Make Money Blogging Series

Tips For Naming Your Blog

What’s funny about naming your blog is the inner dialogue and struggle you will probably have over choosing a fitting name and creating a brand or going SEO and buying a keyword based domain.  Let’s talk, I really want to help you get over the fear of not having a keyword based domain when you are running a blog.

SEO Tips For Naming Your Blog?

There are four areas that you want to see your keyword if you are want to rank easily, the keyword has moderate to low competition and a decent amount of traffic (minimum 70 – 100 per day).  They are: URL, Title, Keywords and Header tags within the text.  One of the most awesome things I have learned just running this blog is your main domain doesn’t matter.  What? That’s right, let me explain.

When you set up your blog you will want to click on Settings in when you are in the WordPress admin area, then click on Permalinks.  When it shows you the different kinds you will choose Custom and type /%postname%/ and save your changes.  That will take the title you use for your blog post and use it in the URL.  If you want an example look at this blog post, the name of the post has been appended to the domain name.  Isn’t that awesome!  It takes care of half the SEO battle when you do this and name your blog post using the keyword you would like to target.

Why wouldn’t you use the keyword you want to target anyway because those keywords represent questions that people are asking and you should be providing answers.  Those answers can be in the form of an informative article, wise advice (better) or a product or a product combined with sage advice (best).

Ideas For What You Should Include When Creating Your Blog Name?

Well I think I can explain this best with an example.  Let’s say you review gadgets but you want to brand yourself as “the fluffy bunny.”  You can get the domain thefluffybunny.com or you can purchase the domain fluffybunnysfastestreviews.com.  It’s more descriptive but long and you will want people to be able to remember how to find you.  So first google fluffy bunny to make sure there aren’t too many other fluffy bunnies out there.

It’s great to save yourself time by having reviews in your domain name so you won’t have to put that in the titles of your blog posts.  But you will need to weigh it out and decide which way you want to go: thefluffybunny.com/review-of-xyz-gadget/ OR fluffybunnysfastestreviews.com/xyz-gadget.

One Last Note

In case you were wondering about how to get the keywords and the header tags.  For the keywords and everything to show up correctly I suggest using a plugin like Platinum SEO.  Then you just fill in all the info at the bottom when you are creating your post and your keywords will be assigned correctly to get the seo benefit.

The header tags are known as h1, h2, h3 and so on and they are done by using them before and after section titles.  You can see them in this post when you see the bolder larger sized words with the blog post.  For the low-tech people just type your title, highlight it and choose heading 1, heading 2 or heading 3.  They are different sizes so you should always preview your post before publishing it.

Now to wrap up this series on making money blogging, the next post will talk about how to monetize your blog.  There is so much more that I want to cover but I really feel like it would be best to cover the tools you will and can use for your blog so I’ve decided to cover those throughout June 2011 and then I will talk about getting traffic to your blog in July 2011.

How To Monetize Your Blog

To finish up planning your blog you will need to decide how you want to monetize it.  That means how do you want to make money from this blog you are planning.  There are so many ways to make money from a blog I am just going to focus on the ones that are the easiest to get going.

How To Monetize Your Blog With Adsense

The first one you may have heard of is Adsense, these are the ads from Google and you have probably seen them all over the internet.  You can choose to have either text or banner ads and you can choose different shapes of the area that the ads will take up.  You can’t customize too much on the shapes but they do have a good selection and there are a lot of WordPress themes that are setup to handle Adsense. 

You can either allow people to target your site by the content description you give or not but Google will detect the content on your site regardless of what you tell them.  You will want to place the ads in a way that is not disruptive to your content but still gets them in front of your visitors.  I would test different ways of placing them to maximize your profits but still satisfy your visitors so they keep coming back.

If you are going to use Adsense you will need a privacy policy and a compensation disclosure.  You can use the Easy Privacy Policy plugin for WordPress that will automatically create one for you once you activate it.

How To Monetize Your Blog With An Amazon Store

Another place to go is Amazon, from them you have a selection of ways that you can monetize your blog.  You can have a store that looks like it’s built into your site.  Amazon allows you to select the products that you want to sell so it’s great if you have a particular niche that you are targeting.

One way to use this is to create a page on your site labeled “Store” or “Your Keyword Store.”  Then throughout your content you can refer your readers to purchase the item you refer to in your store.  Amazon lets you customize the page so your logo and other information will show up and there is also an option to help get buyers back to your website after they have done their shopping.

They also have options where they host a store and your whole website is an Amazon store but it’s hosted on your own domain.  These are a little bit more advanced options but it’s not hard to look through their information and figure them out.  Just keep in mind these last suggestions will cost you some money.

How To Monetize Your Blog With Clickbank

Clickbank offers information products that can be sold for various amounts per sale.  This is straight affiliate marketing and can have the benefit of the vendor providing marketing materials and possibly training for you.  There is training for affiliate marketing on the Clickbank website in case you choose a product from a vendor that doesn’t help you.

You will need to choose products that pay you a decent amount per sale, preferably have some sort of rebill and sell often (you can tell this by the gravity).  Look for a gravity higher than 10 if possible, and if the amount per sale isn’t much than you will want a higher gravity to show that you will be able to make up for it in the volume that you sell.

Wrapping It Up

Some people start with how they will monetize their blog because they build entire blogs around a single product.  Which is why it was so important that you go through all of these steps to plan out your blog.

There are plenty of other ways to monetize your blog like selling ebooks your have written or get the rights to sell someone elses book.  You can promote most of the popular products you see on the internet you just need to know what affiliate program they are going through and then apply.  Keep in mind that some programs want you to already have a well traffiked site before you even think about applying because they want to make sure you will be able to make them money.

One of the easier sites to get into for this is Linkshare but you will still need to apply for each individual company’s products to promote.  Some companies just want to know your site is decent and the content is relevant others want you to have adequate traffic or meet other requirements.  Regardless get to know your account manager and don’t be afraid to tell them when you have issues with a program.

I recently told my program manager about a company that didn’t provide the size of banners that I use and what they did provide sucked.  Just realize that you are in this to make money, if the product isn’t forthcoming move on.

Sample Blog Layouts

As promised I  have put together three examples of layouts that you can use to figure out how you want to setup your blog.  Please keep in mind these are just examples to be able to demonstrate and explain the benefits of structuring your site different ways.  Plus if you already have a site and just want to add a blog I have also demonstrated how that looks and I will explain how that is accomplished.

Another thing you need to understand is themes are getting more advanced and industry specific to allow you to better present yourself.  So if you are looking for more of a magazine look or you like it where there are pictures linked to blog posts sliding across the screen you can get those but understand there is still an underlying site structure.  Those features don’t always affect your site layout they are usually settings in your themes options and setting a “feature image” for each blog post.

As I just mentioned if you already have a site or would like to have your visitors land on a splash page that captures their email, etc then here is where you need to pay attention.

If you are trying to build a list you would set up your splash page on your main domain directory folder and install WordPress under /blog or /whatever-you-want-to-call-it.  Then you would configure your autoresponder to use your pre-sell blog post as your confirmation page.

If you are planning on just putting together a topic focused blog or a personal blog this might be a good layout for you.  You may also want to consider this if you are a small company that just needs a start up web presence that will direct your potential customers to you.

You could add another page for products and then create further pages that feature categories of that first page.  Just make sure you draw it all out so that you will have a nice flow for your customers to follow so they can find your products.

This is setup is actually done by creating a page called “Blog” and then another page that would serve as your welcome page.  You would then go into your Settings and Reading in the WordPress Admin area for your blog and set the pages to have a static homepage.  This is the current setup for this site.

I wanted to give you an idea of the most common layout for blogs that I’ve seen where the page that you land on is the page that features the blog posts.  You may have different aspects of your topic that you feel are more important and deserving of more attention and you would create pages for those.

If you choose to you can setup several levels deep pages that are only accessible if you have drop-down menu capability or if the visitor actually visits the page up a level in the hierarchy.  Which could be helpful if you are talking about clothing or something like that.

This structure really takes advantage of drop-down menus to conserve space on your menu bar.

Or if you are building a mini-site to promote a product you may want 3-5 keyword focused “Pages” and that would be the extent of your blog-site.  I hope this is helpful stay tuned for two more posts wrapping up creating your site plan the next one being: Your Blog Should Be Focused To Make Money.  Then I will discuss naming your blog and monetization.

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