How To Set Up Your Blog For Profit

Planning your blogging profit plan is crucial part of the construction of any monetized blog. But what does it usually involve? Generally, planning your blogging profit plan consists of two things: working on a traffic generation plan and improving conversion rates.

When planning your blogging profit plan, you may want to work on the conversion side first. If you begin sending traffic to your blog before it is monetized properly, your conversion rates could be too low to earn a significant return on your investment; this is especially true if you are paying for traffic from pay-per-click sources, such as Adwords.

One important thing you must consider when planning your blogging profit plan is how you can improve the quality of your copywriting. If you do not feel that you have the expertise or writing skills to convince someone to buy your product, you may want to hire someone to write your salespage for you. With the recent boom in freelancing markets, you should be able to find a talented copywriter on elance.com or guru.com for a relatively low price per word or page. If your copy is bad, your conversion rate will also be bad, which means you are wasting traffic.

Additionally, you should consider including pre-selling tactics while planning your blog profit plan. You may want to include such pre-selling methods as giveaways, cash prizes, or some other form of interaction for visitors.

The other important part to consider while planning your blog profit plan is your traffic generation methods. No matter what the topic of your blog, you generally have five basic traffic generation methods: pay-per-click programs, which allow
you to pay for targeted traffic; natural search engine traffic,

which you can build by optimizing onpage and offpage factors; link-based traffic, which you can build by purchasing links from link brokers; list marketing traffic, which you can build by purchasing solo ads from list-owners; and repeat traffic, which you can build by giving visitors a reason to return and by persuading them to bookmark your site.

Choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog will determine whether or
not you are able to stay in business for an extended period of time.

While narrowing down the theme from a list of themes can be a fairly scientific process, choosing the themes on that list to begin with is considerably more experential. If you're planning to market your own products, you may want to start by finding a need, rather than looking at data. For instance, do you know of a pressing need that many people have? Could you provide some sort of substantive solution to that need? If so, would a blog be the appropriate means though which to provide that solution? Something might come to mind immediately, but if it doesn't, you can proceed with data-analysis as a means of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog.

You can start by using a program like WordTracker to begin choosing a popular and profitable theme. WordTracker will allow you to view a list of the 100 or 1000 most searched topics on the Internet.

You can then break this list down into smaller pieces. For instance, if number 10 on the list is “cars” and you have some sort of an interest in cars, you can then take the keyphrase “cars” and search for it on Wordtracker using overture payper- click results and demand/supply analysis called “KEI.”

This will tell you two things: it will tell you approximately how hard it is to penetrate your niche; and it will tell you roughly how much money people are making in your niche. For instance, if pay-per-click amounts are high and have a lot of bid competition, that means that people are making a lot of money in your niche, which is why they are purchasing advertising for large sums of money per click. It also means that you can potentially make a lot of money for serving ads for these advertisers via Adsense and YPN.

Many people ask what you need to get started in order to make a profitable blog.
The answer is nothing, provided that your only goal is to spend no money at all.
Now, if you want higher returns and if you have the money to spend, the answer
to “what you need to get started” might several hundred dollars to invest in tools
that could make your climb to the top faster and smoother.

One of the most important things you will need to get started is some form of
keyword research tool or database. Currently, there are dozens of these products
on the market, which range in price from free to around $500. The most popular
tool on the market is probably WordTracker, which offers a limited trial version
for free—or a fully-functional version for $7.50/day or $45/mo. This will allow
you to find out which keywords are most profitable and have a reasonable
demand (aggregate search)/supply (aggregate site) rating.

Other than a keyphrase tool, the answers to the “what you need to get started”
question will usually depend on the project. For instance, if you're hosting a blog
and you want to monetize it with Adsense, you may want to add a thumnail
generator to your “what you need to get started” list. A thumnail generator will
create code that, when inserted in your blog, will generate scraped-thumnail
pictures from related searches on Google images—and will place them next to
your contextual ads, increasing the click-thru rate.

In contrast, if you're planning to sell your own products, you may want to add an
autoresponder to your “what you need to get started” list. An autoresponder will
allow you to greatly improve your conversion rate by allow you to put all followup
emails on autopilot, rather than doing them personally or strictly using your
salespage.

So what exactly do you need to to get started? Nothing. You can create a
profitable blog without paying a cent, but if you want to take advantage of
automating tools to further improve your profitability and efficiency, you will
have to purchase at least a few tools.