You’ve seen them, you’ve been ‘wowed’ by their power and by the amazing CMS (Content Management Systems) capabilities, and now you’re wondering “Do these guys really make any money with this stuff? It’s just some opinions and some text and some graphics/banners/aff link…?”.

Truthfully? You can make millions from these blogs - especially once you make your first one and prove that you can profit from it. Do I make millions with this one? Nope, not yet anyway - my blog has been up for a few months, during that time, one month it was down due to a server switch and careful customization/setup, and even now as I write, the blog itself is still NOT complete… However, having said that - blogs can be made into a wonderful income generator if they are setup properly…

1. If you are promoting someone elses product as an affiliate, it is relatively easy to get yourself a blog or wordpress theme, and buy a relative domain name to forward it to. The more SEO you throw at it, or the more plugins you get to help, the better! IF you are making it product centric, you can easily convert clicks and not deviate from your goal to monetize the offer you are pushing.

2. This is what I see most- and I KNOW it does not yield optimum results. If you set up a ‘make money online’ free blog with no customization or flare, just another plain blog, and throw tons of products on it, say by making it a review site - your efforts will be short lived imo. I think the biggest mistake I’m seeing is when people make blogs with 10 or so products, and promote 2-3 of those products in articles, youtube etc. just to get clicks to the blog first. Once at that blog, the person is distracted and tempted with 10 other products that you have endorsed… Chances are you just lost them before they even got to your site. If you heavily endorse a product, create your blog around THAT product and only THAT product, do not let the reader be distracted by any other offers or exits, leave them with as little room as possible for ‘decision making’.

3. LEARN SEO - Even if that means spending two-three weeks in advance of creating your blog - you MUST understand SEO so you can target keywords in various ways throughout your posts to attract your targeted visitors. If you do not know SEO - you might be setting yourself up for failure before you even start.

4. Do NOT create 10 blogs and interlink them - at least not yet. Your first task is to understand how they work, what the possibilities and restrictions are, and to MASTER your first blog so you can create others with just as much density and SEO. Otherwise you’ll have many ‘mediocre’ blogs and no matter how many you make it won’t make a difference for backlinks and quicker raises in your results.

5. Nowadays there are auto content generators, auto commenting in do follow blogs, auto searches and keyword stuffs… so many little tricks and fake generators that you can probably notice the difference right away as any reader would. This is not ideal - Your blog should be filled with useful, original and great content that YOU yourself have written or acquired - do NOT steal or imitate others ideas and posts, simply BE ORIGINAL and google/other SE’s will love it.

6. Don’t forget, google, msn, yahoo search engine bots are like a 6 year old, they do not like to be confused, yet they get confused easily so your objective is not to trick them knowingly, but to rather give them exactly what they want - feed them in a way that will not confuse them or put them in a loop.

7. Branding - I can talk about this one forever so I will make it brief. Notice how my blog is quite original and you will not find one like it elsewhere (unless people start copying it). The better job you can do with your branding, the more readership you will attract, and the more respect/authority you will portray. Nobody likes looking at stale or standard templates no matter how good your content is, make sure your blog is at least well put together and well thought out visually. Logo, colors, typography sets, graphics, taglines, white space, etc.

8. Sometimes I feel that those who have absolutely NO intention of monetizing their blogs get the most attention. Why? Because their objective is pure - they give google and others real content to index that is clearly not an ‘ad’ or meant to monetize… Google might be like a 6 year old, however you must think - how many webmasters try to take advantage of it everyday with potent SEO tricks? Their algorithm changes a lot and though it acts like a 6 year old, it’s filter to crap is that of a world leading veteran… So - content is king after all - make sure your content is GREAT and you will succeed. Take time with your writing, take time with your formatting, take time with thinking about what to write. Get a lil’ personal, that works well for me. Write to your readers on a one to one, tell them a story, bring them into your world a little deeper than others, and YOU - will have them hooked and subscribing to your feed in no time.

9. I’m sorry that this post does not have a clear step by step of how to make money with your blog - so in closing, there are countless ways to monetize it including:

*Get a clickbank or paydotcom or CJ or linkshare or shareasale or other network account (free).
*Pick a sector of business or life in general that you love, and start acquiring the top 3 products in that sector. You will soon be promoting these products and affiliate links from your ‘one to one’ blog.
*Get adsense - this is only going to make you pennies per click however if your blog goes HUGE - it can be a good little stream of income.
*Advertise for people - allow a banner spot or 2 or 10 with pricing for each.
*Offer reviews of products for a fee - your client will have a professional review, backlinks to their site and most people will read it before buying as they research what they are about to purchase…
*Sell your own ebook/digital product and get a paypal account, you can create PayPal buttons right in your posts and collect directly from your blog.
*If your blog is for a good non-profit cause, put a ‘donation’ button/box in all your posts or on your interface somewhere.

A good scenario: You get a blog, about life - it costs you $10 - lets say you get www.allaboutlife.com <<I’m sure that’s not available but good example. Now you can write all about life and endorse anything and everything.

Now you get an account somewhere like clickbank, pick a product YOU LOVE << get a domain name for it. Now promote that domain in your blog Here is a video to better explain this:

I must finish as it’s long weekend here in Toronto and I can here the firecrackers starting to go off so I’m gone to the beach to watch the show! Enjoy and I hope this teaches you enough that you get inspired to go to blogger or wordpress and start on one tonight!!

Cheers everyone and God Bless.
Norb.