Posts Tagged “money”

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I have a blog that I decided to setup a newsletter and mailing list for and over the last year I have gotten my subscriber numbers to over 1000 subscribers without having to spend any money on advertising. I think this is pretty good even though I know others may be doing lots better.

So here is how I built my list so far

First I decided that there had to be a good reason to have people sign up and so I made a 21 day how to type list that made it a no brainer to sign up, this is often not the case though and maybe I need to pump up the offer a bit.

Now that I had a reason for people to sign up I needed info and a place to have them get the autoresponder and the newsletters from. I setup the autoresponder series with past articles from the blog and every few weeks now I just send the newsletter to all of the inactives, that is the people that are no longer getting those messages. I had a fear that people would receive two emails from me in a day and that is a bit much for anyone to receive.

Using Popups to Capture Email Addresses

Next I setup a signup form on my site. This got a few signups but I have experimented a lot over the last year and no matter what I do I can never get the same response from a form on the page as I do from a popup on the page. I have never had a complaint about the popups and I have not been able to correlate any reduction in pageviews to the popup but it is probably about 300-400% more effective then a signup form anywhere on the page. I am keeping my popup.

There are other ways to utilize popups and that is obviously to sell people something directly from the popup. I beleive that this is short sighted and very ineffective, look no one kows who you are so how good would that popup need to be to sell them something that they are immediately going to be distrustful of. No, I believe that once you have built some credibility in the minds of your readers then you will have a much better chance of selling them.

Intro and Monetization

As for monetizing my newsletter and autoresponder traffic I have not done much. One thing that I do with the first three messages that I send is offer nothing of salesmanship and everything of content. I want my readers to love my content and trust me more before I offer them something to buy.

I currently have a couple of messages where I mention and send people to one of two affiliate programs but not much more. This needs to be a higher priority but really I want to lower the churn and keep my people on my list and trusting me.

All My Traffic is Organic…So Far

I have relied on Google for all of my traffic and by putting up a blog post every day I have been steadily building my traffic, this of course has it’s drawbacks, I am sure with some pay per click or some banner ads I could get more traffic and thus more signups but I really would need to know how much a signup is worth. Here is a simple way to figure out the value of a signup to your newsltter over a year:

Average number on list Divided by total revenue over the year from list equals revenue per list member

This is accurate but there are a few variables that we can look at that would change this. I will link to that article after I write it.

Also I have not used any coregistration programs. At this point I have not paid for traffic at all and just try to optimize posts and write posts that would be interesting and keyword rich and let Google do the rest of the heavy lifting for me.

Conclusion on the list building process

This process has worked for me to get up to 10 signups a day and over the last year gain over 1000 people on my list without having to worry about losing people to my marketing message. The real feeling that I have about my list and listbuilding in general is that a list is a real asset, traffic on the other hand can come and go and is fleeting. If you are not good at capitalizing on your list you can always learn more and experiment. But start to build that list now.

Now we get to the ideas themselves. How are you going to find 500 ideas for different posts? Actually the answer should not be all that hard. The first thing to do is some keyword research in your niche. Go to Good Keywords or seobook.com’s keyword tool and start typing in keywords. Do not worry too much about competition or the amount of searches at this point but instead write down keyowords that are good. This is a great way to get a list of keywords for your niche. After this you will need to work harder on a daily basis to read all of the blogs in your niche and related niches to try to find more ideas as well as getting articles that you can link to for some good backlinks back and forth from the fellow bloggers in your niche.

Another great way to find articles to add content is to carry a small notepad with you in your pocket or even a piece of paper and a pencil. Whenever an article idea comes to you just write it down with any bit of detail and then just let it go so that you can get the next idea. On Sunday nights I go to the grocery store and with my Blackberry I will just sit in the car before I go in and type out a couple of titles that I thought of on the way to the store. There is seldom a shortage of things to write about.

Finally one last way that you have probably not heard of is to allow other writing to become ideas for your own future articles. Often I will get a bit of an article idea when I am reading a flyer or an article in the newspaper or even when I am surfing around the internet.  In the first two case just circle the words with that pen or pencil in your pocket and stuff the paper in your pocket. On the internet just copy the relevant text and either drop it into a notepad document or copy and paste it into Google Notebook if you are using that plugin with the Firefox browser.

Now you have a lot of ideas for posts. What should you do with all of these post ideas and germs of post ideas? I have found that the best way to organize all of this is to add the articles to a list at your desk or in a book and as you transfer them from computer screen or shreds of paper or torn out pages from newspapers or flyers just start creating titles with three or four bullet points underneath and you will have everything that you need to start writing articles. This should have been the hard part the easy part is the writing of the articles itself that I have written about elsewhere.

There is an important point to making money with a blog and that is that the content is what brings people to your blog to give you a chance to sell something. So how do you create content that brings people in?The key to traffic on a blog is constant content that is interesting to your readers. In the first place you will have no readers but as your content gets recognized people will come back. I will have some aggressive content ideas here so be aware that this will work to make you money but you will need to work to get it.

How much content for a great blog?

Firstly I believe it is important to have a goal for your blog or you will get tired of it and leave before it has a chance to become an income stream. I believe that a blog is not a real entity until there are 500 posts in it. Now I would not expect you to write 500 posts quickly but the pace is up to your. You need to write at minimum once every two days so that the search engines will know to come back and reindex your blog so at that rate it would take two to three years to get to that magical 500 post level. I would say that if at all possible you should be posting twice a day and maybe taking 1 day of a week this will get you to 500 posts in under a year.

By the way although there is no way to really figure out how much money you will make with your 500 posts it is safe to say that it should bring you a substantial monthly income month after month

How long should a blog post be?

So now that you have a goal for posts number as well as posting frequency, how long should a post be? I believe that a post should be 400-500 words. If you write a post longer than that you will have picked to large a subject and shorter than that you will have probably not dug deep enough into the subject. Try to think of each post as about a page or so in Microsoft Word and you can envision what this will take.

So how long will this take? I can write a 500 word article in about 20 minutes. I have a great little system that seems to work well. I just type the heading which is the title of the article, add three or four points that I want to cover and then just start typing as the words come. Writing articles should not be difficult at all for you and once you have written a couple you will wonder why you have been putting it off for so long.

If you know that you can knock off a blog post in 20 minutes and you know that this is just about the most important work that your business has then why just write one article and be done with it. Instead it is a good idea to have your thoughts organized on paper and then write all of your weeks articles in one sitting and then setup a posting schedule in your blog or just daily add the articles as you need them.

Now that you have a system go ahead and start writing lots of content and prosper.

What is niche research? Niche research is the act of finding a subject that you are going to create a web blogging business around. Niche research is of course incredibly important because if you shoos a market with either too small a demand or too much competition then you are likely not to be successful.

There are two ways in which to decide what niche to pick, the first way to pick a niche is to take advantage of an underutilized market, the second way to pick a niche is to choose a subject that you have a definite interest in. I believe that for any person to try to start a web business by picking a niche that is just good opportunity is never going to make it work as they will lose interest after a few weeks if the money does not roll in and that is a real possibility as you try to build your markets interest. Out of all the important reasons to start a blog besides money, enjoying what you are writing about is the most important factor when starting out.

OK now if you are following the way that I have laid out how to find a niche here are the steps that you will need to follow to find a niche with the best chance of success.

1. Spend a couple of days writing down exactly what you are good at or have a lot of interest in. Is it boating? Stamp Collecting? Pizza recipes? Fast food restaurants? These may seem like pretty insignificant markets but there are thousands of searches within them so make sure that you are not looking for too broad a niche.
2. Take you list and start searching for blogs that are about you category. If there are no blogs than you may have a winner but more than likely is that there is not enough interest in the subject. Take a look at these blogs and see what the writing style is like, how they cover the niche and go to Technorati and see how popular they are. A good blog would have an “authority rating over 100 or 200 at least.
3. Go to overture.com or get the program “good keywords” (it’s free) and start looking at the volume of searches within your possible blogs categories. What you are looking for is an interest that people have in your subject so that if you start writing posts about a particular subject then people will be looking for it in Google or another search engine.
4. Fire up Firefox, go to seobook.com and download the latest copy of the seobook plugin. This plugin is great as it will allow you to easily see the pagerank of sites when you do Google searches. What you want to do is look for a fairly good searched for keyword, some of these are keywords that you would search for in your blogs category and see what the top listings have as a pagerank. This is not very scientific but it is the best we can get. If I look up a term and see that the pagerank of the highest listing is only a 2 or 3 then I know that with just a little work I could rank highly for that term.

I hope that this helps you in your quest for finding a niche for you blogging business.

There is of course a lot more that you can do to ensure success. I have also written a complete review of the popular blogging to the bank book that not only will show you what you need to know but also will help you decide if the book is good for you.