Step One - Make Money Make a Blog

So today, day one of making money online, I will explain what I spent the last 2 days doing to get started.

First I made a blog, which is easy to do. Go to blogger.com and follow their simple instructions.

The kind of blogs I will be making are niche blogs, which are basically blogs that have a "niche", or a distinctive topic that has keywords. These blogs often grab onto a topic that is really hot at the moment, and then it kind of cools off. Pick a topic that you think is hot right now.

Here's what I did. When I think hot, I think celebrities, movies, TV, fashion. So I remembered reading a month ago about a new America's Next Top Model program on Oxygen. I also remembered that Tyra Banks has a new show, and that a new season of America's Next Top Model is about to air. So I decided to go with that. It's easy to write about, and has easy keywords like "model" "tyra banks" "photos" "celebrity" and when your niche has good keywords it means that advertisers are going to have ads to put up, and this is how you make money.

Let's rewind for a minute. ADSENSE. This is what we are building our blogs around. Google adsense. It is a program run by google which places ads on your blog or website. Everytime an add is clicked, you make money. Google uses keywords it find on your website or blog and that's how it knows which adsense ads to put on your blog.

Okay, now let's pik up where we left off. You just chose a niche. Mine is America's Next Top Model. Yours is something else. You are making a blog, you go to blogger.com and you follow their instructions. You MUST use your keywords in the url address AND in the title of your blog AND in the description. Let's pretend your name is Gary and your blog is about food. If your URL is "garysfavoritethings.blogspot.com" and your title is "Gary's Favorite Things", google won't know what your blog is about and will put public service announcements on your blog instead of ads, and you won't make any money that way. For detailed instructions on how to set up a blog, go to Make Money For Beginners. This is a very useful site I'm using. My only problem is the guy, Grizzly, who writes this blog is alreday making money. So his advice (which is extremely valuable) sometimes doesn't explain the process. But it is an excellent resource nonetheless.

Back to the point though, so now you have your blog set up. So start writing articles. And remember to use your keyword A LOT. But not too much because then google will get mad and not index your site.

Index your site? What does that mean?

Basically, this is what you want: You have a niche site with a bunch of unique articles (articles that you wrote and didn't copy and paste) and you have ads on the site and people click on them and you get paid. But how do you get people to click on your ads. You need traffic!
You need to get your site indexed by google. Once it is indexed then when people search for the keywords that you use, your site will come up and they will click on it and so on. But it's not that simple. Getting your site indexed is a good start, but for any given keyword there are usually thousands of sites. So you need to beat those sites by getting a better page rank then all of them. And I will explain how to get a page rank later (when I do it).

Right now I'm going to tell you how to get your site indexed, because my site is already indexed. The way I did it was I went to Yahoo! Answers and I found as many questions as possible that had to do with my niche and I answered them and included a link to my blog. My blog was indexed overnight. I also submitted my article to a few article submission sites such as goarticles.com. When you submit articles to article search engines, reword your article without changing the keywords. And make a few of the keywords in your article a link to your blog. That will provide a backlink (which I will explain later but it's the most important thing).

I'll talk a little more about adsense and then that's it for the day. So I made my blog and then I made a mistake by putting adsense on it right away. You want google to index you, and for them to index you you will want them to take you seriously. If they see adsense on a brand new blog with almost no content and little traffic, they will know you set up a blog just to make money and that is a no-no. It wil be harder to get indexed and to get a decent page rank. So do not put adsense on yet. (Do it when you have traffic coming from search engines which won't be for a little while).
But since I made the mistake of putting adsense on right away, I may as well share somethings I have learned.
The title of my blog was "America's Next Top Model Cycle 12" And I talked about cylce 12 a lot. I also talked about models a lot and tyra banks. I had a few ads on my blog about modeling, one or 2 about Tyra, and the bulk of them were about Cycling! Camping! Bicycles! Fitness!

WHAT????

Oh, big mistake. I used the word cycle all over my blog. I have since removed a lot of my uses of cycle, and I have removed adsense from my blog until I start to get some traffic. Right now I average between 25-30 unique vistors to my blog a day. That is not a lot. Once I start to see numebrs around 300 I will consider adding adsense again. How am I going to get 300? I don't know yet. But as soon as I find out I will tell you.
But the point of me telling you my brief encounter with adsense was to warn you to be careful about which keywords you choose. There is special keyword software, I'm not using it as most of it is expensive. Once I start to make money I will start to invest money.

A few other quick tips before I leave - make your blog ugly and boring! You want people to leave your site. There are 2 ways for them to leave, by clicking ads or by clicking back. The less people want to stay on your site the more they will click away.

Also, in order to know how many visitors you have on your site, you need to use a program called statcounter which you can find at www.statcounter.com. It's free and simple to use and set up, they explain it to you.

Well I'll post again soon. Until then, thank for visiting me and learning how to make money online with me.