Make Money Blogging

Managing a blog is not a task to take lightly. It is labor intensive, and will eat up a good chunk of your time. That’s why it is understandable that people sometimes make mistakes. The key is to recognize those mistakes and correct them from then on.

A few of those mistakes are:

• Uncategorized blog posts:

This is a big offender. I have made that same mistake, even here on this blog. You work hard on an article making sure that it is not only lengthy, but fully informative and not lacking key points. Then you make sure it has all the right post tags and meta tags. What happens next is that you mistakenly hit publish before assigning a category or two for your post.

OOPS! At this point, it is best to leave it because chances are, search engines and blog directories have already been pinged. You don’t really want to go in and remove it from uncategorized and replace it with something else because Google could already be on that category indexing it. You CAN go in and add another category to that post if you like though.

I understand how easy it is to make the category mistake, but it is important that it does not happen often. You are losing out that way by not having an important keyword in the url. To avoid this mistake, you can remember to slow down before you publish. Go over every single thing on that post before you continue. In wordpress, start on the left where your post content is, then work your way to the right side and check the publish date and time, then the post tags, then the category. If you have a meta tag plugin that allows you to edit them, make sure they have the right density before you go further.

• No SEO:

Your WordPress should be as search engine friendly as they get. Blogs are meant to be search engine friendly as it is in a blogs nature. You should ensure that you have the plugins installed to help with this. Look over the basics such as the url, and set your permalinks so that the urls are not dynamic. You can also install one of the many seo plugins available for download.

Search engine optimization is a key factor in the way that Google and other biggies look at you. Without seo, you are reducing your blogs potential for top 10 rankings.

The good thing is that with blogs, you don’t really need to hire a seo professional like myself. All you have to do to get top 10 rankings is post on a daily basis. Get those original articles out there, and install tracking like Google Analytics. Watch where your traffic comes from.

• Micro-Blogging:

Micro-Blogging was made popular with services such as Twitter. Some people don’t understand how to use that tool though, and they end up posting two-liners on their actual blogs. Your blog should be a place where you can post decent size articles that hold some actual value to the reader. You can utilize tools like Twitter to bring traffic to your blog, but it shouldn’t be your business model to emulate them.

There are good plugins for WordPress like wp-to-twitter which will automatically post your latest blog article using a url shortening service like bit.ly or cli.gs. I use it on this blog and it comes in handy. You will notice if you went to my twitter that it posts a portion of my articles and links back to the lengthy original. Doing this will help you get followers, as long as you actually write content with meat in it. If you micro-blog on your blog then you will just turn away that reader for life.

• Being greedy:

I understand that you want to monetize your blog. But you can make that happen faster if you allow people to help you. After you have posted on your blog for a month or so regularly, you may get an email from an aspiring author wishing to guest post on your blog.

Guest posting on blogs bring in traffic to your own blog. Other authors know this, and they want to take advantage of it too. The good thing is that their original article will actually help your blog by giving it fresh content, and the traffic/rankings it might bring in.

It is important that you allow guest bloggers that can write an article on your target topic(s). Just say yes!

This is not a complete list, but the fact is that you will have to learn as you go just like everyone else. If you follow these pointers, you will have a good starting point to help you run with it and never look back.