Welcome to Revenue Blogging Version 3.0
February 9, 2010 by Greg
Filed under Revenue Blogging dot com
Yes this is the third, and hopefully final, launch of this blog. The difference between this and the last two times I tried to get this going, is I now have the experience and knowledge to back up what I will be writing about. Two things that were sorely lacking previously.
The Past
My name is Greg Young and I am a full-time Internet Marketer. My journey began three years ago when I was listening to Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy podcast. He was talking about John Chow and how he was making $10,000 a month from his personal blog. I visited John’s site and if you knew it back then, you remember it was a simple blog and the posts really weren’t anything Earth shattering. Some would say they still aren’t, but I am not here to critique anyone else’s way of doing things; he was making money online and I wasn’t. I figured I could do what he was doing. I was working a full-time corporate job at the time and I thought it would be a fun hobby to learn more about it.
I quickly learned how to register a domain name, purchase hosting and set up WordPress (it’s not hard), and Revenueblogging.com was born. If I remember correctly my first post was entitled How to Make Money with Adsense. I laugh when I think about it now, because how could I credibly teach people how to make money with Adsense, when I wasn’t doing it myself. In fact, knowing what I know now about the intricacies of Adsense, including the importance of targeted traffic and keyword selection, writing that post is embarrassing in its ignorance
As I continued to learn more about how to generate revenue blogging, I discovered that the “make money online” niche was both over crowded and often not as lucrative as other niches that appeal more to casual web surfers. So I launched a few different websites on different topics, but I was still “blogging” in a social sense; much along the lines of what Yaro Starak and Problogger teach. In fact I was even a member of Yaro’s paid program for a few months.
I floundered along this path until I discovered Griz’s how to make money online blog. I connected with the methodology he was teaching and finally started to make a few dollars consistently each month. I think it was some time in here that I tried to launch this blog for a second time, but the fact of the matter is that I was too interested in my niche sites that were actually making money, that maintaining this site just didn’t have any appeal to me. Fast forward to today and my full-time corporate job is behind me and my hobby has turned into a full time living. My business model now mainly follows developing niche websites, built on WordPress (self-hosted) and monetized with affiliate offers. I do have a few Adsense sites with respectable CPMs as well.
The Present
As I mentioned above, a blog about blogging or making money online is not a good choice for actually making money online, so instead my reasons for re-launching this site now are as follows:
- To teach friends and family exactly what it is I do for a living and give them a blueprint so that they can do it for themselves.
- To establish a visible online presence for myself.
I know a lot people who would like to work from home or at the very least make some extra money online. They have expressed interest in learning what I do and while there are several good, free sources for this on the web I wanted to provide a step-by-step outline of what I do specifically. I want to share what actually works for me and what pitfalls to avoid. I also want to provide some of the technical instruction with respect to WordPress and hosting and I want it all to be in one place. So while I don’t proclaim to have the only way or method to be successful with affiliate marketing, I do have tested and proven techniques to really make money online.
Secondly I want to begin networking more with others in my line of work. I feel to do so effectively you need an online presence. As I teach you more about this business and niche marketing you will find that it can be somewhat lonely. A golden rule is that you never give away the addresses of your money making niche websites to other Internet Marketers (don’t trust anyone and all that). So without a “flagship” blog, I am finding it difficult to bring an identity to online conversations that I want to engage in or contribute to. So going forward, at conferences, in forums or in blog comments, I can be known as Greg from Revenue Blogging. This site will be my business card if you will.
The Future
To accomplish the first goal I will be rolling out a “Beginner Series” of posts and tutorials on how to get started from scratch. These will be a combination of how the business works and technical instruction on setting things up. If you are new to making money online, then these are the posts you want to watch out for and follow.
Interspersed with the beginner posts will be regular blog posts where I will share my opinion or take on things that are happening in the industry and will serve as an opportunity for me to be social with my peers.
That’s all for now. Be sure to Subscribe to Revenue Blogging by Email to ensure that you don’t miss a future post. Take care.
You’ve got me hooked! Ever since my husband started trucking (and even more so since he bought a small trucking company), I’ve wanted to find SOME way to make a relatively steady income so we could still actually have a monthly budget (trucking work and income can be very sporadic, I’ve discovered!). But I also want to continue being a stay-at-home mom. I am VERY interested in your forth-coming “beginners” series.
Stay tuned Tammi; you are very capable of doing this too. You have a significant head start in that you are familiar with Blogger and you don’t mind writing. I have a Blogspot blog that regularly earns me a few hundred dollars a month. So WordPress and self-hosted are not the only way to go.
Is there something I can do TODAY to get started with Momentum of building & making money?
Thanks
Lea,
It is tough to answer this without knowing where you are at personally, but I’ll give it a go.
There absolutely are things you can do today to get started. Let’s assume you are brand new. Start by reading my next post that gives an overview of one way (my way) of making money online.
Then sign up for one of the affiliate networks, such as Commission Junction, Clickbank, Copeac or my favorite: Shareasale. Select a high converting merchant or offer that you would like to promote. This product represents the solution to somebody’s problem and will determine the topic you will build a website around.
Now as far as building the website goes, there are a few options. You could get started right away with a free Blogspot blog from blogger.com. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to worry about domain registration or webhosting. There are a few drawbacks as well, such as you don’t own the property you are creating, but I don’t want to get into all of that right now. Blogger is a viable option.
However, the method that I will be recommending and explaining in detail, is to register a domain name (I like Godaddy and Namecheap), sign up for a hosting account (I recommend Hostgator), and install WordPress as the blogging platform.
Regardless of the platform you choose, you will have to select a domain name (in the case of Blogger it would be name.blogspot.com or if you register your own it would be domainname.(com/net/org). Again I will have a dedicated post to this later on. Try to select a name that contains the main word someone would use when searching for the problem you are providing an answer to. If you are promoting a wart remover, then wartremover in the name would give you a bit of a head start in ranking highly in search engines.
After that Lea, the work begins. You need to start writing and writing a lot. You need to populate your website with pages that each target a specific phrase that someone with the problem would type into a search engine. How do I get rid of a wart; What is the best wart removal cream; etc.
Do all of the above to get started building and making money today. The steps after you have done that involve promoting your site and getting ranked higher in Google.