Guide to start a popular blog to earn money
The main reason why I blog is money. And to be honest I’m currently doing a really bad job in that sense (zero income from blogging so far). I asked myself today whether I actually have the right approach in order to succeed. I’m currently blogging mostly about cakePHP and search engine optimization. I get the most traffic out of my cakePHP posts because some of them are ranked really high on Google. For example, if you searched for
cakephp breadcrumbs
cakephp mac
you would find posts from my blog about those topics ranked 3rd and 6th on Google respectively. Those are really good ranks and I’m more than happy with that. If somebody searches for those terms I’m pretty confident that they eventually happen to visit my blog as well. But does this mean my blog will be successful? Does this mean my blog will make a lot of money through advertising? Unfortunately the answer to both questions is no - big time, no. So today I had some thoughts about this and found some great infos that can help you (and me that is) to start a blog that will actually become popular over time and will also be able to generate some cash flow!
How to get rich with a blog - a 5 step tutorial
Ok, this header is a little bit catchy, but essentially this is the main theme I’m going to cover with this post. I already wrote an article in the past, esentially saying that content is the key to your success. Now this time I am not only going to clarify what good content actually should be, but also give you an extensive step-by-step explenation of how to start a blog with successful content that will actually get you some cash!
1. Get content that people care about
As mentioned before, I have some articles about cakePHP online. Is this a hugely popular topic? Your (and my) guess would probably be no (maybe you do not even know what cakePHP is … it’s a framework for building websites… if you don’t know what a framework is you can probably tell why cakePHP is not going to be a major topic for most of the people out there). But there is a more advanced way to find out. Google Insights for Search - another free and great tool brought to us by Google. Google Insights for Search allows to monitor what is being searched for at Google and you can also determine how popular a specific search term is. If you want to give this a try with “cakePHP” follow this link. As you can see there has been a huge increase in search requests for cakePHP over the past three years. You can also see where most of the requests are coming from - Bangladesh and other Far Eastern Asian Countries. I would assume this is because a lot of outsourced developing of websites is going on there. Anyway, the question now is - cakePHP has been on the rise lately, but is it really popular? To answer this have a lookt at this link. This link shows you the 10 most requested search terms in 2008 in the United States. As you can tell - no cakePHP anywhere.
Now Google Insights for Search is a really great tool to identify content that is currently requested by users all over the world. While it is not possible to get the most requested search terms worldwide you can drill down to your specific target market and obtain data for it. Also keep an eye on the rising searches figures - they tell you what keywords are currently on the rise! I would suggest you look for content that is popular and has a rising trend. Play around with the different tools! Try different key words, different countries, different time ranges and so forth. There is only one thing to note: Google does not provide absolute search request figures but instead normalizes the data. They say that they do this in order to keep the data comparable between different countries of different size. I would guess they do this, because otherwise it would be obvious how much traffic Google gets in different countries and what the hot topics really are. But because this data is not available you have to play around and follow your guts feeling to find different areas of content that are really popular at the moment.
2. Get content advertisers care about
Say you have come up with a list of 5 different content topics that seem promising. You see an uprising search trend in your target markets and believe those are blockbuster themes. Before you go on to produce content in those fields hold on one second. While it is great to get a blog with a lot of readers it’s even better to get a blog that earns you a lot of money. So you should check first, whether the topics you have identified are actually relevant to advertising.
Let’s get back to our example “cakePHP”. Our first check is to fire up Google and search for cakePHP. If you do so have a look at the advertisings that are displayed. If nothing has changed since this was written you will see absolutely no advertising. This is not a good sign because it means that nobody actually pays for advertising related to the keyword cakePHP. But there is an even more detailed way to find out whether a topic is hot for advertisers or not. Check out this link which leads to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Enter cakePHP and have a look at the results. This nice little tool not only tells you what Cost per Click to expect for cakePHP ($0.45 when writing this), but also other keywords to consider. What you want to see here are keywords that have a high CPC, because this means that advertisers care about this topic! If you think 45 cents is a lot enter “insurance” as a keyword… you will see CPC estimates up to €25!
Now the only thing you have to do is find a topic for content that is both popular and highly requested by advertisers!
3. Create your content
After you have decided what topic you want to go with you will have to create a website that provides relevant content in this area. You basically have to options - create a website or blog. If you are new to programming you might want to stick to the second alternative. It is actually really easy to start writing a blog and I have wrote a short article on this here. If you decide to build a new website there are dozens or hundreds alternatives out there. You could use an Open Source CMS for example or design static webpages with Word or Dreamweaver and the likes. If you are looking for something more powerful you will have to program. I can recommend cakePHP as a framework for building websites with PHP & MySQL but there are tons of alternatives out there. I have written a short article on how to start building websites with cakePHP.
Once you have your blog or website set up you will actually have to create the content. And really I think now is the first time that you should worry about how you can create the content yourself. I assume the topic you have chosen is not “PhD programs in biotech” or something similar, where you would probably have a hard time writing content about. I assume your topic is going to be a popular one and in this case most of the people will understand it and now something about it. If you don’t know anything about it, it doesn’t matter at all. See, I had almost no clue about Search Engine Optimization just a couple of days ago. Still I’m writing articles about Search Engine Optimization. And this is easily possible because I’m writing about the new things I learn and things I have tried out along the way. You don’t have to be an expert already on your topic. You just have to show interest and learn! Read other blogs about your topic, read articles, books and so forth and present your readers the exciting information that you will find along your way. Eventually you may become an expert in the field that you are blogging about.
I think it’s even an advantage if you write about something you haven’t been too much involved in the past. As an example consider you were writing about car insurances. Car insurances are a complex topic but nothing like rocket science. If you document your way of finding an optimal car insurance, points to consider, price comparisons, terms that should be closely watched etc. I believe this would appeal to a lot of readers because most of them won’t be experts on car insurances either.
4. Get your content out
What I mean by this is, that you also have to spread the word. The great area of content you identified before and the great content that you produced for this is not of any help, if nobody has the chance to actually consume this content. This is basically the field of so called Search Engine Optimization. There are tons of guides out there on how to improve the ranking of your site with search engines and how to make your blog or website more popular. I have written a short introduction on search engine optimization for blogs here and this should give you a good start.
I would also strongly recommend using two other great Google tools: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Both tools help you to monitor and improve how your website or blog interacts with searchengines and your users. I have written a short article on both of them here and here.
5. Maximize your revenue income
This is the last step. You have identified a promising topic. You have created a blog or website, optimized it for being found on the Internet and traffic is starting to flow in. The question now is how to turn this traffic into money. The answer -once more- is Google. They have this great service called AdSense that allows webmasters to include text advertising on their site.
Of course there are many other alternatives for online advertising including ad-networks or individual deals with advertisers. To be honest, I haven’t gotten to step 5 of starting a popular blog to earn cash myself (as mentioned in the beginning) so I cannot really give an advice on this yet. As soon as I have experience with this, I will write an article and post a link here. In the meantime feel free to post any comments and thoughts on this (and others of course)!
Summary
So to sum this up for today: Use Google Insights for Search to indentify content that is popular. Use Google AdWords to see what of this content is most relevant to advertisers. Decide what content you want to go with and create that content. Use Search Engine Optimization, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to get your content out to the people. Finally use Google AdSense and specific advertising deals to maximize your revenue income, sit back and enjoy! Did you notice that Google almost covers the entire value chain in this process? There is only one thing that’s missing: a free Blog service by Google!