Friday, September 5, 2008

How to Blog Like a Pro and Profit Like a Guru

How many times have you heard the words blog or web log or how about online diary? If you have been active online for the past few years, you’ve probably heard it thousands of times.

What you might not realize is that blogging is not only one of the fastest and easiest ways to get indexed in search engines but it is also a huge source of income that is just waiting for you to grab your share.

Blogging has actually been around for quite a while but only up until the past few years have online as well as offline marketers, become aware of how powerful this medium is.

You can find plenty of free to very inexpensive places to start a blog. A few of the top rated blog hosting services are Blogger, which is owned by Google, Wordpress and Moveable Type. If you already have a web hosting account somewhere, that runs cPanel & Fantastic, then you're in luck, because Wordpress blog software is just a couple of mouse clicks away from installing on one of your domains.

The easiest to get started and set up would have to be Blogger.com, since they are not only free, but they have a very simple step by step process for creating your blog. The only downside to Blogger is that the features that they offer are very limited. The upside to Blogger is that it's owned by Google, which is not a bad thing at all, if you know what I mean.

The most common ways that most Internet marketers are making a profit from blogs is by integrating Google Adsense into their blog. This is very simple to do and Blogger makes it even easier for you. You can also insert many other contextual advertisements into the blog such as Yahoo, Kanoodle, Chitika and many others as well as any other affiliate links you may have.

The other benefit to blogging is also the ability to add back links to your blog that point to your other websites. This is very important since the more back links that you have coming inbound to your websites, the better you will rank for the keywords you are promoting. You will also have to setup the proper keyword anchor links in your blog and on the pages of your websites that the links are pointing to.

Let's look at a summary of what needs to be done in order to take advantage of blogging.

First, you need to setup a blog either at Blogger or one of the other online services mentioned earlier or create a blog on your own domain name & web hosting account.

Once you have your blog setup, it's time to start monetizing it by adding in contextual advertising such as Google Adsense and or affiliate links. Now add in some targeted keyword anchor links that point back to your other websites.

All you have to do now is post to your blog a couple times per week and make sure that you are pinging after you make your new post. Sending out a ping is a way to let the search engines know that you have new content on your blog. The search engines will come to crawl your blog and start indexing your new content and follow all those targeted links that point back to your other websites. Are you starting to see how powerful this is?

Now just keep posting to your blogs and if you keep up with it and continue to add new content on a regular basis, you'll start reaping the rewards of blogging.

(C) Writing Career