Blogging For Money – Google Plus HoA Review
Posted on June 25, 2014
Blogging for money is something that a lot of people, maybe you included, set out to achieve but not all can squeeze a few shekels out of their online blogging exploits. A recent Google Plus Hangout On Air between Wade Harman, Nicholas Cardot and myself discussed the topic of blogging for money and answered some questions from our viewers on the subject.
For your audio-visual pleasure I’ve timestamped the main talking points of the show and extracted some key nuggets of info on blogging for money which you can find just beneath the video. Press play and enjoy! (and, why not subscribe to our YouTube channel?)
Blogging for Money – GooglePlus HoA Review
3.00: “Blogging is not just blogging, there is so much more to it” – Wade
4.00: “Best Way of Driving Traffic to your blog?” – question from L. Williams
– for ongoing value have some SEO in mind so that you can optimise each page/post for a keyword or variety of content. With that said don’t underestimate the power of social media to bolster your SEO efforts – Rob
7.00: “Onsite SEO – what’s to be considered?” – Wade
– use Yoast SEO plugin and focus on “the big 3”, title, meta description and URL.
– first words are important, make sure to place your keywords towards the start of your title, meta description etc
– use h2, h3, images, alt tags etc to give Google the best idea of what the page is about.
10.40: “If you are using h2, h3 tags with your keywords is that over optimisation or spammy?” – Wade
– You can naturally weave your keyword, eg “Blogging for Money” into the copy of your post and it can be done in such a way to break up the text of your post – especially if the h2, h3 tags are for sub headings. Rob
12.00: “Know your target audience” – Nicholas
– you want targeted traffic of people who are interested in what you’re offering. If you’re blogging for money a 1,000 visitors from stumbleupon for example could be worth less than 1 visitor who is actually interested in your service.
13.00: “How Important is keyword research?” – Wade
– you can go down the rabbit hole searching for the perfect keyword and it can induce some paralysis. Do some research, Google Trends or Ubersuggest.org are good but don’t be beholden to it – Rob
16.00: “Don’t sacrifice your style or tone for SEO” – Rob
17.00: “I get traffic from building up relationships with my followers online more than focusing on SEO and am more concerned with helping other people than SEO focus.” By sharing content out, and fostering relationships, he gets spikes in traffic. – Wade
20.00: – “I get most of my traffic from G+ & Twitter, is that good or bad?” – L. Williams
– “Can be good and can be bad – bad if they are just auto followers, good if they are targeted, real followers” – Nicholas
– “A thousand true fans would make me a rich man” – Wade
– “You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, remember Facebook pages? Hedge your bets, a mailing list is a good place to start. – Rob
23.00: What kind of tactics do you have for mailing list? Question from Wade which dovetails with Sam Stormborn Ormandy question.
– The ethical bribe is a good way to get people to join the list – an ebook or pdf can be helpful.
– Auto pop up for mailing list sign up – higher sign up rate when the mailing list sign up form popped up straight away.
– Bottom right in footer is a good place to place mailing list sign up widget as well as in the sidebar on the blog.
– Calls to action from within blog posts asking people to join list is also helpful.
29.00: What’s the most effective way to monetise a WordPress blog? – Sam Stormborn Ormandy
What is your real strength? What product/service can you offer to people that people will pay money for? As a WordPress developer I get business from my blogging. Having a service is a better way of monetising than trying to make a fraction of cent from AdSense and the likes. – Rob
30.00: “Give Away the Keys to Your Kingdom” – Nicholas
– People don’t want to learn how to do what you know, show people that you know what you’re doing and they’ll trust you and will pay you to do it.
32.40: “What is the quickest way to set up affiliates?” – Sam Stormborn Ormandy
– no quick way but targeting is key. Make sure your ads sync up with your content/niche. – Wade
35.00: “How many ads should you have running on your site? – Sam Stormborn Ormandy
– If you have no products/services of your own to sell and are just blogging for money then it all depends – there can be diminishing returns if you are too ad heavy – Rob
36.00: – Make a banner ad for yourself to drive people to your hire me page – Wade
Blogging for Money – In The Can!
It’s been a while since I partook in a Google Plus hangout (some of my other ones are listed below) but it was great to get back in the groove and talk about blogging for money. Special thanks to Nicholas who filled in on short notice for Carolyn Capern who is recuperating after surgery and so was unable to join us for the discussion. She’ll be back for the next show which is scheduled for July 5th and we’d love you to tune in live to ask any questions you have about blogging for money or similar!
Wade Harman
June 25, 2014 (4:32 pm)
Great job on this as usual Rob, always a pleasure to talk to you about blogging. You should definitely include the YouTube link where people can subscribe to our Blogging Warfare channel too :) YouTube.com/BloggingWarfare
Thanks for doing this my friend, I have always wondered how to do those timestamps on the social update too.
Robert Ryan
June 25, 2014 (5:36 pm)
No real mystery to the timestamps – just a case of watching the video and jotting down the time..not a fan of watching myself back but it has to be done hehe :) Will update post now to include link to YT Channel.. Looking forward to next show..