Web Design Tutorials | Creating a Website | Learn Adobe Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver

Creating and Monetizing Your First Blog

Posted on 02. Jul, 2008 by Michael in Web Development

If you would like to find out what blogging resources I use to make $1000’s every month from my blogs then check out my FREE eCourse to making money online.

1. Buying a Domain

We use GoDaddy to buy all our .com domains as they offer the best service. If you are looking to buy a .co.uk domain we recommend 1&1 for domains.

If you would like 10% off your GoDaddy domain, use the coupon code “cjcsave10″!

If you are struggling to come up with a good domain, we recommend using Instant Domain Search which will tell you if a domain is a available as quick as you can type the URL yourself. This tool has helped me find some great domains.

Buy a domain from GoDaddy.com

2. Buying Hosting and Setting it up with your domain.

So often bloggers decide to use FREE hosting such as Wordpress.com, Blogger and Blogspot. If you ever want to make real money online, you have to be willing to invest the $10 a month it takes to host your own website.

It is important you choose a hosting company which has a auto installer built in so you will be able to install your own blog without any knowledge of HTML or coding. Hosting companyies we recommend are HostGator and 1 & 1, they both offer the software called Fantastico which allows you to automatically install a Wordpress blog onto your hosting. They also offer a variety of hosting packages which will suit any blogger.

If you would like $9.94 off your hosting then use the coupon code “Retireat21″!

To connect your domain and hosting together, log in to your domain host and find the settings for name servers, you will need to change them to something like this:

ns1.hostgator.com
ns2.hostgator.com

3. Installing your Wordpress Blog

Now you have your domain and hosting set up, installing the Wordpress Blog is simple, if you chose one of our recommended hosts, all you have to do is log into your hosting cpanel ( www.domain.com/cpanel ) and scroll to the bottom where you will see a smiley face icon called Fantastico, click this and you will get this screen:

On the left side click Wordpress and then click New Installation, if you do this you will be presented with this page:

Fill out the details like so:

Click Install Wordpress and you will now have a blog hosted on your domain. It should look like this:

4. Adding a theme to your Wordpress Blog

There are 1000’s of FREE wordpress themes you can download all over the internet. Find the theme you like and download it. If you would like to choose a premium wordpress theme, Premium News Themes and Revolution offer some very well designed themes.

For uploading our Wordpress Themes, we use FlashFXP, you can download a trial of this software here. You need to upload your theme to WP-Content >> Themes.

Once you have uploaded your theme, you need to login to your blog control panel ( www.domain.com/wp-login.php ) and click Design, you will now see a page like this:

Click on the theme you just uploaded and your blog will now be using that theme.

My blog now looks like this:

5. Monetizing Your Blog

Different monetization techniques work better for different types of blog. For example, a blog about home improvements would earn more money per click through Google Adsense than a website about Computer Games. Here is a example of how I monetize each of my blogs:

Private Advertising – Selling private advertising is one of the top ways to monetize your website. You want to have a good advertising page and have all advertisers sign up on a subscription payment system, so that they automatically get billed for their advert every month, this helped me to over double my advertising income because I didn’t have to keep finding new advertisers. If you are struggling to find advertisers, I would recommend offering your advertising for sale on SitePoint Marketplace and DigitalPoint.

To add your private advertising to your website, I recommend using OIOpublisher which allows you to add, edit and delete all your adverts from an admin control panel, you also can offer your advertisers an extra service by providing them with a login to track and edit their advert.

Affiliate Programs - I love affiliate links because you can earn by promoting the products and tools you love! If you ever lack blog post ideas, you can review a product or service you use often with your affiliate link and collect commissions. I also like to promote a product related to my blog at the bottom of each blog post, to find affiliate products join ClickBank.

Often readers won’t click affiliate links because they know you’re earning a commission from it, you can cloak your links so no one knows its an affiliate link. For example, a normal affiliate link may look like this “http://webdesignd.lpnow.hop.clickbank.net/” if you cloak it, it can look like this “http://www.webdesigndev.com/go/hosting”. I found a really good piece of software to allow me to do this on my websites and also have a whole bunch of monetizing opportunities, its called WordPress Link Cloak.

Advertising Programs – Using programs like Google Adsense inside your blog posts can generate an extra decent revenue.

To make the most out of advertising programs like Google Adsense, I recommend either using a Adsense Ready Wordpress Theme or laying your Adsense out like I do on this website I run. To add advert code to your site, login to your wordpress account and go click on Design >> Theme Editor and you will see your code for your blog theme like so. To show Google Adsense inside a blog post edit your Single Post (single.php file) and paste your Google Adsense code in the location you want to show it.

Sponsored Reviews – Reviewing websites can also be a great way to boost earnings as you can decide how often you want to do a review. A lot of the time you can sell reviews directly through your advertising page but to boost sales, I recommend offering reviews on Pay Per Post, Review Me and Sponsored Reviews.

Typically private ad sales bring in the most revenue so presenting your advertising details is very important, don’t forget to get testimonials from your advertisers, include screen shots of stats and ad locations. Here is a couple of examples of great advertising pages.

6. Promoting and Marketing Your Blog

You are ready to launch your blog now and start promoting it:

Search Engine Optimization – When you get your blog the URL’s are by default “www.domain.com/?=1″ as you can imagine, these are not so good for search engines, you want to change the blog post url’s to reflect on what the blog post title is. You can do this by going into your Wordpress Admin and clicking Settings >> Permalinks typing in the Custom Structure field “/%postname%”.

Social Bookmarking – Asking your readers to bookmark your site to help others find it can be a great source of traffic. The effects of social bookmarking aren’t just extra traffic but can be used to increase search engine rankings. When you hit a homepage of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, you automatically get boosted up to rank very highly for that keyword your blog post is about. For example, on Retireat21.com I had a post about Young Entrepreneurs Rich List, because it hit the homepage of google I hit first page for terms in google such as “Young Entrepreneurs, Young Rich List and Making Money Online”. On some of my blogs I use a Wordpress Plugin called Sociable, download it and add it to every blog post.

RSS Feeds – Keeping what traffic your blog gets is very important, an RSS feed notifies your readers every time there is a new post. Your rss feed is located at www.domain.com/feed – most webmasters opt for the popular service called feedburner which allows you to offer an email rss so readers can get their notifications through email. They also provide an RSS count which shows your readers how many readers you have. This is important when you have a higher amount of readers as it helps sell advertising and makes other people sign up to become an RSS reader.

Recap – 6 Steps to Getting Your First Profitable Blog Online

1. Buy Your Domain
2. Buy Your Hosting and Connect Them Together
3. Install Wordpress onto your Hosting
4. Download a Free Wordpress Theme or Buy One and Install.
5. Monetize Your Website
6. Start Promoting

Blogging Guides That Helped Me:

How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs
How To Market and Promote Your Blog
How To Make Money From Your Blog – He Makes Over $1000 a day from his blog!
Building a Niche Blog With Wordpress

Bloggers That Inspired Me:

Darren Rowse who is perhaps the most famous full time Blogger in the area of helping other bloggers add income streams to their blogs.

Collis Ta’eed, the founder of FreeLanceSwitch which has been running for only one year but has attracted over 20,000 Subscribers.

Pete Cashmore who runs one of the most visited blogs in the world called Mashable. Mashable offers news on social networking and social software and attracts millions of visitors every month.

Carl Ocab was just 13 when he started making money online blogger and quickly managed to earn more than his parents combined.

Yaro Starak runs a Blog Mastermind which has helpped 100’s of people earn a substantial income online.

Tags: Blogger, Blogging, Blogging Resources, creating a blog, domains, hostgator, hosting, make money, making money online, wordpress