if possible try to always add more articles to article directories.

Link Exchanges - As long as the sites you are exchanging links with do not go under you can usually always get traffic from the links you have exchanged with other websites.  There are rumors that Google doesn’t like this type of traffic generation but I think if you do a little bit of it it cannot hurt your website rank and will bring in some more traffic.

Link Baited Websites – There might be another term for this but this is what I want to call it.  Basically what this is is websites that have linked to your website because they found it interesting and wanted to link to it.  If you can write blog entries that are very interesting to users they will most likely link to it and refer to it in their website.  This is great traffic because it is free and you don’t really need to work for it.

Banner Exchange - This is similar to link exchanges in that you exchange a banner with another website and there is a link on the banner.  It is good for long term traffic as long as both websites stay up and active you can always send traffic to each others websites.

So that is it

For now this is the list of things I have tried so far to generate traffic to my blog.  As mentioned in a lot of the paragraphs some of the traffic generated to the website is a lot better then other traffic but all of them are worth a shot.  I would try some of them yourself and see what works best for you.  And remember as long as you write quality content, lots of content, and do some SEO on your website you should get decent traffic from search engines.

Also if you guys have any other traffic methods you would like to suggest feel free to comment below and I can add your recommendation to my list and link back to your website since you are the contributor of the idea.

So after doing a lot of research and testing one technique for generating traffic that I found to work best for me is to generate traffic through forums. It is important however that the forums that you do participate in are do follow forums.  You can find a list of them here in one of my previous posts.

So how do you generate traffic with forums?

There are a couple ways you can generate traffic with forums.  The main ways you can generate traffic are through links in signatures, review links (in particular threads), and through increased rank from search engines because of the do follow links in the forum.   When trying to generate traffic with forums you need to be careful though not to get banned.  This is something that can happen easily if you do not follow the rules of the board.  This actually happened to me recently because I posted a link in the body of a forum post and they deemed it as self promotion and didn’t take to kindly to it.  So I was given a temporarily ban on that forum.  So be warned that you do need to follow the rules if you don’t want to be banned.

So what forums work for me?

After trying a few ones the two I find that I like the best are DigitalPoint and SitePoint.  The reason why I like these two in particular are because they are do follow forums and they have a lot of traffic.  The type of forums that have very little visitors are very unlikely to send you a lot of traffic to your website.  So what I do is try to be as active as possible in these blogs and as a result get traffic from the members of the forums.  Also a neat feature of DP (DigitalPoint forums) is that if you have an Google Adsense account you can also get a share of the ads shown on an thread you participate in.  Therefore if you are a very active member of the boards you have a chance to make money with your Google Adsense account on the forum as well.  Usually you don’t get a ton of earnings but it is still worth setting up.

So test this out for yourself.  Market your blog with forums.  If done right it can generate plenty of traffic to your blog and you will be on your way to a successful career as a blogger.

One thing a lot of people struggle with when creating a blog is getting enough traffic to the blog.  There are a number of ways you can generate traffic for your blog.  One way I have found to get great traffic to your blog is with LinkReferral.  This is a great site because what you do is your post your website up and then you review and visit other people’s site to get your rank up on the site so people visit your website as well.  It is a great way to generate a lot of traffic to your website.

You can increase the your rank by viewing other sites, submitting site reviews, doing forum posts, and selecting favorites.  If you are interested in getting more traffic to your blog check out LinkReferral.

Many people decide to create a blog because they think they can become a great source of income for them with limited time, effort, and work.  The truth of the matter is is that it takes time to build up a blog to the level of success where it is worth while to put in a couple of hours a day into your blog.  At first you will see hardly any success and for most that discourages them to continue blogging.

It is at that point where you think it isn’t worth while to continue that you need to realize why you started blogging in the first place.  Most people have started because they are passionate about a certain topic and mostly likely want to make a lot of money in the process.  People just need to realize that they need to keep at it in order to become successful.

The longer you blog and update the content on your blog the more likely you are to succeed.  There are many reasons why this is true.  For one, the more content you have on your site over time the more likely it is that search engines with index your content.  Secondly, the age of your website will help search engine ranking.   Thirdly, the more content on your website the more likely readers are inclined to stick around to read other posts on your website.

So in order to be a successful blogger you need to be willing to stick with your blog for a long period of time.  Sticking with a blog for only three months or less isn’t good enough.  Some of the most successful bloggers out there have been blogging for years!  My blog (as I am writing this post) is only a few weeks old but I plan on keeping this blog active for years to come because I enjoy what I write about and want to have success with my blog.

My goal with this blog is to hopefully bring in a thousand or so extra dollars a month so I can add that on to my full time income and have a bit more spending money.  I realize this is going to take a lot of work to do but I believe if I stick with my long term goal with this blog it can be successful and make the extra income that I desire.  I will need to post every day if possible and also market my blog so people know its out there on the Internet.

So, when your income on your blog sucks (like most start up blogs) you need to keep a few things in mind to keep yourself going for the long haul.

• Have a dream – You need to have a dream to be successful.  If you don’t you will lose your will to continue blogging.  My initial goal with this blog is to make enough money to buy myself a large flat screen LCD TV within the next 6 – 9 months.
• You need to remember that blogs grow exponentially - at first your blog traffic will be very little and getting more traffic will be slow.  However as time goes by and you write more content and get more readers you will get recognized and there will be a spiral affect and people will start coming to your blog faster then you can imagine.
• Stay focused with your posts – you need to make sure you do not stray too much from your niche of your blog.  If you start straying too much from the main focus of your blog then readers will not follow and most likely lose interest in your blog.
• Be very passionate - you need to be invested and interested in what your writing about because your readers will pick that up from reading your blog.  If the readers know you are interested in what you are writing about it is more likely that it is something that they will get interested in as well.

Just remember when starting up your blog and are having limited success that you need to remember why you started your blog in the first place.  You need to be in it for the long run otherwise you are unlikely to succeed as a blogger.