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How to Make Money on Your Blog

Marketing, social media, advertising

Windsurfer

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Hi,

I'm a real estate investor who is trying to start a blog to help others do well in real estate without making the mistakes I have made. I am doing pretty well investing in real estate while still holding down a regular job.

I have started a blog called http://www.techielandlord.com to show people how to use technology and other tools to make RE investing easier. I would eventually like to make some money from this blog as well so I can quit my regular J.O.B. but feel overwhelmed by all the information out there on making a profitable blog.

I am about to acquire two more properties and would think it might help to make some information products out of how I fix them up and put tenants in them for cash flow.

Can you guys point me to good information about advertising my blog, using SEO, setting up a mailing list, affiliate linking or product advertising? Or should I concentrate on a bit at a time? Help me figure this out - please?!

Thanks.
 
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Chris_Willow

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You've got a nice blog. Focus on building a following first. It'll be easier to sell stuff later once you have the credibility.
Also don't monetize with ads - it's just not worth it when you're starting out with little traffic.
And if you're looking for a paid resource, fizzle.co might help you.
 

Windsurfer

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Thanks Chris -

I checked out fizzle.co and it looks like a very affordable way to learn. What I need to figure out is how to get a following. All the social media stuff and SEO/keyword research is hard for me to grasp. It seems really overwhelming. Any resources there or is Fizzle the way to go?

Hal
 

H. Palmer

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Hi Windsurfer,

You can't make money on a blog. A blog is just a way to funnel people to a product or service.

If you want to build a following, SEO and social media are very important. Both aren't very hard. For instance, SEO is more like following a recipe.

Perhaps an email list is something more to your liking. In that case, study what squeeze pages are.

But the real way to build a following is the combination of SEO, social media and an email list. And of course, good content. But if you're an expert, that part shouldn't be hard.
 
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Windsurfer

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Hi Windsurfer,

You can't make money on a blog. A blog is just a way to funnel people to a product or service.

If you want to build a following, SEO and social media are very important. Both aren't very hard. For instance, SEO is more like following a recipe.

Perhaps an email list is something more to your liking. In that case, study what squeeze pages are.

But the real way to build a following is the combination of SEO, social media and an email list. And of course, good content. But if you're an expert, that part shouldn't be hard.

Thanks Amschel. Makes sense. I think I can supply some quality content. I am looking for where to go to study SEO, social media and squeeze pages?
 

SBS.95

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You can't make money on a blog.

That's not always true. I don't like to say that you can't make money in any area really. There's always a way to make something fastlane, it's just that some things are more difficult than others.

@Windsurfer,

I recommend you check out that link and blog. It's exactly the direction you want to head. You want to become THE resource for your niche. At that point, people will just be looking for ways to throw money at you, whether it be through referral product promotions, ad revenue, or anything really.
 

H. Palmer

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Smartpassiveincome uses its blog in the way I described. As a funnel, in other words a marketing instrument.
But it's recommended to have a sellable product in this model.

By the way, this is one of the best resources to study making money on the internet.
Pat Flynn has lots of great interviews available and you can learn a lot from his SEO duels.

If this is a model you like you should google "niche websites".
Adam Short is another name in that category, although he adds outsourcing to it.
 
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H. Palmer

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Windsurfer, I visited your website.

Your right border already functions as a sort of squeeze page.
The only thing you could add to it is a video presentation of yourself in which you point to your free ebook.

As far as social media, if you're not doing it already, you could become a member of RE groups in for instance LinkedIn and Facebook or - better - start your own group. Personally I like your positioning as a techie landlord. Most of times techies don't like RE and RE specialists aren't very fond of tech, with some exceptions. It seems a theme you can expand upon.
 

Windsurfer

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Amschel,

I really appreciate the advice. I've been holding off a little in terms of going into social media with this because I thought it would look much better if I had a lot of posts and an impressive blog. I think I am only up to 40 posts or somewhere around that. I also wanted to get my ebook on the site for people to purchase.

Should I start a newsletter for people who subscribe in addition to the blog- or is it enough just to send them the posts? So many questions..
 

Pete799p

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Love the ATM card idea. I have definitely been robbed a few times in my neighborhoods and I try to never take any cash pmts for a few main reasons. 1- I dont want any cash on me, 2- I love a paper trail, and 3- It makes it much harder for your employees to steal from you, assuming you have somebody else collecting your rent.

Another thing you can do is get a partnership with the local check cashing stores to accept your pmts directly with them. They are happy to do it since they want more business and your tnts can pay rent in cash instantly.
 
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Gravytrain

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Okay, you've asked a lot of questions throughout here. My experience:

Can you guys point me to good information about advertising my blog, using SEO, setting up a mailing list, affiliate linking or product advertising? Or should I concentrate on a bit at a time?

The only things you should be concentrating on:

1) Creating great content

2) Spreading the word that you're creating great content

#1 is rather easily accomplished and given how many posts you have on there, it doesn't seem like you're struggling with this. #2 is quite a bit more difficult and all comes down to how much work you want to put into it. There are the obvious avenues:

a) Get a Facebook fan page going and ensure that every blog post automatically gets on to the fan page. Free plugins accomplish this rather easily (https://developers.facebook.com/wordpress/). Once you have a solid FB fan page with a great design, you can start to buy ads that target your demographic and land on your fan page as opposed to trying to exit the user from FB to your blog. By the way, on Fiverr you can get a logo and a Facebook fan page banner for $5-$10 (http://fiverr.com/hi5_fiver/design-a-vectorized-logo-design-for-your-website-company is one we've used in the past)

b) Get a Twitter account going and ensure that that every blog post automatically gets posted to Twitter. Again - free WordPress plugins (WordPress › Tweetily - Tweet Your Posts Automatically! « WordPress Plugins). Once your Twitter feed has a few days worth of updates on it, you've followed a few hundred people and some have followed you back (social proof), then a REAL easy way to grow your blog is to answer questions. Head to http://search.twitter.com and search for users asking questions that you've answered with a blog post. Shoot them a quick tweet reply... "Hey @username, saw you asked about rental property ads. I give some great tips in this blog post: link". Now, you're leveraging your already-created content to add value to peoples' lives.

c) Find / research / scrape up a list of blogs in your niche and leave real, thoughtful blog comments on posts. Add them to some sort of feed reader so you can quickly go through a couple of times each day and comment on every fresh post, so your comments are near the top. Bonus points if some blog post you created is relevant and linkable inside of your comment. "Steve, I fully agree with your approach to rental property ads that you've written about here. I wrote a post about this a few weeks back (located here: link) and I covered many of the same points... blah blah etc." Your domain name makes it easy to create a brandable persona as "Techie Landlord" and you can even sign your comments as this.

There's three easy options to spread the word about your great content. Create the content first, then find ways to share it.

What I need to figure out is how to get a following. All the social media stuff and SEO/keyword research is hard for me to grasp. It seems really overwhelming.

Stop. You don't "get" a following, you "earn" a following; in the type of blogging niche that you're working in, you do that by creating excellent shareable content that then gets shared. Don't worry about SEO, don't worry about keyword research. Search engines will never sign up for your list, or buy a product, or do anything other than scrape your webpage and offer you some traffic. So... why bother optimizing for them? Optimize for users! What you should worry about is writing blog posts that answer relevant questions that people are searching for - then you're just leveraging search engines as a traffic source. One tip for finding those: Yahoo! Answers. Here's an example Google query:

site:answers.yahoo.com/question/ intitle:"rent" intitle:"cash" -intitle:"check"

So what we've done here is told Google to limit our query to Yahoo! Answers, and to ensure that the words rent and cash are in the title, but check is not (since people use the word 'cash' differently with 'check'). Then, just start writing down ideas for blog post topics. Here's some I found on the first page:

My landlord wants us to pay the rent in cash, is this legal?
Is it illegal for landlord collect cash as rent?
Landlord asking for 1 months rent upfront in cash - should I be worried?
Can you pay rent in cash if you live in a complex?
Landlord Demanding Rent in Cash with No Lease: What Are Risks and My Options?

So here are five potential blog post topics that I literally copied and pasted unedited, and it took me 10 seconds to find them. You can do two things here:

a) do a bunch of these queries to get a massive editorial calendar going with blog post ideas so you never run out of content. Visitors needing answers will find you, they will stay and if you add value, they will share your post and/or sign up for your email list.

b) by answering questions on Yahoo Answers! you can link to your existing posts (blah blah. In my blog post here (link) I cover landlords asking for cash in detail. What you need to understand is... blah blah)

You earn a following by being an expert, as very few will follow an idiot. Give without expectation of return.

I am looking for where to go to study SEO, social media and squeeze pages?

Don't bother wasting your time with this. I own a content development company and we produce hundreds of blog posts each month on behalf of our clients. Trying to "SEO" your own blog posts in the post-Penguin world is going to be very, very expensive and provide less results than focusing on producing 'more' and 'better' content, and helping those who need it. You don't need to know anything about squeeze pages for a long while yet... focus on getting your email marketing list to a few thousand individuals who are waiting with bated breath for your weekly newsletter. Once you're there, you can start thinking about hardcore marketing.

Should I start a newsletter for people who subscribe in addition to the blog- or is it enough just to send them the posts? So many questions..

a) start a newsletter / email list and promote it everywhere. You should have a signup form at the end of every blog post (How to Add a Newsletter Signup Box After Your Posts will help you with this) and of course you have it at the top of your sidebar as well, which is great.

b) only send people to posts when it answers some question for them, or adds value to them. Otherwise, you look like a shill who is just trying to garner traffic. We like to use phrasing such as (I'll be brief as I've covered this in a past blog post (link), but here's a quick answer for you. blah blah blah. For more detail, check out the post I linked or email me with questions)

The bottom line: if you want to market, you need an audience. Pay attention here, this is critical:

YOUR AUDIENCE IS YOUR EMAIL LIST - NOT YOUR BLOG READERS!

Build the list, build the list, build the list. Always add value to the list in the form of your newsletters (80/20 rule: 80% valuable content, 20% "product suggestions / reviews / marketing").

Hope this helps, shoot me a PM if needed.

(p.s. I can't speak for anyone else but if I came across your website I would bounce immediately due to the poor design. In 2008 it was fine to use a default, boring template with tons of white space. In today's world, it's not okay. Head to http://themeforest.net and buy a theme for $30-$40. Ensure it is made recently and is mobile ready!)
 

Windsurfer

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Hope this helps, shoot me a PM if needed.

Gravytrain - I'm about to PM you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all the information you put in your post and advice you gave me. This must have taken you a lot of time and I think it is amazing you would do this for a total stranger. I will work on everything you suggested here.

One question is how what to do with my web guys. They are convinced that 'techie' sites are normally plain and concentrate on content. They sent me some examples and the ones they sent were definitely not great to look at. I'm an idiot when it comes to graphic design - do I just go with one I like or is there some analytical way to determine what is interesting to my audience?

Also - how about newsletters to my list? What is the difference between content on the blog and content in the newsletters? Any tips there?

Thanks again for all the help.
 
S

stranger

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Can you guys point me to good information about advertising my blog, using SEO, setting up a mailing list, affiliate linking or product advertising? Or should I concentrate on a bit at a time? Help me figure this out - please?!
This forum is filled the answers on these questions. You just try to save your time re-asking everything again.
 

extraordwealth

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You can make a lot of money blogging but first of all you must establish dominance and Internet presence before your blog can start making money for you. If your first point of call is to make a lot of money blogging at the start, then you had better don't start because u might be frustrated on what might arise.
Keep soaring and be blessed.
 

Andy Black

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1) Forget about "blogging"

Your goal isn't to build a blog, build an audience, or build a list.

Your goal is to:
  1. Find out what people want
  2. Find out how to sell it to them
  3. Find out if you can make a profit
  4. Fail Fast or Scale Up

2) Forget about "building an audience".

Instead:

Go help someone
TODAY!

On writing content
What works for me is focusing on helping people, and not writing.
I might get an email from someone asking how to do something. I reply, to my whole list.
Forums help me generate a lot of content too.

On helping people TODAY
Find forum(s) where people are talking/complaining and go start helping people there. If you can't find them, then take it as a warning sign. As you keep answering questions, you'll eventually tire of repeating yourself. Start a new thread and then link to it in future. You've now an "article" written. You later might want to link them up in an order that makes sense.

The beauty of a forum is that there is a ready made location of people who are already active online. See what titles get you the most clicks (you're now learning how to write subject lines - good for articles on your blog, emails you send out, and chapters in your book), keep an eye on what gets you the most thanks, and trace back to find out who thanked you and what they might have in common.

Example1 - A "lead magnet" I use (see where it leads at the end of the post):
https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/com...-reason-people-lose-money-with-adwords.52715/

Example2 - My Story:
https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/the-biggest-benefit-of-adwords.52440/


3) Create a simple sales page and build a list of interested people

In your signature in the forum, link back to a simple sales page where people can "raise their hand" and express an interest in learning more. You may even mention a forthcoming book or product and take pre-orders.

(You could also drive traffic via paid search and bid on search terms indicating the searcher is actively looking for a solution, or more information. If you're going to use AdWords paid search just be aware of falling foul of their "information harvesting" policy. However, your hurdle here is learning paid search... so leave this for a while as you don't want to put up any MORE hurdles in your way.)


4) THEN start adding the content to your own website property (this may or may not be a blog)

Example article on blog:
http://www.andyblack.net/launch-and-learn/

I've also posted that into my own forum.
 
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