Many people wonder what exactly is a blog, and how to make money with a blog, if at all. This is a common question that people ask me frequently as they seek for legitimate ways of making money online, but before you can think of making money with a blog you must first understand what blogs are all about because many people simply don’t know.
Blogs have been around for years, however, it just came into major popularity in the last decade. The weblog or blog is simply an application that allows users to post written text that gets immediately posted to the web, like an online journal of sorts.
A blog is designed to be as easy to use as the word processor application on your computer. While most websites take hours to update, a blog can be updated in real time, as quick as one would save a file to a computer. This is partly what makes blogs magical.
Blogging is a great way to get information on the internet, what this means is that if you are selling home security systems, and you create a blog about good deals on such systems, chances are that people looking for a security system will come across your blog in the search engine. This added exposure will surely help more people notice your business, and make purchases, thus creating greater business for you.
Read: How To Make Money With A Low Traffic Blog
Why Blogging Is So Popular
Name one person that doesn’t like to share his or her point of view, and you will have just named nobody at all. The statement above is to show you the simple fact that everyone likes to talk about themselves, and what they are up to, even if they say that they do not like doing so.
There is something about being human that makes us self-involved to the point where we truly feel as if others want, or need to know what is going on with us. Blogs offer one a unique way to express his or her feelings on any number of issues, with a shield that only the internet can provide.
The most common use of a blog is that of a journal, or an opinionated piece of writing involving some aspect of the author’s day to day life. While some blogs are totally commercially driven, they are often masked as personal musing in order to entice visitors. This is something that just can’t be avoided, people love checking out other peoples blogs to see what’s going on.
The internet can be a cold and bare place for people to be at times, and blogs help create a sense of community with its powerful reach, and ease of use. Many people want to share their ideas and make money online, but simply don’t know how to create a blog and earn money.
Blogging is popular because it relates to community, family, and friends, and therefore it is in direct relation with what matters most in life. Blogs can be a powerful tool to communicate to others, as well as to market with, as they are so friendly to search engines in terms of keywords, and ranking.
Read: How To Get Free Stuff Online And Incredible Discount Using Coupons
Just making a few blog posts can literally get you noticed immediately, and is something that truly can help you become a big player in the internet business game.
Niche Blogs And How To Get The Most Out Of Them
Having a niche blog is something that can be profitable and easy, or challenging and difficult depending on how you handle the day to day posting. Niche blogs are typically blogs related to one or more specific industries or fields, including hobbies, businesses, and sports etc.
The more niche or in-depth a blog is, the harder it might be for people not involved in that niche to get into. It is for this reason that one must think about the best way to make the most out of niche blogs, and finding the right niche is a good start.
When searching for the right niche for any blog, be sure to look at the prospective audience, and your ability to keep the blog up to date within that niche.
If you are thinking about doing a blog about horse racing, yet you have no time to watch horse races, it might not make sense to try to do a niche blog on the subject. Instead, a good way of finding a niche is by looking at what it is that you do have time to do, and then creating a blog based on that instead.
After you have selected your niche blog topic, it’s time to become an expert. No matter how much you think you know about your niche, chances are you might need some brushing up on the topic.
One can brush up on a topic by simply doing research on the niche, and spending a few hours reading within the blog subject territory each day. Feel free to check out rival blogs, as they will give you an idea of what is popular in your chosen niche, and what is not.
The most important part of getting the most out of a niche blog is becoming the go-to place for information in the niche. That means creating a blog that is constantly updated and is accurate in the stories relating to the subject. If you do this with your niche blog, expect big time results and the question of how do bloggers make money would have been answered.
How To Make Money With A Blog
1. Affiliate Marketing Still Leads The Way
In this section, I am going to outline a few techniques that I use to really amplify my affiliate promotions. This isn’t exactly a “how to make money with affiliate programs” report. It is more of “how to make more money with affiliate programs”.
So I assume you know what an affiliate program is and that you have been involved in promoting affiliate products before. As for where to find good affiliate products to promote? I usually go with Clickbank for a few reasons:
1.There are tons of different affiliate products to choose from.
2.Clickbank is a third party service, so you know you will be getting paid, unlike a company who runs their own affiliate program.
3.Many merchants at Clickbank are paying 60-75% commissions per sale which is a fantastic offer to affiliates.
You can, of course, use the ideas in this write-up to promote anything, and maybe you have a program in mind already or an opportunity that you want to promote, that’s fine. But if you are looking for new markets or products to promote, then Clickbank is a good choice. Let’s get on to the tactics!
Read: Top Affiliate Networks Guaranteed To Help You Make Money Online
Using Videos To Skyrocket Affiliate Sales
Videos have come a long way online and are now starting to show up in just about every promotion you see, and for good reasons as well. This is because they produce big sales. You can certainly use them to promote your affiliate products with great success.
Here is an idea that I have been testing and it has yielded a great result, the idea has to do with creating a video of the actual affiliate product which you intend to promote.
When I say video I mean a screen capture video using a program like the one on Camtasia. You can easily do a quick search on Google to get free video screen capture software, so do some research to see what you can come up with.
A lot of computers OS program now come with video editing software for home movies and other functions. You can use this exact same software to edit your screen capture marketing videos. Once you get some screen capture software you create a “Here is what you can have in minutes” style of video.
You call it a “tour of our product”. You then add this video to your affiliate product promotion and boom, increase sales. It is very simple to do and hasn’t failed yet to work for me. Here is how you can do it:
Step 1
Start up the screen capture software, and welcome the viewer to the product tour video. This can be a simple greeting where you introduce yourself as a user of the product and give a quick introduction to what will be in the actual video.
Step 2
Login to your member’s area where the product will be downloaded or if the product is a downloadable file like a PDF report or eBook, you can just open the file.
Step 3
If there is a download page, it is a good idea to show the download page, discuss the bonuses, etc. Talk about everything a buyer will receive when they order. Show them the order process and how it works. A lot of people online are still a bit scared to give their credit card numbers over the Internet.
They do not want their credit card to get stolen by some hacker, and are also concerned about being scammed by the people that are ordering from. So if you show how easy and safe the order process is, this can surely help sales by reassuring customers that they will not get scammed out of their money and that the product is safe to buy.
Step 4
Show them the chapters in the book while reading some of it. This is a big part, it shows the viewer that the product is real, it also shows how it is presented, and they get a quick taste of exactly what is inside. You can go by each chapter to show them the headlines or titles of the product. This can produce big sales as it really taps into people’s instant gratification trigger button.
You’re basically saying “You can be reading this right now!” You should get permission from the owner of the product before you show the inside of their product to the public, but this shouldn’t be a problem.
Just explain what you are doing and let them know that the viewers of the video would only be able to read a few pages in the video and that you aren’t showing the whole entire book in the video. Also, this works the same way if you are promoting a software program. Show how the programs work, the features, etc.
Step 5
Thank the viewer for watching the video and remind them that they can have this within minutes from now by placing an order for the product. Also, if there is an affiliate program for the product, you can give them a quick glance at that and let them know how they can recoup their investment by just referring 2 friends. This is also very powerful as it makes an investment in the product seem even less risky.
Something else that I have used in few videos is showing the guarantee of the product to make sure the visitor knows that if he is not happy with the product, he can get a full no questions asked refund. I have also used these videos to build lists. You can say something like:
“Subscribe today and receive a video tour of ABC product free”
People subscribe and get the video of the product which you are promoting sent to their email. Something else I have been testing with great results is what I call an “Insiders view”. If you go to Google and search for a heavily promoted affiliate product you will see that lots of people have set up web pages and have used Google Adwords program to advertise it.
They use ads that say things like:
“ABC Product Reviews” or “Don’t Buy ABC Product Until You Read This”
They are using these ads to generate traffic to their page which then links to the actual product through their affiliate link so that they get credit for the sale.
This is a simple tactic that people have used for years. What I have been testing are ads that start like: “Get an Insider’s View Of ABC Product” This ad links to my page which then has my video that starts automatically. The video is of course all about the product, shows it chapter by chapter, shows the download area and order process etc.
These works well, and of course, you can even get them to subscribe to your list first before they can get the “Insider’s View” video. Something else you can do with this video is to submit it to the video directories like Youtube and Vimeo.
Make sure to link back to your site in the description area in order to generate traffic back to your site. This can be a quick and easy traffic generator. Search engines love video and if you carry out this idea you will have one to submit to the video websites. It’s quick and easy, give it a shot!
Read: How To Make Money With URL Shortener
Offer Limited Bonuses
One more thing you will definitely want to mention in your video is if you have included any of your own bonuses if they order the affiliate product. Something like “If you order XYZ report, I will throw in my own ABC report as a bonus, but only if you’re one of the next 50 orders” etc.
This, of course, will also add value to the product you are promoting and easily boost sales. Generally the better the bonus, the more sales, but do not overshadow or devalue the main product that you are promoting with your bonus.
2. Practical Easy Blueprint On How To Develop Your Own product
In this part of the article, I am going to outline a simple step-by-step system that I have used to produce consistent profit quickly and easily. The best thing about this system is that it can be duplicated by anyone and once you master it to a level in which you are able to make money with it, you can do it over and over and over again which will keep making you more money.
So without much ado let’s dive into one of the strategies on how to make money with a blog.
Step 1 – Create A Report Or An Ebook To Sell
First, you have to find a market and create something to sell to that market. If you probably have a market in mind which you believe is going to be a hit, then there will be no need for extensive market research.
Weight loss products are selling, Internet marketing products are also doing well, so there are lots of prospects to explore, some markets which you might have in mind to explore won’t need extra work to see what sells.
If you have a blog, I suggest writing a report or an eBook on a topic closely related to your niche, after you have picked a topic or market for your report, the next step is for you to create content for your report.
Where do you get it? Well, you have 3 options.
- You can write it yourself, this would ensure that it is unique and it is the best option.
- If you cannot write, then you can hire somebody else to do it. This option will cost the most but require very little time on your part. You can get good and affordable service on upwork., freelancer, and iwriters.
Also, be very clear about what you want to avoid confusion. Make sure you state how many pages you want, what the font size should be, the chapter titles, etc. Be very specific in every aspect of the report so that whoever you hire does things your way and not theirs.
- You can use private label content. This would be the least unique but would be cheap and would work if you are not a writer. Here is what I do with private label content to make it much better.
I get all kinds of private label reports, articles and eBooks on one topic, read them all, take out the best stuff from each private label item and make one “best of” report. So this means I get the best information from different sources.
I suggest you do the same. This way, you do not have to write anything, you just copy and paste most of it into one great report. Finding PLR products to make your “best of” report will come quite easy as PLR products are literally everywhere. Just go to google.com and type in “private label eBooks”, “private label resell rights”, etc. and you will see exactly what you want.
If the PLR come with sales letters, then you do the same when writing your sales letter by making a “best of” sales letter to sell your report. The best places I have found for PLR products are the memberships that give you two new eBooks per month with sales letters for like $30. That’s a product with PLR with a sales letter for 15 bucks that you can make money with for years to come.
Read: Ways To Make Money On The side – My Top 5 Pick
Plus, you usually get access to all of the previous months products, I am not going to give you a list because these sites go up and down often and the list will be outdated quick. Just go to Google and do the search and you will find plenty.
You can even do this with just one PLR book. Let’s say you just want to create a 20-30 page report and you got the private label rights to a 100 page eBook. You can edit it down to a “best of” 25-page report by cutting out the 75 least helpful pages. That way your customer gets just the guts, the best parts of that 100-page book. What do you edit? Well since it is private label, you can change anything you want.
Step 2 – Naming Products
The first thing you are going to change is the title. Just think up something clever, it doesn’t have to be perfect. There is a simple trick that you can use to name your products and also use it when you buy domain names, assuming you don’t have a blog already.
This is actually a branding technique that big companies use to create a more memorable brand for their products/business. The trick is simple, start each word with the same letter.
For an example, how about the donut chain Krispy Kreme or Duncan Donuts. It kind of makes it roll off the tongue better, and also of course, easier to remember. Another trick that helps with branding is to make your product name rhyme with itself.
Use these two ideas when naming products and buying domains as much as possible. Also, make sure to appeal to human psychology. Use words like:
- Secrets
- Breakthrough
- System
- Undercover
People love to think they are getting knowledge that nobody else is, so just naming your product something like: “Hollywood Makeup Secrets Revealed” or “Breakthrough Internet Cash Secrets” etc. Just doing ideas like that can help increase sales.
Next thing you want to edit is the actual book itself. Don’t worry; you don’t have to write anything. Just skim through it and delete all of the fluff and filler. The more products I sell online, the more I am realizing that people are sick of long lengthy eBooks that are filled with crap. Just cut your PLR products down to the meat – the reason why the customer paid for the book.
You’re not going to sell these products for a ton of money, so you don’t need to have filler in it in order to increase the value. Most PLR eBooks that you get will be in the 40-80 page range.
After I get done cutting the filler out of most books, I am left with about 20- 30 pages of pure meat, which is just fine. Your customers will thank you for that.
Remember, you are looking for the best information from all of your PLR sources. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 or 5 PLR eBooks/reports, get the best information from all of them and turn them into one hot report. Also, remember that you can do volumes. For instance; let’s say you found a ton of PLR stuff with lots of good information for one market.
Create a Volume 1 and sell it, then a few weeks later, release your Volume 2 to the same people who were interested in Volume 1. Depending on how much good information you have, this could go on for quite a while making you tons of quick money
Another idea you may want to consider is to create product packages. If you have been online in the Internet marketing industry for any length of time, you will have seen where people take like 10 products and bundle them into one package, and sell it for cheap. Although this is common in the Internet marketing niche, it is rarely seen in other markets and works very well.
Now you don’t have to bundle 10 products, just 2 or 3 would make your offer more powerful. Whichever you decide, the point is to make it stand out from the rest a little bit.
- Change the title
- Cut the fat
- Package it with other PLR products of the same topic
- Combine
The point is, none of this takes a lot of time. You don’t have to write any new content. Well ok, you may have to come up with new chapter names or write some “connector” paragraphs, but nothing major I assure you. If you were to write a 100 page eBook, it might take you days, or weeks. But to edit one will just take a few hours if you are slow.
You don’t have to spend too much time on this. Just reading (skimming) the PLR book will tell you if it’s worth selling. If it is, quickly make the changes or cut out the best information and paste it into a new file, then move on to the next PLR book and do the same.
Somebody else has already spent the time editing these books once, so you just need to get in and modify the main things and be done with it and then, use something like doc2pdf to turn it into a PDF file and you’re done.
Private label is incredible for those who know how to take advantage of it and you are now one of those people and when it concerns how to make money with a blog, it is one very important strategy to use.
Read: How To Make Money Online Writing Articles
Step 3 – Create Your Sales Page
Now that you have a new unique “best of” product, you need a site to sell it on. All you really need is a 2-page site, one sales letter or a landing page and one order form. If you don’t know what a landing page is, here is brief definition. A landing page is a page on a website where a potential lead lands on after clicking a link from another website.
A good thing about PLR eBooks is that most come with sales letters. Now, these aren’t the best sales letters on the planet, although, they aren’t the worst either. They are usually written by a professional copywriter, but usually a cheap copywriter, that notwithstanding they are certainly useable.
Sometimes I put these sales letters up unedited and they convert at4-5%, so you may be surprised. All you really need to make money online is an average sales ratio, which is 1-2%. Which means 1 to 2 people will buy out of every 100 visitors who see the sales page.
To put it one way, marketing is a numbers game, and these numbers are the most important. How much traffic you are getting, and how much of that traffic is buying. All of the other crap you read is just another way to make making money online more complicated than it has to be.
So just focus on these two things- getting traffic, and converting it into sales. So what do you do with the sales letter that came with your PLR eBook? Make it unique of course.
If you only edited one eBook into a “best of” report, then you just need to edit the one sales letter that came with it. But if you used multiple sources to come up with your report, then making a “best of” sales letter will work.
First, delete all of the graphics. You changed the name of the product already, and the graphics on the sales letter most likely have the original name of the product all over them, so they are now useless.
You don’t need fancy graphics to make a sales page convert. The only graphic that I use is a software box style cover that I create. If you cannot create graphics like me, then I suggest using a software program to do them for you.
Next, change the headline and all sub-headlines to the color red. Red sells better than any other color and then, read it. Read the entire letter (or letters) and put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Edit what you like or don’t like.
That’s it really, you’re done. I don’t edit them too much because it is a waste of time. The reason is because you don’t know if they are going to sell well the way they are, you have to try it and see. So I do the little editing that I just mentioned, then put it online and start driving traffic to it to see how well it does.
Sometimes it’ll bring in an average sales ratio, sometimes bigger, and sometimes it’ll be a flop. Those are the only things that can happen, and you shouldn’t be bothered by any of them. If it flops, it’s time to modify the copy some more, starting with the headline.
Also, be sure to do a search on Google to see what your competition is doing. I don’t suggest taking any of their copy, but getting ideas from them isn’t a bad idea.
So when you have a PLR product that flops, go around and see how other successful sales letters are written and get some ideas. There is also pricing to consider. As I said before, these reports will be short after you edit them, 20-30 pages or so. So your price should not be too high.
Here are some good price points that work well, $1.99, $2.99, $3.99, $4.99 up to $7.
I usually sell these products from 1-7 dollars. That seems to be a good range for the optimum amount of money per visitor. Don’t be afraid of the low price points either. $1 or $2 per sale may not seem like much but you have to remember that you will also have backend products and affiliate programs which you will sell to those customers, and those people will also be added to your customer list.
Plus, low price points will usually generate much higher sales ratios which are a good way to lead people into your sales funnel. Okay, so far, you have not invested that much time or money. Actually, by this time, you have barely done any work at all and yet you have a product and sales letter ready to go.
Upload it to your website and start sending traffic to it. Do you need a domain name for it? Nope, not yet at least. Upload it to a domain name that you already own. For instance, if you own www.yoursite.com. Then create: www.yoursite.com/booktitle
If it sells without its own domain name, it will sell with one. This way, if it flops or you can’t get it selling, you can just trash the idea and move on without having lost out on a domain name and believe me, don’t be afraid to ditch the idea if it is becoming more work than it is worth. Sometimes these products just aren’t going to sell the way you have the sales letter and product set up.
They would need a complete redo to start selling well, and with all of the different PLR products out there, it is just easier and a lot less work to ditch the loser and go find a winner. But don’t ditch the content. If it is good content and you came up with a really killer “best of” report, then you can use it for a whole host of other ideas.
Like giving it away for free to build a list or promote an affiliate program. I have setup plenty of these PLR sites using the exact same ideas above and some just won’t sell. I will modify some and if it still doesn’t sell screw it- NEXT!
It also doesn’t matter if things are perfect. So many people are sitting there, working on a project for months trying to get everything perfect and at the end of the day, it won’t still yield the desired result. So nothing is perfect!
Do it fast and get it out there to sell
Step 4 – Create A Second Offer For Bigger Profits
Here is a good way to boost profits by 30% or more. All you do is sell another product to the person who just bought a product from you on the thank you page.
This is a simple upsell that I’m sure you have seen a hundred times before.
So they order product A, and on the thank you page, you sell them product B. Products A and B should be related of course.
To make it ultra powerful, call the second offer a One-Time offer and tell the customer that they will only see the sales page for product B this one time, and they will never get a chance to buy the product again.
Read: What Is A Blog – How To Make Money Blogging
The scarcity and limited time factors work wonders in marketing. People equate value to things that are rare or scarce or limited. And if your product is only available that one time, it will increase orders.
Again, you have probably seen this One-Time-Offer deal before if you have anything to do with the Internet marketing market. Same concept, just use it with these PLR product ideas, it works like a charm (and works well in markets outside of Internet marketing because it isn’t so ridiculously common).
This will also allow you to spend more of your profits on advertising. You can even spend all of the money you make on Product A on advertising because you will make all of your profits on product B sales. This makes getting traffic a whole lot easier.
If you don’t have to make any money up front on your ads because you know you will convert 20 plus percent of those customers into second offer buyers, then through these generating tons of traffic to your site is incredibly simple.
This is what you are striving for; you can create the second report/offer the same way you created the first, with PLR. Something else that I have used on these sales letters is video. You simply create a video of the actual product itself just like I explained earlier.
How to make money with a blog as a beginner is not rocket science, what you need is to create a sales funnel that will guide your blog visitors on what to do once they are on your blog.
Through this article, I have laid out ways on how to monetize your blog through simple methods that are guaranteed to help you make money online. What are your struggles and challenges when it comes to making money online, please share your thoughts in the comment section?
The post How To Make Money With A Blog For Beginners appeared first on Make Money Online Blog.