Make Money Online

The setup of WordPress on BlueHost was extremely easy, and I spent some time tonight reviewing WordPress templates.  Your default installation of WordPress comes with two very basic themes, so you will definitely want to either customize your theme or find other themes to select from.

There are a number of free and paid themes that are available for you, and you can find a good list on the official WordPress Themes page, as well as a more comprehensive listing of themes (as well as how to build them) here.

However, I found that the free themes were all fairly plain and didn’t say enough about the personality of either myself, my blogs, or the readers that I hope to attract.  I believe the design of your blog is the third most important element to your success - right behind your selected niche and quality of your content.

Luckily, I found Template Monster, which has a gallery of paid themes available for your purchase.  Each of these themes is reasonably priced for either a non-exclusive (~$50) or exclusive ($750+) price.  Since these are paid themes, you are relatively unlikely to run across the other 4-5 people who have purchased the theme that interests you.  I think they will be well worth the investment.

In an earlier post, I reviewed three of the major blogging platforms availalable on the market today - Blogger (free), WordPress (free), and TypePad ($4.95/m).  I was most impressed with the full features and functionality incorporated into WordPress, but was put off by the limitations put on their free account. I landed on TypePad’s Pro account ($14.95/m, unlimited domains, etc.), but am today deciding to leave their platform for a hosted WordPress Solution.

The major reason is in how TypePad handles your blog posts. There are four primary limitations that I see, and in two hours of cruising their knowledge base and forums, I could not find an appropriate resolution:

1. Your posts are arbitrarily truncated at 15 characters (including spaces), meaning your url does not contain the full keyword-rich title you need for higher Search Engine Rankings.
2. Spaces are replaced with an underline "_" as opposed to the more search-engine-friendly standard of a dash "-", which means search engines see "your-keyword-phrase" as one word "yourkeywordph" in their crawler (including the truncation from #1)
3. You are unable to modify the Meta tags on individual posts.  Although Google represents they do not use the meta tags for search engine rankings, many other search engines do, and the description tag IS used for display in the search engine results.
4. Your title tag always starts with the name of your blog, followed by the post title.  A keyword rich page title is an important consideration for high Search Engine Rankings.

As a result, I have decided to move to a host that supports the Word Press Installation (and hopefully most of the widgets that have been developed for WordPress as well).  I have initially chosen to go with BlueHost, which was recommended by WordPress. 

I will start by putting one of my new blogs up on WordPress to see how BlueHost performs. The account specifications are much higher than with TypePad, and the cost is less than half. I’ll report back with my experiences.  Please let me know if any of you have had experiences with either the hosted version of WordPress as a blogging platform, or with BlueHost as a hosting provider.  I’d be interested to find out more.

It’s easy.  Setup a blog about your favorite topic.  Write a couple of pages.  Insert Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate Ads and watch the money roll in.

Wrong!  Starting a blog is all about writing quality content that your (potential) audience is interested in, and more importantly searching for!  But how do you know about what users are searching for, and what you should write?

You could look at your log reports (Google Analytics offers a great free tool) and see the most popular keywords resulting in hits to your site.  Google’s Webmaster Tools also offer more detailed information on the phrases people use to find your site, but it’s limited to Google’s search engine.

But there’s another service - HitTail - which is a must have for creating quality content around subjects your readers want.  Even better, it helps provide you with ideas for when you hit the inevitable writers block.

As their founder states, "HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website
owners of all sorts — to help you grow your natural search traffic…
free."  They have both a free (up to 100,000 visits/month) and paid service (ranging from $9.99/m to $99.99/m), and the free service should be plenty for most bloggers starting out or for those bloggers who have hit a creative wall or traffic plateau.

How does HitTail work? HitTail gives you a piece of tracking code to put on your website. The
code works quietly on the background and records search hits and
keyword information. HitTail analyzes these phrases to give you suggested topics based on the underperforming
keywords that you can use to improve your results in search engines. By
using the suggestions in new website content, blog posts, or PPC
campaigns you can improve your search results to
attract qualified visitors to your site.

Through the use of HitTail, I personally used their suggestions to write content for StashSpace.Com that grew the percentage of our "Long-tail" hits from 20% of our overall traffic to over 75% over a 5-month period. 

If you are serious about building your audience(s), HitTail is a must-have tool in your SEO arsenal.

Affiliate programs can be a lucrative way to add income-generating possibilities to your websites.  Google AdSense is a quick and easy way to get started with Advertising on your site, but are inherently limited by the number of people that are coming to your site and then clicking through the ads.

Affiliate relationships, on the other hand, can offer much higher returns on a per-visitor basis (with higher payouts), and as a bonus, can also provide you with topics to blog about!

So how do you get started?  Luckily, there are a number of companies that have created an aggregated affiliate marketplace, bringing advertisers and publishers together and managing all the tracking, auditing, management and financial transactions so you can concentrate on creating and maintaining a quality site that will attract users.

I signed up with three affiliate sites today - Commission Junction, Link Share and ShareaSale - and quickly went through their merchants and applied for the affiliate programs.  There are a great variety of merchants available, from financial services to photo sharing to baby supplies.  A few of the Affiliate programs for which I was accepted included Sony, Philips, BlockBuster, CinemaNow.com, Babies Online, Stamps.com, Baby Universe and Netflix.

Some of the programs automatically approve you, others review applications by hand, and may accept you (or not accept you) if your site meets their traffic ideals, subject area, and does not contain offensive material.  Interestingly enough, I was denied by most of the financial services programs, although I hope to be able to reapply once my blogs have gained in traffic, popularity and page rank.

w.I’ve determined that my initial approach forward with blogs will be to segment my blogging into a few different niche topics.  I also arrived upon a domain name — lugnut22.com — for this blog to go along with it’s title, Making Money Online.  Why lugnut22? That’s a story for another time, but it has been my handle on the web for some time.

So what will my initial topics be? They are unfortunately not very similar, which would be an advantage, but fit the profile of what I think most people would be able to handle when first starting off.  Here they are:

1. http://www.KrummeFamily.Com
   My Personal Family Blog.  Does the world really need another personal blog?  In my case, yes.  With the relocation of one of my companies (stashSpace) to the Methos Valley - a remote rural mountain valley in North Central Washington - my family moved ~250 miles away from our closest relatives, and find little time to get across the mountatins for visits.  This will be a quick and simple way to keep them all updated on our activities.

   In addition, your personal blog is a great general platform to be able to write just about anything you might want to blog about.  A trip to the local zoo or aquarium can also include more general background information about the facility to make your post more informative.  Your family might just also get more variety in their activities — you won’t want to go to the same place more than twice!

2. http://www.Online-Video-Sharing.com/
   This is a personal blog about an industry that has been my life for the last 7 years.  My two companies have been involved in online video since 2000, long before anyone ever heard of "User Generated Content".  This blog will include information about Online Video companies, products and services; Video Tips and Tricks; Photo Sharing Tips and Tricks; and Video editing and storage services.
3. http://www.sailing-the-northwest.com/
   This is a blog about a long-time hobby of mine - sailing.  Growing up, my family spent 6 weeks each summer on our sailboat, and during my college years I managed a Sailing Club and raced 4-5 days/week over a five year period.  This will be my "hobby" blog.
4. http://www.funforafamily.com/
   This will be the family blog about activities that families can do together.  After all, part of the appeal of striving to earn money online is to gain more control over your personal life.  This blog will let the whole family feel like they are part of the process, and will give us some undisturbed, scheduled time each weekend to spend time together.
5. http://www.lugnut22.com/
   Wait, that’s this blog!  Well, this space will be where I document all my different approaches and track my results and lessons learned through this journey.  During the first few months, the blog may be a bit disparate in nature, but after getting these other blogs established and full of content, I will start to compile my various experiences and lessons into month-by-month activities, checklists and approaches to succeeding online.

I do have a desire to start another blog on a topic on which I am not an expert, but have an interest in.  I have not yet decided what this (or these) topic may yet be, but I will most likely hold off on starting it to make sure that my initial blogs are well-populated and get off the ground quick.