Step 1: Make Money Blogging

Introduction

Depending on how you look at it, it's pretty late or really early. Either way it's the beginning of something great for me and you. My name is Blake and I'm a student at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design for 3D Animation/Game art. I've also been a 3D generalist for a little now, you can check it out at some works in progress at bwcreation.blogspot.com.

My Dream

This blog is my dream. I've grown up on the internet and now it's time to make money with my knowledge of it. Lucky for you I'm going to share my progress and process! And the thing is, I'm not successful yet. That means that I'm not going to feed you some bull and then tell you to buy my “3 Step  Get Rich Instantly” book. You know those silly things where people say they make 90k a month blogging. How ridiculous. This blog will be full of resources for you and I to make some supplemental income from simply blogging. What ever you decide to write about, the guidelines that I'm going to throw out will be helpful. I want to make money, and I want you to as well.

The Basics

There's a few basic things and a bit of vocab you'll need to get yourself familiarized with before we can start. The subjects that you write about and the amount you blog doesn't make you money (well it does, but that'll be covered later) it's the adds and affiliate programs that you place on your blogsite. They make you money because people pay Google for optimized advertising and Google passes some of that on to you, because you're bringing them traffic. It's really a great thing. Because I'm using Blogger, I'll just go through what you see when you go to Monetize your blog. But the ideas and vocab should transfer to all Adsense activity and similar things. When you start to Monetize the blog, you'll have to set up a legitimate Adsense account, which you have to be 18 for. Or I'm pretty sure you can have someone set it up for you as long as you are able to cash a check in their name. If that's you, you'll have to look farther into it, I'm 18 so this isn't an issue. So, now you've got your Adsense account set up..what now? Let's get into some vocab as defined by Google Adsense help.

Page Impressions: “A page impression is generated every time a user views a page displaying Google ads. We will count one page impression regardless of the number of ads displayed on that page. For example, if you have a page displaying three ad units and it is viewed twice, you will generate two page impressions and six ad unit impressions.” - Basically the number of pages people have viewed that's displaying Adsense adds.

Clicks: The number of adds your viewers have clicked on. Do not click on your own adds to try and get this number to go up. Before Google cuts you a check they check the legitimacy of add clicks and they have the right to not send you anything at all. Don't cheese it, do honest hard work and you'll be rewarded for it.

Page CTR: This is your “Click Through Rate”. - It's the percentage of add clicks per page impression. Example: You have 10 page impressions and 5 clicks, your page ctr is 5/10x100 = 50%. 

eCPM: “Effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. Essentially, effective CPM represents your estimated earnings for every 1000 impressions you receive.” - Basically this number is Google's estimate of how much money you'll make off 1000 page impressions based off of your estimated earnings divided by the number of page impressions multiplied by 1000. Example: “if you earned an estimated $0.15 from 25 page impressions, then your page eCPM would equal ($0.15 / 25) * 1000, or $6.00. If you earned an estimated $180 from 45,000 ad impressions, your ad eCPM would equal ($180 / 45,000) * 1000, or $4.00.” Don't be afraid of that example from Google, it fluctuates a lot.

Earnings: This is what you've been waiting for! This number represents the amount of money you have earned through all of your hard work! It's exciting but you'll have a little more reading to do and that can be found at: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21591.

There are also a few hoops you need to jump through before you get that check cut.

Congratulations! You and I have finished our first steps to making money blogging. Stick around or check back often to see what next step there is to take. Also if you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

Step 2: Blog Traffic Generation

Traffic Generation

Traffic generation is the most important variable in your equation of money making with adds. If you don't have traffic, then no one clicks your adds and you don't make any money. There are a few steps that will insure traffic to your blog.

Content: This is what I meant when I said what you write about and how much you blog can actually pay you. Content is what brings traffic and keeps people coming back. It's simple, you write interesting things and they'll come. How do you write interesting articles?

1. Write about things you know a lot about. If you're writing a blog for fun, or keeping an internet diary or family photo album, it's probably not the best blog to try an monetize. Write in depth details about your job, where you've traveled, or how to make crafts or gadgets.
2. Niche Categories: If you've searched and found this blog, I'm sure you've found this information already. Niche categories are very specific categories that have a lot of followers. If you make crazy pot holders and people love them as much as you do, that's a great niche to capitalize on.
3. Tutorials: I love tutorials! Especially good ones, and so do so many people who could bring traffic to your blog if you make really good tuts. I'm 3D hobbyist and I love sites like BlenderCookie.com and BlenderGuru.com and all of that great open source information. And they have easy 1 million + individual traffic a month. Image your Page CTR and eCPM with 34,000 clicks a day! (1,000,000/30)

Social Networking: EVERYONE, including my great grandmother and her dog, seriously her dog, has a FaceBook or Myspace or Tweets regularly. You can create a Page for free on Facebook. A Page is something you can make public and anyone can come to see it. Thing about a page is, you post links to your blog, and it brings you massive amounts of traffic. This is due to someone “liking” your page which tells everyone that they're friends with about your page. In turn, tells them about your blog. You probably have more knowledge of social networking and Facebook and this text block has probably been pretty silly to read. But the simple fact is that it's amazing traffic. I have 30 friends on my Facebook page and I posted a link to my 3D blog (bwcreations.blogspot.com) and it received 70 individual page impressions in one day. Image your Page getting even 100 likes from people with an average of 100 friends. That adds about 10,000 potential views. Do the math, then do the work. Make your blog a FaceBook page..Tweet about it. Do the work you feel relative to the amount of money you want to make.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization is also very important to traffic generation. When you Google something, the first link that appears receives a crazy amount of traffic due to just being the top link for that search. People pay a lot of money for “professional SEO services” when can be as simple as a few steps.

1. Keywords: Think of keywords that have to do with the subject you're writing about. Go to Google and type them in and when you do so, look at the number of search results and try to find the combination of key words that has the least amount of results. The number will still be very high, it's the internet, but you should be able to find some that have considerably less results. And those keywords are the ones you capitalize on. Try to incorporate that exact phrase into your article, make the title of you article include those keywords, and then add the keywords to your tags. Google has a lot of fancy things that work very hard to optimize searches for its users, and the prior steps will really help you to optimize your blogs for search engines. But there are some things you need to steer clear of. When you add keywords that have nothing to do with what you're blogging on and are just there for Google, it will get you pinged. There are so many other tiny tweaks you can and should do, for a list visit: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/how-to-seo-your-site-in-less-than-60-minutes/593/ and read through it as well.

Another congrats is due, this is the first major step in getting traffic to your blog. Remember, great content, social networking and any networking (including other blogs, that comes later), and search engine optimization. These simple things will fast track you to success!