Making money from niche specific sites – Blogging

Blogging is one of the ways to publish your self online.

As wikipedia quotes

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

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From money making stand-point blogging is something which allows you to create a niche informative website with just a few clicks & enables you to make money online by displaying other’s websites. However it is really necessary that you give at-least a year to blogging before you can become a very successful blogger.

Just to make you confident about blogging i will name a few popular bloggers who make a hefty income from their blogs.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
2. http://www.gizmodo.com/
3. http://icanhascheezburger.com
4. http://www.labnol.org

If you check all these guys blog about almost anything. Huffington Post is a political blog, while Gizmodo & Labnol are tech blogs & Icanhasacheezburger.com is a blog based on LOLCATS (Funny cat pictures). All these guys are making a fortune from blogging. These are my personal inspirations for blogging.

Okay so by now you understand what blogging is; Now let’s setup a blog for your self.

I give you 2 options:

• Blogger.com – Free one (No coding or technical skills required.)
• WordPress – Self hosted,Self managed(I personally use this for my self)

I would recommend you start with blogger.com as it is a free service by Google & they’d also allow you to display advertisements. Nothing beats blogger’s free service as long as you don’t want to spend some money.
But however when start making money i would recommend you to move to wordpress, If you can spare some money say around $100 (Rs.5,000/-), You can get a good webhost & everything will be self managed.(We will cover more about Setting up with wordpress in upcoming posts.)

Okay now follow these steps:

• Decide what you want to blog about? Any specific idea? What is your hobby?
• make list of things you can blog about your hobby.
• Visit www.blogger.com & create your first free blog.

How He Became A Money Making Blogger & I am still not!

PART – I

Let me first introduce my self, I am Hardik Shah, A successful SEM specialist & a parttime Web Designer. I started my internet career as a blogger 4 years ago, I was brought in to this industry by my friend Dhaval Raja.I am really thankful to him for doing that. Anyways now lets get back to the point. As i started my career, I was a damn Noob, just like any other newbie i wanted to learn all I could to make quick money online, I tried everything that I could, I literally spent plenty of my time on Digital Point. As a matter of fact, I learnt all the SEO gimmicks. I learnt spamming gimmicks. I also worked on blackhat techniques. I did spend some good amount of money for purchasing some stupid SEO softwares & ebooks. Frankly speaking in a year or so, I had all the knowledge that an intermediate marketer would have. I was not a pro but i was not a noob anymore, I knew my way out in the blogging world. The sad part is I had everything that I could learn from & use,

But I FAILED

It was indeed a massive failure. I spent so much of time & money but all I had in my hands was a Massive Failure. My Blogging Attempt was a massive failure(It still is, I left fulltime blogging long back, I Gave UP).
PART – II
On october 10 2007 , My younger brother who still was just 16, Asked me, “Bhai(Brother) , I want to start a new blog , Will you please allow me to use your Ad-sense ads on my blog?” , I was stunned , I mean, I couldn’t understand what was on his mind, I thought he was looking for some Click Exchange kind of stuff, I threatened him “If you do click exchanges or anything stupid, I will not give you my ads.Google is very strict about this & I Can’t take risks.” He politely replied , “Bhai Trust Me! I will not risk your account. We can make good money if you allow me to use it, Please!!”. I said okay, He started his first blog on a subdomain on Blogger.

I was quite sure that even after having some good amount experience in the industry, I could not make any money,Not even 10$ , My brother is also going to fail. Out of my curiosity when i checked his first day’s traffic stats, He drove 795 unique visitors & made 5.45$ in total earnings, Wow I said, Something which i achieved in almost 6 months, He did it in a single day. Over a period of time he had a fixed monthly income from google adsense. Something which I couldn’t do even though I had so much of experience.

I was literally thinking about,

* What did he do in such a short time?
* How come he got rankings in Google on very first day?
* How come he is able to do it & I am not?
* What went wrong for me & right for him?

To find the answers I went in to his Website Analytics Stats, What i found was he had a steady flow of visitors from social networking sites like orkut & facebook. 80% of the traffic was from these sites, Now I thought he must would have spammed there heavily. I shouted at him, “Hey, Adsense TOS does not allow spamming” & he said, I didn’t spam..

The Most Interesting Part

After having some discussions with him, I realized where I went wrong & he did not. What he did was,He was an active member in a bunch of communities, He was the key player & moderator for a bunch of communities, He helped others a-lot of times. He eventually had so many relations in the virtual world that people loved him. When he started the blog, He told everyone in his networks, Some of his friends who were community owners allowed him to post links to his blogs, they literally wrote positive reviews about his blog . He went viral on that front, & boom he had easily achieved something that everyone(like me) wanted to achieve desperately.

One more thing he did differently was, After doing it for a smaller period of time he did not give up like me, Though it was at times boring for him, He was consistent. I was more of moody when i was working on all these. Where as he was literally hardworking. He was punctual,If he wanted to post 15 articles in a month then , He would.
I started helping him in making the blog search engine friendly, I did some link building work for him, I started working on the seo front & he was on the social & the posting front. & we had our way on the internet, Though i eventually started helping out other’s businesses on the SEM front, My brother still consistent, He never misses a single posting schedule. Oh i forgot to introduce him , He is Bhavyesh Shah , He doesn’t want to get in to the limelight, So he wanted me to not to include any of his personal details or blog details in this PDF. Sorry to Disappoint .

Lessons To Learn:

* Be Social
* Be Active
* You have to go to people first, If you want them to come to you.
* Be Consistent
* Seo Helps but it is not Necessary
* Don’t GiveUp
* Work Hard
* Party Harder