Blogging - Carving Out a Plan for Profit

Hi Guys,

I received the latest issue of Website Magazine and the cover story was about Blogging, so I am going to highlight some of the major points of the article.

1. To start a good blog, go and see what your competition is doing blogging wise.
2. Go to Compete.com and put your competitor websites in there and see who is getting the most traffic. Try to find 10 competitors.
   
3. When going to your competition blogs, see which topics are getting the most comments for other viewers. - This will give you some ideas on what readers are interested in hearing about.
4. Earning Money with your blog - Google Adsense, Value Click, Tribal Fusion
   
5. Email subscriptions offer an excellent way to send targeted offers. Consider an email signup box in a prominent position on your page. Feedburner (now owned by google) has a free email collection service.
6. If you feel your content is strong, consider exclusive content and paid subscriptions. The Word Press has a membership plugin and require payment to see all or some content on the blog.
   
7. You need to incorporate Video to your blog
8. To help get advertiser creditability - Make sure you tell about how many facebook, myspace friends you have, or twitter followers, or digg friends you have.
9. Earning money - You can also use affiliate links
   
10. Another way to Earn Money - You can be a paid for content provider. You will need to let your readers know you are being paid for posting your content. To be an advertiser writer go to ReviewMe and PayPerPost
11. Earning Money with supportive services - Blurb.com gives publishers a free downlowad to take content directly from your blog and lay in out into a book format for publishing. Also Lulu.com is another publishing option.
12. As you write your post - MAKE sure you make note of important topics or those that are just scratching the surface of a greater issues.
13. Basic SEO for blogging - Create sitemaps and submitting them to the search engines, key word optimization, linking strategies.
14. Blog Networks - Technorati and MyBlogLog, and facebook's Networkedblogs
15. Good idea to get involved with social sharing, Digg.com, Mixx.com and Bookmarking sites like Delicious.com. While these sites can be beneficial but take a lot time, stay focused.
16. Blogs have evolved from online diaries to essential business tools. Use your blog to inform readers, extend your brand and make new contacts. But at all times and through ever step of the way use your blog to profit.

They noted in the article about DailyCoyote.net, a highly successful award winning blog.
Some points she made in the article.

• When Dooce.com link to her, the blog boomed
• She blog post regularly every day at the same time. Her readers count on it and expect it
• The best source of income is the subscribtions to daily photos, calendar prints and the book deal
• She spends about 25 hours a week on the blog
• She uses twitter help grow

I hope this helps you guys. I really feel blogging could be the tool to help grow anyone's business.
God Bless,
John