We’ll return to my personal journey and what I learned from many online marketing masters, but for now, I want to start your personal journey, and get you started. So we’ll spend some time covering how to start a blog. First a quick round-up of all the basic points I’ve mentioned in the previous posts. Then a simple overview of all the basic steps to take, so you can actually stop pouring over information and get started!
That last part – getting started - is especially important, from two angles:
- Know yourself and what you want to do to to make money. There are many ways to make money online, as outlined at the bottom of my last post, but all of them will require you spending at least 4 hours a day in front of your computer, learning, putting up blogs/websites, and then doing a lot of repetitive chores to attract traffic to your sites. All of them require this, no matter what any salespage promises you about a one-step, push-button system. At least 4 hours a day (preferably more) for at least a year before you see anywhere near the income that would allow you quit your day job. If working at your computer for 4-6 hours every day doesn’t interest you – don’t get started! Do something else. If you prefer working in the great outdoors, be a carpenter or a forest ranger…don’t do this. Know yourself.
- If you do want to do this, read everything on this page and the next two pages, then get started. Don’t spend too much time studying how to do this – you will learn most by doing. Spend no more than 20% of your internet time studying, and 80% of it doing something – researching a niche you can profitably sell something in, putting up a blog, adding new original content, or driving traffic to it. If you don’t know how to find a profitable niche or even know how to buy a domain name and put up a basic blog, obviously we will cover those things first – both finding a low competition niche and creating blogs is simple & straightforward, as are most of the activities in marketing your website – it’s not rocket science – so once you’ve learned the basics, get started doing the things you need to do each day to make tangible progress.
So now you’ve decided this is something you want to do, and your ready to stop dreaming about making a living online and get started. Here’s what you do:
- Think of something you’d like to offer people on your website. It can be anything – a product like dog supplies, cell phone accessories, health products or guitars, or it could be an information product like a report about proper nutrition, or a course in learning to play guitar. It can be something you know nothing about, as long as it’s profitable and you’re willing to make sure the information you post is accurate. But most newbies find it’s easier to pick a niche that is profitable, but also something you know a little bit about. Later, we’ll discuss many places to discover what products are “hot.”
- Research the keywords that people use most often to find that thing. A keyword is simply what you type into a Google or Yahoo search to find what you’re looking for, usually a phrase of 2-4 words like “cell phone accessories” or “how to play guitar.” Your goal is to have your blog show up in the first few pages of Google whenever people search in your niche, so that they click on your site, and hopefully, buy what your selling. As we’ll see in the next post, there are several free or paid tools to help you determine how much competition there is for that keyword. The keyword “weight loss” is a huuuge, very profitable market, but there’s already thousands of expert marketers competing to have their site show up on Google pg. 1 when someone types in the search “weight loss,” so you might have to find lesser competitive keywords
- Next you will register a new domain name with a registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap. One approach is to make sure your domain name carries one of your chosen keywords right in the name, like www.weightloss.com, because this Exact Match Domain, or EMD, gives your site a big initial boost in the search engines. But there are many ways to get your keywords ranked high in Google, even if they are inside the inner pages, and in time your site can be the dominant one in your niche even if your keyword is not part of your domain name. As example, look at Amazon.com, who originally wanted to dominate the online bookselling niche. Their name doesn’t have the keyword “books” or “online books” in it – indeed the word “Amazon” doesn’t have anything at all to do with books, but they became the #1 site to buy books and so many other consumer items.
- Next you will get “hosting” for web space (many, many hosting companies, charging as little as $4 a month) and build a basic website with some content (articles, photos, reviews, comments, etc.) and a clear link to whatever you want them to buy.
- Then you will optimize your site and start attracting backlinks (other sites linking to yours – Google likes to see lots of these) and customers (traffic.)
Each of these steps require a more in depth discussion, so we’ll cover these in the next several post (click here for Part 2), and use an actual example to really help clarify the process.
