5th Key: Monetization – 7 Keys to Better Blogging in 7 Days

There seems to be a mystique about making money online from blogging. There seems to be no end to the sales pitches for this or that system. There is quite a lot of fantastic, useful information, however. There are blogs that specialize in how to make money blogging. There are also a huge number of bloggers who act like they’re going to help you make money online, when in fact they’ve barely been blogging for any length of time and don’t know how to do anything other than rip off other bloggers’ posts. Both the experienced, legitimate money-bloggers and the ignorant hacks often make the same mistake: they focus on programs, systems, tricks and techniques. Often, it’s valid to do so, but none of it means anything without the real secret to successful blog monetization.

Do you want to know what the real secret it is to successfully make money blogging? I’m just going to spell it out for you and take away all the mystery! Here it is:

It’s the 1st Key to better blogging: content production. In other words: quality content that people want to come back for and link to and send their friends to is the secret to effective blogging for money. Excellent content is the foundation upon which you build everything else for your blog:

• Design considerations are based on what kind and volume of content the blog will carry.
• Quality content is the single biggest factor in search engine optimization, as it will naturally contain the correct search keywords people will use to find it.
• Quality content is the single biggest reason why you will get numerous backlinks with the correct anchor text (the words that people click on to follow a link).
• Quality content is the single biggest reason why you will grow your RSS and email subscriber base.
• Quality content is the single biggest reason why you will get traffic (and this is because of the some of the points just mentioned above).

Without quality content, everything else is just scrabbling over nothing more than a few pennies. Great content–remarkable content–will bring in traffic, which is necessary before anything else of consequence can happen. It’s generally agreed upon by other professional bloggers (Yaro Starak has mentioned this and I’ve read it a few times on forums I trust) that you need at least 500 to 1,000 visitors a day before you could ever see any real money from advertising.

What You Can Do Now

• Learn about blog monetization methods, their ins and outs, ups and downs… but don’t implement anything until you feel you know what you might be in for. Forums, rather than blogs, are a good place to see people agonizing over how the various programs work. You may not have anything to say, yet, but if you lurk, you can learn a lot. Digital Point Forums and Webmaster World are two massive repositories of past and present discussions on monetization. Not all of it is blog-related, but that’s not necessary to learn a lot from these two forums. For a blog-related source of monetization information, I recommend Dosh Dosh. Maki, the author behind Dosh Dosh, really knows how to present useful information about making money online. Much of it is applicable to blogging. And, of course, there’s Darren Rowse, ProBlogger, with a huge backstore of posts.
• Learn about the policies and the terms of service (TOS) agreements of programs like Google AdSense or any affiliate program you might be considering.
• Plan out for yourself what you’re willing to do… and what you’re not willing to do. Make yourself a promise about integrity and keep it. The web is littered with the corpses of dead blogs whose authors sold out before they even took off, and so went nowhere. Remember: just because you’ve sold out, that don’t mean anyone’s buying. Draw the map of your boundaries. Burn that map into your heart.

Your Feedback is Desired

Leave a comment with a link back to a post you wrote after you read this. Blog about how you intend to apply these concepts to your blog. At the end of this series, I’m going to pick the best examples and link to them. So please leave a comment below and subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of them! Tomorrow is the Sixth Key: Blog Tools.