e-bloggers.comLearn How To Monetize Your Blog And Make Money Online

What is a niche?

A niche is typically defined as a position particularly well suited to the place it is put in.

In the blogging jargon, a niche is the key area of interest a blogger chooses to base his blogs on.

Choosing a niche

Deciding on a niche requires a lot of research and an in-depth study of the market as well as your surroundings. When analyzing options for a niche topic, there are two main principles:

• To estimate what your targeted reader will be interested in. For instance,

events, sports, news, real estate etc.

• To analyze as to which interest areas are least written about, even if they apparently don’t appear to be lucrative in the beginning.

Factors to consider

Beyond the above two principles, the topmost thought to ponder over is what is it that best defines your thought process and persona.

The main reason behind this is that a blog’s popularity grows over a long period of time and it is crucial for the blogger to be passionate about, and involved with, the topic. Failing this, the blog loses its charm and sheen within no time at all.

Here we list a set of basic factors you should consider while deciding on your niche in the blogosphere:

1. Popularity Index – The principle of supply and demand works well in the blogging industry. The knowledge of what people want to read is crucial while deciding on your subject.

However, it’s not advisable to search for a topic everyone is writing on. Hence, the blogger needs to create a delicate balance between common, generic topics and less-searched but interesting ones.

2. Competitive Index – It is vital to estimate as to what kind of competition your selected area of interest will have. You might have opted for a subject that’s ‘hot’, but in the process, you also might end up facing huge competition from others who are also writing about the same topic.

It’s advisable here to go for the categories or subjects that might be miniscule in their popularity but will make for good meaty reading.

3. Market Neglect – You need to analyze as to what areas of general interest have been suffering neglect in the blogging community.

To start with, you might have a smaller audience, but eventually you will manage to create a selective audience for the gap in the niche you’ve spotted.

4. Sufficient Content – Before you actually start operating in your niche, ascertain that you have enough thought content and substantial material to sustain you over a period of time.

Switching on to an altogether different area of interest does quite badly for your reputation as a blogger.

5. Earning Prospect – You will have to critically analyze the financial scope of the topic you decide on. While the mere quality of some blogs gets you a good income, affiliate programs and impression based ads are also good earning propositions.

For earning through affiliate programs, the key is to find affiliate programs that closely match your topic. Meanwhile, the impression based ads with high traffic levels can be a major lucrative option. Adding Google Adsense ads to your blog is currently one of the more lucrative methods of earning from your blog.

Introduction

The elementary structure of search engines is programmed as such that it reacts in an extremely dynamic and result-oriented manner to fresh content.

The latest and highest quality updated content is what the search engines always crave for and react to the best.

Content and Search Engines

The key factor which makes blogging a beneficial web activity for search engines is that the search engines respond well to new content on a website or a weblog. In fact, the internet jargon labels ‘content as the king’ from a search engine’s viewpoint.

Blogs provide one of the most simple, quick and easy methods of adding content to a website. Users don’t need to know HTML or web design techniques to add content if they do so through the medium of blogs.

Ready Information

Search engines also react marvelously well to mediums from where they can dish out ready information. Analysis of various news and information websites vis-à-vis weblogs has proven that the information content in blogs is more easily accessible than that in websites.

To explain further, search engines respond well to the blogs also because of the blogs’ unique relationship with the user and the content. If we talk about the pages sitting in an index, we are waiting for the search engine to visit and query the data. On the other hand, owing to the unique feed association, the user is right there, getting the data almost as soon as you create it.

RSS Feeds

Besides, RSS feeds have also shifted the choice of visible content. By using RSS feeds, blogs give visitors the ability to use blog aggregators such as Topix.net, Bloglines, Yahoo’s blog aggregator or a desktop tool such as FeedDemon.

This again works well for search engines. From the search point of view, you can go to Yahoo! and type your search term and simply find results. The site represented by those results has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to and read on a regular basis.

Default Structure

Most importantly, the inherent and basic search engine friendly nature of blogs is what gets the attention of search engine marketers. As we said earlier, blogs are easy to publish and tend to contain lots of fresh, keyword rich text.

Moreover, as many blogs are rendered as static HTML pages in standard compliant designs, all of this information is readily available for the search engine spiders.

To conclude, blogs provide a faster and qualitative access through the medium of search engines to an informed and interested audience. This in turn does well for the efficiency and abilities of the search engines.

What is a blog?

A weblog, commonly truncated to blog, is basically a website carrying published items, including articles, photographs, videos and audios.

A typical blog is an information hub comprising of text, images and weblinks related to other web pages and blogs, along with other media related to the topic.

Meanwhile, in layman language, a blog is essentially defined as a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and web links.

The act of authoring and maintaining a blog, or adding an article to an existing blog is known as blogging. Individual articles on a blog are referred to as ‘blog posts’ or ‘entries’ and the person who posts these entries is called a ‘blogger’.

History

The pre-digital electronic community witnessed many forms of electronic communications including the likes of wire fights of AP wire, usenet, e-mail lists and bulletin board systems (BBS), going on to ‘threads’, the running conversations created by WebEx.

The concept of a blog as we know it today evolved from the system of online diaries where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. The term ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger and abridged to ‘blog’ by Peter Merholz.

Functions

A blog has one or more of the following functions to perform:

• To focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, news etc.

• To function as an online diary for various thought groups.

• To disseminate information.

Making of blogs

Specific server-based systems are used to create and maintain blogs. The users use tools such Ecto, Elicit and w.bloggar to maintain their web-hosted blog without being online while composing or editing posts.

Besides, blog creation tools and blog hosting services are also provided by many of the web hosting companies, internet service providers, online publications and internet portals. Some of these service providers include Tripod, America Online, Salon.com, Yahoo! 360° and Google.

Some of the blogging software are b2evolution, geeklog, blogger, bBlog, LifeType, Nucleus CMS, PostNuke, Serendipity, TypePad, Typo, WordPress and Xanga.

Blog Composition

A blog entry has two types of components .i.e. vital and optional. The vital components essentially include:

• Title: main title or headline of the post.

• Body: main content of the post.

• Permalink: the URL of the full, individual article.

• Post Date: date and time the post was published.

The optional components include:

• Comments: comments added by readers.

• Categories / Tags: subject that the entry discusses.

• TrackBack / Pingback: links to other sites that refer to the entry.

Types of Blogs

A weblog is designed as such that it can be used for a wide range of possible uses. Normally, a blog is identified by the purpose or the main subject it is used for.

The main forms of blogs include business, cultural, science, political, spam, topical, travel blogs, link blog, moblog, photoblog, shockblog and vblog.

Role of Blogs

Blogs have come to play an important role which benefits the community on a whole. Here we’ve discussed a few of them:

• Information dissemination

Many times, bloggers have to their credit leading the way in bringing key information to public light and breaking and shaping news stories. This leaves the mainstream media with the task of reacting to this news, instead of it being vice-versa. One of the major instances is the furor created by the blogs of the left-swing and right-swing bloggers during the Iraq war.

• Mobilising public opinion

Blogs have played a major role in bringing the common man’s opinion to the forefront and raising the magnitude of its effectiveness and influence. The incident in year 2002 when the U.S. Senate’s Majority Leader Tent Lott’s infamous comments carrying a tinge of racial segregation were brought to the limelight by the onslaught of bloggers is a major example. Lott was eventually forced to step down owing to the public pressure built this way.

• Public Contact

Blogs have also come to act as a major link between the politicians and leaders and the general public. Blogs are increasingly used by these leaders to express their opinion on wars and other issues, acting as major contact between them and the common man. This has made blogging an important tool for outreach and opinion forming.

Common Terms

Here we list a few terms out of the blogging jargon, which are the most common in the world of blogging:

• Audioblog: A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings.

• Blaudience: The audience or readership of a blog.

• Blawg: A blog focusing on commentary about law, normally written by a law professor, law student or a lawyer himself.

• Bleg: A blog entry which is a request to the readers

• Blog client: Software to manage blogs from an operating system with no need to launch a web browser.

• Blog feed: An XML-based file in which the blog hosting software places a machine-readable version of the blog for syndication to allow further distribution to the web.

• Dark Blog: A non-public blog.

• Flog: A blog that’s ghostwritten, for instance by the marketing department.

• Multi-Blog: Creating, maintaining and running multiple blogs.

• Ping: The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post.

• Splog: Spam blog.

• Troll: A commentator who has the job of attacking views expressed in a blog and incites a flamewar.

• Vorage: Act of foraging for video on the internet and sharing it with others.

Have you been blogging for some time now? While you already enjoy the personal satisfaction that you get from maintaining your blog have you ever considered that you could also be making money doing what you enjoy? Of course there are many that like to keep a blog simply because they are happy doing so, but if you are in the group that would like to turn their blogs into money making venture there is no time better then right now. You have been creating interesting content and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for doing something that you love.
The following are two fantastic benefits of turning your personal blog into a profitable money making venture.
You will become an instant online business person.
Maybe you have been dreaming of starting your own online business but have had difficulty coming up with the capital to get going. Needing start up money goes along with starting just about any type of traditional business. This is not the case when you are turning your personal blog into your Internet business. There are many high quality blogging platforms that you can sign up for zero out of pocket costs. It will be completely your choice to add any upgrades to your blog. With this business you do not have to have a large source of money to get your business going all you need to do is be able to write money making content.
You can make money while doing something that you love.
You can apply to affiliate marketing programs and other money making business blogging tools. You can utilize programs such as Adsense, Widget Bucks, Kontera, Clickbooth, Yuwie, MyLot, Adbrite, Bidvertiser just for a few examples. Once you have signed up for all of the income generating tools that you want to you are all set to enjoy recording your daily life experiences and anything else that strikes your fancy to write about.
So what are you waiting for start earning money with your personal blog today!

Of all the people that have big dream of making a great living on the Internet there are more then half that will end up failing before the first month is over. So what is the difference between the people that are failing and the people that are making a huge amount of money working on the Internet?
Blogging has become a hugely popular way for people to make money online. However there are many who are becoming frustrated because they are not making the kind of money that they hoped they would by running a blog.
So what are some reasons as to why someone would fail in blogging?

You are unhappy with what you are doing.
You can fail with running a blog if you are not happy with what you are doing. You will not be productive and will likely end up making excuses to avoid working on your blog altogether if it is not something that you are completely passionate about doing. The wrong attitude is a certain sign of a business that will fail.
You have the wrong priorities.
You can spend and entire day feeling that you have worked your butt off to improve your business and be completely worn out by the end of the day. The bad part is that when you sit back to think about you really did not do anything that was truly productive. You need to have a very clear idea as to what are the top priority tasks that you need to complete concerning your blog each and every day. You also need to be able to determine the tasks that can be set aside for later so that you can be truly productive.
You can easily become distracted.
If you are sitting at your computer trying to get some work done and it seems like you are always getting called away to take care of something else then you are going to have a really hard time making your blog a success. You need to focus on small tasks that will make your productivity level increase. For instance you could take the telephone away from your work area while you are working or work on writing your blog posts and then take care of promoting your blog. By setting yourself up with a schedule that you can keep you will be able to limit your distractions during the day.
You do not want to learn from your mistakes.
If you are doing something like wasting time and you do not seem to see any problem with that then you are definitely going to fail in blogging. You need to be able recognize your mistakes and be able to make positive changes to correct them otherwise you are doomed to be repeating your mistakes over and over again.
If you can avoid making these mistakes when you are working on making your blog a success then you are going to be well on your way to creating a great online income for yourself.

When you own a blog and are pinging you are using a method of alerting the search engines that you have created brand new content for your blog or that you have updated a blog post that you had previously written. When you send a ping you are basically sending a message to a ping server, which then alerts the search engines that your blog now contains new information.
Now what is a ping server?
Ping servers are web-based applications that accept messages (or “pings”) in an XML-RPC format. The ping server will then take the information it receives from these messages to create a list of all the blogs the have recently been updated with freash information. There are many blog servers that operate their own search engines for blogs while there are others that take the information that they receive through the XML-RPC messages that they receive to update other ping servers and search engines.
Ok now that you know what pinging is and how a ping server operates how does pinging work?
A great many bloging platforms operate with a built in pinging tool. Wordpress for example is one of these blogging platforms and has the option to ping turned on by default. When a Wordpress blogger creates new content for their blog their ping will go out instantly to one ping server, which then in turn updates several different search engines.
If you are unsure if your blogging platform allows you to utilize pinging you can manually send messages to ping servers buy visiting their main websites and adding your blog’s name and url.
PingOMatic.com is an incredibly helpful blog ping server. By notifying the PingOMatic server that you have added new content to your blog. Once PingOMatic gets this information it will be able to notify several different websites that your blog has fresh content. The bonus here is that many of these search engines have their own independent ping server, which will bring even more attention to your blog.
There are many search engines that have the ability to almost instantly update their listings as soon as they are made aware of new content. This is exactly what you want to happen as you will then be given one way backlinks from your blog to the search engines. Many of the search engine pages that you could find yourself listed on could have a very high PageRank with Google.
Four important rules of pinging.
You should only ping you blog if you have just added fresh content to it. If you choose to not follow this rule you will quickly find that your blog will quickly gain the reputation of a spam blog, which is commonly referred to as a splog.
You follow the practice of creating new content for your blog and then rewriting that new post often it would be a good practice to only ping when you add fresh content to your blog.
It is a great idea to ping several different ping servers when you add new content to your blog. Just make sure that you do not go overboard and that you make sure if you are going to ping a niche search engine that your blog is relevant to the search engine.