Many of you moms have a blog already… but is it making money for you? Even personal/family blogs can bring in a sizable income. Over the course of 60 days we’ll walk you through a variety of lessons showing you many different ways that you can monetize an existing or new blog.

Step 1: Choose a Niche/Audience/Topic to blog about: If you already have a blog, you can skip this post, but you may want to skim it anyway to see our thoughts on what type of topic will help you get traffic and monetize down the road.

Step 2: Keyword Research: This is the most important part of the process. You will use this research to decide if a niche is worth getting into or not. Are people really searching for relevant keywords?

Step 3: Analyzing the Competition: This goes hand in hand with Keyword Research. If people are searching for the keywords, but the competition is so stiff you’ll never rank for relative keywords, you still don’t want to enter that niche.

Step 4: Naming Your Business and Choosing a Domain Name: This is important to do after you’ve done your keyword research, because having the correct name will help you rank for some of those keywords.

Step 5: Paperwork and Licenses, and Get Your Business Organized!

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Step 6: Register and Host a URL (web address): Now you’re finally past researching, and you’re getting started!

Step 7: Set up Google’s Tools on your Website: These tools will help you a great deal in the future!

Step 8: Install WordPress on Your Site

Step 9: Choose a Template

Step 10: Add an Email Capture and Build your email list that you will market to

Step 11: Change Your Permalinks. Keep your keywords in your titles when you can, add the all in one SEO plug-in for WordPress. (Watch our video on adding Plugins). Use your keywords in your tags as well.

Step 12: Monetizing Your Blog: These are some general ideas, and the following posts go into more detail on how to do each of these things.

One Method: Become an Affiliate:

Step 1: Sign up to be an affiliate

Step 2: Add affiliate products to your blog

Another Method: Sell Ads on your site

Step 1: Add Adsense

Step 2: Sell Banner Space

Method Three: Sell Your Own Information Products

Check out What to Write about on your Blog when you are marketing an Affiliate Product, or your own product!

Step 13: Getting Traffic to your site:

One Method: Organic Ranking – Ranking on the Search Engines for your Keywords

Step 1: On page SEO

Step 2: Build Backlinks using Anchor Texts

These are some of the places you can get backlinks:

Social Bookmarking

From other Blogs

Web 2.0

Articles

Directories

Blog and Forum Commenting

Purchasing Ads

Another Method: Social Media. Get yourself seen! You should have profiles on each of these places so that people are seeing your face all over the place.

Have profiles in these locations. Then you’ll interconnect them:

Twitter

Linked In

Facebook

Niche Social Media Sites

Youtube: these videos will go to TubeMogul to be distributed over several video sites.

To connect all of these, set up Twitterfeed and the Twitter to Facebook App.

Once you have done each of these steps, you are on your way to having a Blog that is bringing in money for you. You are ready to move onto our more Advanced Techniques to grow your business even further! [/ ]