Ok so you really want to know how to create a profitable blog. I hope you know how to create a blog in the first place. If you don’t, there are plenty of tutorials on creating a blog at WordPress and at YouTube. That is the easy part.

You can create your blog at blogger or WordPress. I like WordPress myself. WordPress makes it easy with plenty of themes, plugins, and widgets.

The blog you create should be something of great interest to you. The reason for that is you will need to be blogging for some time. You will need to write posts and add pages. Just creating a blog is not going to help. Your blog has the same chance of being found as winning the power ball.

On your blog, please make sure it looks nice. Give it a clean and friendly look. What I mean by that is have your categories, pages and posts organized. Spend the time to set the look and feel up properly. As you are creating the pages, ask yourself this question: would I go there. If it doesn’t have your interest, it probably won’t have anyone else.

While you are creating your blog and for months to come, believe in yourself. You will need to do this. You are not going to put up a blog today and make $20,000 a month in a few months. Have the positive mind set and just write about the topic of your interest. There are always ways to monetize your blog and I will get to that. Again, believe in yourself.

On your blog, the posts should be short and informal. Write the posts as if you were talking to a friend or coworker who had the same interest. As people find your blog and read your post, they may comment. READ the comments. Your readers are what is important. Read the comments, and maybe you will learn and have to adapt your style. The interaction between you and your readers is what will get them to come back. Most internet marketers will say your money is in your list of email subscribers, and using autoresponders to (chat) with your list is how to make money. This is true as you will need to have contact with customer. It is said that a person visiting your blog or hearing from you will need to do so up to 9 times before a purchase is made. Creating your profitable blog takes time. See what I mean by having the positive attitude.

To stay in touch with your visitor, you should do the following. Allow people to subscribe to a blog, have a form on your blog that is giving away something. An example would be a free report. And you may also want to use a pop-up possibly giving them something. Give it away. I personally like pop-ups that go up when leaving my site. I feel it is less intrusive. Some free report that has a link back to your blog is invaluable. Use an autoresponder to stay in touch with these people. Don’t overload them, though. Send them their free report and say thank you for stopping by my http://www.blog.com. In 3, 4 or 5 days using your autoresponder system send a quick note saying hi to the person, ask if they liked the free report, and maybe let know about any recent happenings on your blog.

Keep communication going in a friendly way. If you set up an autoresponder to email your list. I suggest that you follow up after giving away a freebie at days 3,7,12,19,30. This is keeping it friendly and not overloading their email. I know if I get too much email from someone pushy, I unsubscribe. You got a friendly subscriber, now keep it.

OK now I will talk a little more on the monetizing side of your blog. I see many blogs that way overdo it with Google AdSense. Your primary focus should not be a click leaving your blog by clicking on a Google AdSense ad, where you only get a little money. Your goal is to build a friendly relationship with your reader and during the course of the stopping by, or you email them, you suggest something that may interest them. This is where you make money. I like to use commissionjuction, paydotcom, and ClickBank.

I also like to try to incorporate items that may have residual income or earnings from backend sales. I hope you know what that is. Backend sales and residual income can be your golden nugget of your website. I spend time at associaiteprograms.com and residualincomefindres.com to get ideas to incorporate into what I may be doing.

Well, I wish you luck in your endeavours in creating a profitable blog. Please don’t overdo the monetization part of your blog. Don’t have 60 banners on it, and don’t suggest that 100 different programs are the best. Stay focused and be positive. You can do it.

Are you having trouble trying to figure out the best way to put video on your blog? There are several different ways that it can be done, but some ways are a little bit more difficult than others. Depending on what type of video you are trying to add to your blog, there are certain things that you can do to make the video show up the way that you want for it to. The way that you put videos onto your blog will also depend on what type of blog that you have.

If you are trying to add video to a self-hosted WordPress blog, there are a variety of ways that you can do it. Depending on what type of format the video is in that you are trying to add, you will be able to find a plugin that will make adding it very simple to do. There are a lot of developers that have created plugins to make various tasks on a WordPress blog very simple. All you will have to do is go to the plugins section of your admin dashboard and select the Add New option. This will allow you to search for a plugin that will allow you to add the type of video that you want.

If you are trying to add a YouTube video to a WordPress blog, then the process is even easier than finding a good plugin to use. Of course, there is a plugin that you can use to add the video, but it is not necessary for you to be able to put the video that you want on your blog. All you have to do is go to the video that you want to add and copy the embed code for the video. You will then go back to your blog post or page and make sure that you are in HTML mode. After making sure that you are in HTML mode, all you have to do is paste the code into the post or page that you want to add it to. The video will then be visible after you publish or update the page.

If you are trying to add videos to a Web 2.0 blog, there are different methods of doing it. Each Web 2.0 website has their own modules that can be added to do different things with. You will want to make sure that the site your blog is located on allows videos from other sites or that you can upload your own.

There are a lot of different ways to put video on your blog, but the ones described above will help you to get started. If you are having trouble or getting stuck somewhere, then find a webmaster forum and ask someone how you can add a video to the type of blog that you have. Webmaster forums are filled with all types of people who own websites or do things related to websites and you will be able to find someone who can walk you through the entire process.

Before we can list the best widgets for an ecommerce site, it is interesting to know what an ecommerce widget is and how is it used. Your ecommerce site is basically a site that portrays and lists the products that you have either manufactured or procured. The motive is to make a sale of those products. The loading of these products onto your site or store online can be done with the use of widgets. Not only do these help to load the products, you can even use them to be distributed over the internet. It can also be used to create direct links for consumers to buy the products. This aide to the consumers helps them by making the buying process simpler, thus adding to your campaign’s rate of interest and also your conversion rate.

These widgets can also be linked to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. With the high volume of net users accessing these sites every day the traffic to your site can increase substantially if you just add your widget to your fan page. By doing this, your consumers can not only purchase your product, but also easily recommend it to their friends and family. These can be used to manually upload the products, but can also use the RSS medium.

WordPress is a popular CMS or Content Management System that helps to boost your ecommerce sales. This is the system that allows the automatic updating of the site with the current content online. Therefore, the best widgets are the ones that work in accordance with WordPress. The best five widgets for WordPress are GD Star Rating, Theme My Login, WordPress.com Popular Posts, Pretty Link and StatPressCN. The GD Star Rating plugin helps you to set up a rating system as well as a review system for all the posts, pages and comments that appear on your blog. There are a number of different types of rating stars. The associated widgets can be added to the sidebar. These will display the top ratings and other stats that have been created by the plugin itself. It is therefore the number one widget for WordPress.

The other widgets that are directly used for ecommerce and have the highest ratings include Amazon Store, EcWid Shopping Cart, ProductCart, TamingtheBeast, Live Shopping and ZenCart Master. These give you direct links to the respective ecommerce sites. The Amazon, EcWid Shopping, ProductCart and ZenCart will directly connect you to the shopping sites and here you can buy your various products. The LiveShopping is the widget that gives you the latest news on the various different sales and offers on different shopping sites. TamingtheBeast.net gives the latest development news, ecommerce and web marketing research to help you make the most of the ecommerce sites on the internet.

Look At The Statistics

With almost 75,000,000 users around the world WordPress certainly has a lot of users. And because of the way that it works these sites aren’t all just basic blogs. Many full websites also use WordPress as a Content Management System.

Whilst that is a lot, other sites are also prolific. You could try Tumblr or even Twitter, but these are micro blogging rather than full blogging. Google’s Blogger does have a lot of users, however they don’t reveal any statistics for us to review.

Hosted or Self Hosted?

Here are two words that you will come across when setting up a blog and they are important to understand. Both are quite different.

Hosted – this is the simplest form of blogging, where the blog provider “hosts” the site for you. Usually they provide a subdomain name for you to use, although there is also the ability to use your own domain name along with all of the storage space that you will require. Software updates to the core of the blog are also usually handled by them.

Self Hosted – this is where you are responsible for providing the hosting. You will buy space and a domain name and install the blog. A lot of providers make this a lot easier than it once was with “one click” installs, thus avoiding the need for you to get into the realms of databases and FTP.

Which Is The Best Hosting Type?

So, out of these 2 options, which is the best? In my view Self Hosted is best. I like to be in control and to have a domain name of my own.

However, if you are new to blogging the maybe the Hosted version is easier for you to start off with.

How Does WordPress Fit Into This?

To me, and about 75 million blogs, WordPress is undoubtedly the best blogging platform. You can use it either as Hosted or Self Hosted, with a roughly even split between the 2 for WordPress sites.

Both versions are totally free and there are thousands of add ons that you can employ, which is what adds loads of value to the system. Excellent free designs, which are also mobile friendly, can be installed with just a few clicks whilst extras (called Plugins) are available for almost every extra feature you might need.

The Exception That Makes The Rule

Any good rule has its exceptions, and this is true here. In a few circumstances there are specialist platforms that are even better. For example, if you are a runner training for an event, then networks such as Real Buzz have the huge advantage of sharing your blog with other runners. Instant built in readers!

And for many other specialist niches, there are also relevant tools to use there. But at the end of the day, I think that the self-hosted version of WordPress wins the day for me.

It’s fun to monetize a site, you just have to know how. Everyone want to profit from their blog, but only a few are successful. Why?

When it comes to blog monetization timing is always important, as the people who started 10 years ago know well. Niche is also essential, since you need to offer what readers want.

Beyond that, the most important factor in blog monetization is crazy, mad traffic. Monetization is a numbers game and more visitors mean more possible conversions to a sale.

The caveat to the numbers rule is the devotion exception. If your following is monumentally engaged, you have a better chance of converting them, so numbers are less important. So if you don’t get 10,000 – 50,000 hits per month, you’d better have lots of devoted followers to support you.

Once you’re ready to monetize your blog, here are some tools you’ll need.

Advertising

Advertising requires an agreement with an advertiser who will preferably give you the graphics or code to place on your site. Here are some plugins to help manage ad placement.

AdRotate This plugin accomplishes all of the above, plus ad scheduling. In addition, you can set a new ad to appear on refresh of the page. Free

Simple Ads Manager This plugin offers an interface for uploading ads. Simple Ads Manager features Ad Place, either through a widget, a shortcode, or by adding PHP code. Ads can be weighted to be shown more often. Ad Zones allow you to specify what ad will be shown on what type of page or post. The auto-insert ad functionality lets you automatically insert ads into posts or pages before and after the content, as well as in the middle of content. Free.

The MidGame This online service helps you find sponsorship opportunities, manage client relationships and increase your online influence. Also called native advertising, this is where a brand pay “influencers” to post about them. Terms are all over the place, so caution should be used.

Affiliate Marketing

The best thing about affiliate marketing is having nothing to do but place code on your site.You can place pre-designed ads in sidebars or embed links in text, and when a reader clicks and buys, that company gives you a percentage or a flat rate. Most offer it’s a one-time payment, but some will pay a recurring fee based on subscriptions.

Amazon Associates Earn up to 8.5% by selling Amazon products, which is just about anything.

Individual Affiliates Some companies have their own affiliate programs and work directly with associates to offer high percentages on sales. For this site, I work with BlueHost, HostGator, as well as all the advertisers in my sidebar.

ClickBank, Commission Junction, Linkshare and Share a Sale are affiliate clearinghouses that hook you up with merchants and send your percentages of sales from links and ads on your site. They are strict about sales and will deactivate your account it sales fall short.

eCommerce

If you want to sell 3-dimensional products through your blog, things can get complicated with shipping, taxes, and credit card payment.

Shopify Create an online store, connected to your website or Facebook. Provides a secure payment gateway, shipping options, tax calculations and translations on a hosted platform. Packages from $29 – $179

Woo-Commerce Free plugin from Woothemes that allows you to set up an online store on your site. Built for WordPress, mobile friendly, open source. And, free.

Here’s a video to compare Shopify with Woo-Commerce.

eBook Creation

Having a blog means the inevitable potential of creating eBook from your blog posts. To convert your blog posts to eBook format acceptable to the big distributors, here is my favorite option.

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Pressbooks This is freemium Software as a Service (SaaS) that offers a dashboard exactly like WordPress. Imported posts can be reordered by clicking and dragging, and edited, WordPress style, on their individual pages. Pick a theme and export as PDF (for printing) Epub ( for Nook, ibooks, Kobo) and Mobi (for Kindle). To get a 25% discount on Pressbooks exports, just go to the Pressbooks Upgrade page and enter the code: MARIKANE at checkout.

eBook Distribution

Once you create your eBook, the simplest, more profitable method of distribution is on your site itself. After that, there are innumerable options.

Free with Subscription Simply load your PDF eBook file to WordPress and use that link in your email opt-in confirmation email. (See Email Management.)

PayPal Sales Put the eBook’s link in the PayPal receipt the customer receives after payment.

Online Bookstores So many book sellers, so little time. Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Copia, Smashwords, Baker & Taylor will sell your book for a percentage of the cover price and manage sales and distribution.

Ebook Partnership will distribute to all of the above book sellers and more for a flat fee.

Email Marketing

Building an email list is key to monetization. The subscribers you entice to opt into receiving your email alerts become your home team and your cheerleaders. You need to encourage readers to convert to subscribers but assertive means, like pop-ups. These are two good options.

OptinMonster A plugin that allows you to create and A/B test pop-up lead capture forms using a drag-and-drop builder within WordPress. Various packages let you grab exiting visitor, segment behaviors, measure results, location-specific in-line forms as well as effects. $49/yr – $199/yr

Sumo Me A freemium suite of plugins with simple-to-configure landing page welcome mats, heat maps, share bars, scroll boxes, contact forms, Google Analytics, image sharer, content highlighter, etc.

Email Management

All those emails collected from your site’s pop-up form have to go somewhere and it should not be the Users file in WordPress. Cultivate subscribers by using a third-party email marketing service to manage addresses, send pretty email alerts, and track results. Here are a few of the better services.

AWeber Sends unlimited emails to up to 500 subscribers for $19/mo – $149/mo for up to 25,000 subscribers, which includes automation, segmentation, analytics, support, stock photos 700 templates and more. 30 day free trial.

Constant Contact Get analytics, support, stock photos, list-building tools, sharing tools, apps, file storage for $20/mo for up to 500 subscribers – $90/mo for 10,000 subscribers, minus pre-payment discounts. Pay more for more tools and templates. 60 day free trial.

MailChimp Free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. $25-$35 for 2,001- 2,600 subscribers includes automation, integrations and tracking. Free but no support for free members.

Graphics

If art, graphics, coding, or promotion are you weakness, sometimes it’s best to delegate those tasks. Here are two place you can get pros to help.

Fiverr A marketplace for creative and professional services. $5 is the base, but you can spend $10-$20 more for a logo, eBook cover, banner ads, or get SEO, WordPress development, or video production. I once had a guy digitally record a song I wrote – for $20!

Upwork This (formerly E-lance) marketplace offers similar services, but for more normal prices. There are 3 different options: super-cheap, Pro and Enterprise that charge according the amount services you contact.

Landing Page Builders

Professional-looking landing pages aren’t built with WordPress alone. You need special plugins or services to create and/or manage those kinds of pages.

LeadPages A similar SaaS as Unbounce, LeadPages allows you to sort pages by their conversion rate and offers more templates for sale. Plans start at #25/mo – $199/mo. 30 day money back guarantee

Thrive Themes A suite of tools to upload directly to your WordPress site. Thrive Themes are conversion focused themes. ThriveLeads is a list building plugin. Thrive Content Builder is a front-end editor to create landing pages. Thrive LandingPages are conversion optimized landing page templates. Rates start at single license individual plugins at $67 or or Thrive Membership for $19/mo

Unbounce A local SaaS that provides a platform to build, publish and A/B test landing or splash pages using provided templates and integrate them with email services, CRMs, Google Analytics, social media, marketing automation and WordPress. Starts at $49/mo – $199/mo. 30 day free trial with branding.

Memberships

There’s money in membership, especially if your group has what people want. Here are some tools to manage your site’s members.

Optimize Press Lets you create landing and sales pages, training and course pages, webinar registration, membership portals, and product launch funnels. Starts at one time fee of $97 for up to 3 sites. Example: BlogMasteryAcademy.com

s2Member A powerful freemium membership plugin for WordPress that protects members-only content with roles/capabilities. You can sell recurring (or non-recurring) subscriptions, “Buy Now” access, sell specific Posts/Pages, or access to file downloads. Free, but Pro version, which integrates with other payment options, starts at $89/single site – $189/ unlimited sites.

WishList Membership A powerful, membership plugin that can turn any WordPress site into a full-blown membership site. Sell membership levels, offer sequential content delivery, control viewed content, shopping cart integration, subscription control and more. $197 for 1 site – $297 for unlimited sites.

Online Products

Digital products are the easiest things to sell since they requires absolutely no shipping. Often, they are low priced, like eBooks, so use of PayPal is preferable. But if you sell courses, you need more power.

E-junkie offers easy to use eCommerce tools to sell digital downloads (and tangible goods) online. They provide a lightweight, embeddable shopping cart to put anywhere, including your website, blog and social media. Starts at $5/mo for 10 products using 200 MB of storage – $100/mo for unlimited products using 50 GB of storage including remote file server support. 30-day money back guarantee.

Learn Dash A Learning Management System (LMS) plugin allowing for multi-tier courses, drip-fee content, certificates, quizzes, access expiration, assignment management, forums and more, so with a shopping cart. Starts at $129 for 1 site – $229 for unlimited sites.

Thinkific This is an all-in-one software that allows you to sell courses online. Full support for videos, html, PDF, quizzes, multimedia, and much more. Starts at $0 with 10% transaction fees -$79/mo with no transaction fees.

Udemy Utilize state-of-the-art, free-to-use course design tools to create your own online course. Reach millions of students worldwide, and deliver your course on any device, at any time on Udemy’s servers. Keep 100% of the revenue when you promote your course; 50% when Udemy promotes it. Free.

Password-Protected Page Post your materials on a WordPress page that requires a password. Send the link and password in the confirmation email after PayPal payment completes. Free.

Payments

PayPal “The World’s Most-loved Way To Pay And Get Paid.” Corny, but true. And it’s very easy to create a button, copy and paste the javascript code into widgets, and sell! Accepts credit and debit cards, and create invoices and reciepts. Online payments are charged 2.9% + $0.30.

Stripe A payments platform for Internet companies of all sizes. Using developer-freindly application program interfaces (API’s) you can accept payments, create recurring subscriptions, build marketplaces as it features simple, transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing, with no up-front costs, no monthly fees, no refund costs, no hidden fees. 2.9% + .30 per transaction.

Webinars

As a trusted authority, you don’t want to just sell courses online, you want to conduct them in real time. For Webinars there are lots of options, but here are a few of the best.

Blab A lot like Google Hangouts but allows only 4 people to converse and it require at least one participant before going live. Blabs are viewed live only on the Blab website. Unlike Hangouts, Blab allows the conversation to be Off the Record which pauses the record button. Free

Google Hangouts A step up from Skype, this is a live streaming free plugin from Google that allows 10 people to participate, plus chat, screen sharing, and integration with Google +, Google Drive and YouTube. Requires Google+ account. Free.

Webinar Jam Cheaper than Go To Webinar but on steroids, it allows for unlimited attendees, targeted email followups, auto-store on YouTube, studio control center for chats, questions, polls, offers etc, on-demand video and attendee spotlight. $400-500 year (compared to $500/mo for Go To Webinar).

Go forth and monetize

Now that you have some great tools you can harness the buying power of your following and monetize your blog.

If there are any tools you like that I missed, please leave a comment below so that others can click on your affiliate links 

Happy monetizing!

The social networking giant, set to open its Instant Articles feature
to all publishers next month, has launched a free WordPress plugin that
will help publishers create Instant Articles with ease.

Instant
Articles will be opened to all publishers – of any size, anywhere in the
world – at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco on April 12.

“We
have partnered with Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com VIP, to
build a free plugin for Instant Articles, which simplifies the process
of generating and publishing Instant Articles from WordPress,” said
Chris Ackermann, partner engineering at Facebook in a blog post on
Tuesday.

The open-source WordPress publishing platform now powers
more than 25 percent of sites on the Web so “we are excited to help
millions of publishers all over the world bring the Instant Articles
experience to their readers”, he added.

The plugin creates a
special RSS feed that automatically optimises Facebook posts to appear
as Instant Articles. The plugin is open-source and customisable.

“We’ve
worked with a small group of publishers on WordPress to beta test the
plugin as a seamless way to adapt web content for the Instant Articles
format, with a built-in suite of interactive tools that help stories
come to life on mobile,” Ackermann posted.

When Instant Articles
opens up in April, publishers that use standard WordPress templates can
activate the plugin out-of-the-box to create Instant Articles.

Publishers that want a more customised production experience can extend the plugin to support additional elements.

“We encourage all interested publishers on WordPress to review the plugin’s documentation and FAQs,” the post said.