Blogger Blogging: The Complete Guide
This guide details every aspect of developing a popular and profitable blog using Googles free blogging platform "Blogger: Every detail from technical setup, content creation, traffic generation, link building, social media & monetization are covered!
Blogger Blogging What you should know
Setting up a blog is remarkably simple. I recommend that you use Google's "Blogspot.com" platform for your first blog. The reason you should start with this blog platform is simply because it is easy to get started and it is free to use. Besides that is what I am using and your about to learn how to setup a blogspot blog, just like the one you're reading here.
5 great reasons why I suggest Blogger over WordPress For New Bloggers
- Free to use-Don't have to fork out any money to get started.
- NO hosting fee's: free hosted blogging platforms
- Don't have to learn how to FTP or use C-Panel to get up and running.
- Integrates easily with social media, YouTube.com, and other Google related sites.
- HTTPS: When you have a self hosted blog or any website with your own domain name and hosting, your site is not secure server certified, unless you pay for that certificate with your hosting company. I don't know exactly how much that costs, but I imagine it is expensive. Search engines may give you better rankings when you set up a blog with Blogger, because you will be taking advantage the Blogspot authority. And because blogspot is certified secured, that means you won't get an annoying message from your browser that states: The site you want to go to is not SAFE. Go Back to Safety.
Let's face it, you are probably a little confused at this point, if you have read any blogging books, or some of the bigger blogging blogs such as John Chow blog or Darren Rowse "Pro-Blogger."
Most of these Top bloggers suggest using self hosted wordpress blog.
This is fine, especially if you already have a self hosted site up and running.
So, what changed. Simply, I use to set up Blogger blogs as a link wheel's to my self hosted Wordpress blog and found that those Blogger blogs of mine began outranking my main sites.
I have had several self hosted word press blogs starting with my first plumbing blog that was actually a direct response blog, set up for capturing leads for my plumbing business. then something changed, I began testing Blogger blogs with Adsense and affiliate marketing and found that my results were even better than hosting my own site.
However, I really suggest that if you are new to blogging or don't want to spend $100 or so right now that you set up a Blogger blog at blogspot.com, over using a self hosted WordPress blog at the start. The main reason many bloggers tell you to set up a blog on your own property is because, Google, at anytime, can shut your blog down without notice.
It happens, it happened to my mentor
Marlon Sanders.
If you decide to go down the path of self hosted WordPress blog platform then you will need buy a domain, hosting and learn how to set it all up or hire a webmaster to do it for you.
That means you’re going to spend around $50 to $100 and if you decide to outsource the process much more.
Let’s keep it simple and free until you grow and are making some money before going the self hosted route.
The Blogspot Myth
The myth with free blogging sites like Blogger, were notorious for removing blogs at their whim, even if they were very high quality. WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to put advertisements on your blog at all if they host it. This is why I went with Blogger, because Google owns
Adsense and once you have some good traffic and plenty of posts you should apply for an Adsense publishers account.
This feature will be in your Blogger dashboard under the "earnings," tab when you are ready.
I have been using Blogger for a few years now and have never been removed from their network. In my humble opinion Google “Loves” itself, and they want you to use their tools.
Now if you decided to blog about illegal, or politically incorrect stuff then you might want to set up a self hosted blog.
I can’t promise that your site won’t be removed. I highly recommend keeping a copy of every post you make in a folder on your hard drive and back-up at least once every week. This is just incase you do need to go the self hosted route, or your blog does get shut down. WordPress, has a plugin that can import your blogspot blog over to a self hosted blog. This way the only thing you lose is time and some traffic.
Not the end of the world.
Benefits to having a Blogspot blog
Back in the day, not that many years ago, Rob Benwell, created a product titled blogging to the bank. The first ebook, was about setting up affiliate blogspot blogs.
One strategy he taught is to set up a blogger blog as your main website. Quick and easy.
Another strategy is to set up a Blogger blog as a method to get links to your main websites.
When you set up a blog with Blogger it will be created as a sub domain on the blogspot.com domain. (For instance https://wrcato-webmaster.blogspot.com/ ) Notice the HTTPS.
That means you get all the link juice that comes from an authority site like blogger, which is a great thing for you.
To take advantage of this strategy for the search engines, you'd want to create a "mini blog" on Blogger that links back to your own website. This is a similar concept to adding articles to an article directory, though you have more control over the blog with less traffic, than using article directories sites.
The more blog posts you add, the more likely you are to be found by other Blogger.com users, by way of the search feature at the top right corner, just under the address bar, and you're website should rank more highly in the search engines because your blog is coming from such a respected domain.
Today, you can actually get traffic to your blogspot blog or your website of choice, by participating on social media sites such as FaceBook, twitter, DIgg, a must for blogspot bloggers among a host of other Killer traffic strategies that this blog will get into at a later time.
Make Money Blogging
Blogging is a great way to make money if you create profitable blogs. The sad fact is, “most people just don’t understand what it takes to make a profitable blog.”
Blogging about what you had for dinner isn’t likely to make you a lot of money unless you’re already relatively well-known for something else, or a slapstick comedian that happens to go viral.
I’m not saying you should post some information about you and your personal life on your blog. This can actually help your readers get to know you a bit better, which will make them want to visit your site even more. But the majority of your posts should be geared toward a specific niche topic that has the potential to make you money.
From this section you're going to discover some ways to find profitable topics to blog about. Some topics will just naturally be more profitable than others. Finding the topics that will be highly profitable will make you more money with less work, and ultimately that is what you should be looking for.
I won’t actually say blogging is easy. It’s easy compared to plumbing or flipping burgers. And it’s easy when you think about the fact that a typical blogger spends only a few hours per week blogging. But it does take work.
Don't be fooled to expect to make one post per month and make thousands of dollars, and you can’t expect to make ten posts and never touch the blog again and have it make you a full time income.
Most people who make money blogging actually run multiple blogs. I have at least, 6 blogs in various niches. It is certainly possible to make outstanding money with just one, but the odds are better if you run several.
I would suggest starting with just one, building it up to a nice income, and then starting another. If you put up one after the other, there is a tendency to not promote each one adequately, and then they don’t make as much as they should.
It’s much better to start out with a single blog and promote it fully before moving on to the next one. Listening to this advice, will save you a ton of time, money and many headaches. With the pep talk out of the way, let's dive into how to choose a topic for your blog.
Choosing A Great Topic For You're Blog
Choosing a topic is the first step in setting up your blogspot blog, or any type of blog you want to get started. If you choose a topic that doesn’t have good profit potential, you’ll be wasting your time.
Not every topic will be well-suited for money blogging. Just because a topic has a large amount of traffic doesn’t always mean it will make you a lot of money.
You need to look for topics with the following qualities:
- Plenty of traffic available.
- People who are willing to buy something.
- Plenty of advertisers or affiliate programs available.
- Reasonable level of competition.
When it comes to competition, I’m not afraid to go after the high-competition niches. I have a lot of experience and I know I can select keywords that I can rank for and make money with.
When you first get started, you may want to stick to niches that don’t have so much competition. It can be tough to rank well in the search engines when you’re just getting started, so choosing niches with a bit less competition can help you see results faster. that will keep you motivated.
Of course, you don’t want to choose phrases with too little traffic, either. Sure, there shouldn’t be a lot of competition for those phrases, but ultimately they won’t make you much money, either. Even if you got 100% of the traffic for a search term that got only 20 hits per day, it wouldn’t be a lot of traffic.
Traffic = money
So the key is finding a good balance of traffic versus competition, at least in the beginning. You need to search for niches that have thousands of searches per day overall, but that have several keyword phrases that don’t have an enormous amount of competition.
We’ll get into keyword research in the next section When searching for niche ideas, there are several places you should look:
Amazon – I like to browse through the nonfiction books and magazines. There are literally thousands and thousands of ideas here, and I can do keyword research on any niche that looks interesting and potentially profitable. If there are numerous books and magazines about a topic, it’s probably profitable.
Discover A Hobby – This is a website I discovered years ago, that has over 100 hobbies and sports listed. There are plenty of ideas here to get you started.
WebMD – This site is a medical site that lists symptoms and other information about practically every medical issue known to man. There are thousands of niche ideas here, and medical niches are often extremely possible, especially if you’re running AdSense on your blog.
Libraries & Bookstores – I enjoy spending time in libraries and bookstores for recreational purposes, but I find plenty of niche ideas here as well.
Dummies.com – This site lists thousands of topics that you can build a niche blog around. If a book has been published by For Dummies, it’s probably profitable.
Project Gutenberg – The most visited site when it comes to Public Domain eBooks. This site takes old out-dated books and preserves them digitally. You can find a ton of topics by browsing their catalog. Cooking-dog breeds-gardening, it’s all there waiting for you to start a niche blog.
I like to make a list of about 20 or 30 topics, then do keyword research on those topics. I find that blocking the work into similar tasks really helps me get things done more efficiently than researching one potential niche, then doing keyword research, then finding another niche, and researching it.
It’s also best to stick to niches you have an interest in for your first few blogs. You don’t absolutely have to do this, but it does help you stick to your business plan if you have at least some interest in the subject. It can get boring writing a lot about a topic you have no interest in.
Once you have a list of potential topics, it’s time to move on to keyword research.
The Key to the Blogosphere is Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding out how much traffic potential phrases have, and how much competition those phrases have. It is a critical component of blogging, especially in your early stages.
Most of your blog traffic will undoubtedly come from search engines early on. Later, you might get more traffic from repeat visitors or referrals, but when you get started, search engine traffic is vital.
There are numerous places to do keyword research. I only use free keyword resources, because I find them to be perfectly adequate, if not better than paid sources. Plus, paid sources generally get their information from the free sources, anyway!
I use the Google keyword planning tool more than anything else. Since it comes straight from Google itself, it is much more accurate than anything else in terms of keywords and traffic.
Since your going to be blogging using Blogspot, it makes sense to set up a free
adwords account, so you can take advantage of the keyword planner tool.
Once you get your Adwords account set up, log right on into it.
I start by going to the Google keyword planner entering a general topic into “search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.” Then I click “Get ideas."
That gives me a list of dozens, or hundreds of keyword phrases for that particular niche. What I look for is the overall volume of traffic within that niche. I can get a rough idea of the total amount of traffic by looking at the top 5-10, so I click the text at the top that says “Global Monthly Search Volume” to sort by traffic.
I used the phrase “Blogging”. These were the results:
1. Blog sites 22,000
2. free blog 12,100
3. free blog sites 12,100
4. what is a blog 18,100
5. blog websites 9,900
As you can see, there are over 22,000 searches for the first phrase alone each month. This tells me that this is probably a niche worth pursuing, especially since I can later find that there are thousands of affiliate products available.
Another way to gauge profitability is to look at the column that says “Competition” (You’ll see that once you download the keyword file.)
Next you want to find out how much competition there is. You can do that by taking several of the higher-traffic keyword phrases and entering them directly into the Google search.
This shows that about 7,050,000 ,000 pages in the Google index are using the exact phrase “Blogging” on their site. This number can fluctuate as Google updates its databases, but it’s generally pretty accurate.
Ideally, you want to look for phrases that have at least 1,000 searches per month and fewer than 100,000 competing pages. This gives you the best chance to rank well for those phrases.
You can also target the extremely competitive phrases. As your site ages, and gathers backlinks (links from pages within your site and links from other sites), it may very well rank for the more competitive phrases.
But you should concentrate mostly on the less competitive phrases in the beginning. What you want is to make the most possible money for the time spent, and using the less popular keyword phrases is the best way to accomplish this.
You’ll want to start your blog with about ten articles, and then you should post at least three times a week. When you start promoting your blog, you don’t want it to look like a ghost town with only one post.
That means you should find at LEAST 62 keyword phrases to start with. That would be for your first 10 postings to start with and then one for each month for the next year. That’s one per week for a year (52 weeks), plus your initial 10.
The reason you want to gather them all up front is because you will probably want to go ahead and write a few month’s worth of blog posts and set them to automatically post on a regular basis. This way the blog runs on complete autopilot for a number of months, updating regularly whether you are around or not.
One of the main reasons I like running niche blogs so much, is the fact, that it’s passive income. Once the blogs are created and set to update blog posts, you don’t have to touch them anymore that year unless you want to change the affiliate programs I’m using or make minor changes to ad placements and answering comments.
Once you do your initial research, find your niche, and gather keywords for blog post and your blog title, I encourage you to start writing at least 10 blog post and link them to other posts and/or pages on your blog. This is called internal linking and it is good for better seo scores.
Creating Your First 10 Posts
Create Content Around The Keywords you found in the last step.
Once you’ve created a list of keywords with a high KEI value, your next step is to write articles around them.
You should include your keyword in the title of your article as well as one or two times for every 100 words of content. So if your article is 700 words, your keyword should appear seven times in the article.
Example: Using the example above: You can create an article titled “The Secrets of Weight Loss for Men Over 40.” Then you can sprinkle the keyword throughout the article, such as: “Weight loss for Menover 40 – How to Acheive the Impossible?” Or, “Maybe you’ve been thinking about weight loss for men over 40…”
If this sounds difficult then just write your article naturally and then count your keywords in the article once you finished. If you use your keywords more frequently or less, this would be a good time to edit your article and adjust the keyword frequency. Over doing the keyword will make your article look spammy and not having your keyword enough... well, your article will not rank in the search engines.
Two Types of Blog Posts You Should Create
The top ten blog post is just what it sounds like. It is simular to the list article because it is easy to read and for your readers that like to scan, which brings up another point; whether you start with a top 5 or ten or even a list post you need to make the posting as interesting as possible. Don't be afraid to allow your personality to shine through. If you ever watch David Letterman, he always started his show off with a top ten "funny" list. All you need to write a top ten list is to share niche specific tips, resources, products, blogs, people, books or most anything else that’s relevant.
If you are an affiliate then it is fairly easy to promote a product within these types of blog posts.
Here are a few examples...
Top Ten Books Every Corvett Lover Ought to Read – here you can list ten books using your affiliate links (along with a few lines about why all Corvett lovers should read these books).
Top Ten Tips for Bloggers with low self esteem – this is a useful blog post. Here you’d simply list the top ten tips that will help bloggers with low self esteem to reach out to other bloggers, to promote one of their blog posts, to leave comments on another blog and so on.
Top Ten Articles of the Year – You can send your readers to other people’s blog posts and articles. Creating this type of useful list can serve as “link bait” – that is, your compilation is so useful that others just can't help but to link to it. You can always use the Letterman format of descending instead of asending.
Here's what I mean...
Start with number ten and work your way down to number one. Or visa versa. Do you see the usefulness of the top ten list?
The Q & A Post
This type of blog post is a great way to promote reader interaction on your blog. If you have been following the latest Google update you may have noticed that there are Q & A snippets on the google search engine.
They look like this...
Here is how simple it is to create a Q & A Post
Visit niche specific forums, Facebook groups, search for questions on twitter, type question into the search engines and make not of the most frequent question. Then all you have to do is write the question in list forum and then simply answer them then hit publish. You can even
make a weekly “Question and Answer” feature on your blog, where your readers submit questions and you answer one or two each week.
Example #1: Your reader asks, “What’s the best way to get free traffic to a sales page?” You answer the question providing useful tips… and then point them towards a traffic-generation product for more information using your affiliate link.
Example #2: Your reader asks, “How do you check if a fuel pump works on a ’55 Chevy?” You offer your step-by-step instructions… and then provide affiliate links to a fuel pump and the tools needed to carry out the instructions. Recently I have been answering questions on regular post when necessary. Google seems to love questions and placing the answers directly on the search page. The only thing that I have seen above the rich snippets are paid advertising. If you want to put in the work to get all your answers into the snippets, this could give you a lot of visitors to your blog post(s) where they originated from.
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