Blogging the beginners guide to blogging for profit

Blogging: The Beginners Guide To Blogging For

Profit

All you need to know to get you started earning

like a professional blogger.

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Contents1. Affiliate marketing – Why you should have an affiliate

marketing blog.2. Is blogging the new way for stay at home mothers to make a

great monthly passive income?3. Building a lasting Relationship between the Guest Blogger and

the Blog Owner.4. Need to make a list building free report? Here is why I love

blogs.5. Top 5 Types Of Articles That Can Go Viral.6. 5 Top Tips For Creating Content7. 5 Important Work From Home Tips.8. The Best 15 Wordpress Plugins The Newbie Blogger Needs9. 5 great plugins to help you make money from your blog.

Affiliate Marketing: Why you should have an affiliate marketing blog.

Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest and best ways to make money online, in a nut shell, you get paid to sell other peoples products without having to buy, hold or post any products yourself. This method has made a lot of money for a lot of people.

There are many ways to promote an affiliate product online but one of the best is by having an affiliate marketing blog. Simply building a content based blog that has affiliate offers on it is a great way to make money as you are not actually selling.

By adding plenty of regular useful content that is free for the visitor to read is great as it builds up your online presence and builds up a trustworthiness and confidence in you with your visitors. The content is free without any form of commitment which visitors will love and keep coming back for more, as long as you add new great content regularly. New content is great for search engine rankings too. They love fresh and regular content.

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When reading your posts and reviews the reader will see your affiliate adverts showing down the sides of the blog and embedded into your content as links.

They will be seen by the reader as something there for them to ‘choose’ to buy if they so wish. Without any high pressure selling from you.Because you are not actually selling but merely recommending certain products that you have handpicked, the visitor that now trusts you will be more happier to go that ‘step further’ and visit the product through your link. Resulting in a higher chance of them buying and you making an affiliate commission.

By having a blog you are distancing yourself from the other affiliate marketers who are promoting the same products and at the same time developing an authority within your chosen niche. Visitors love an authority figure! They buy recommended items from authority figures. When Oprah Winfrey recommended a book on her show, sales of that book would increase immensely.

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A blog also has the feel of a forum or discussion board where people can ask questions or leave comments on your posts, if you leave the comments section open. Giving you the opportunity to answer them with advice or reassurances. People love interaction and reassurances. It’s great for business.

The great thing about a blog is that you can change the products as and when needed. If you have a steady stream of regular readers, you are getting new products out in front of loyal followers. Something other affiliate marketers cannot do when they are using other marketing methods.

Please remember, blogging is one of the easiest, quickest and cheapest ways to start an online affiliate marketing business. And it starts your business in the right way, giving great regular content, building up a following of loyal fans, getting love from people like Google and creating you an online presence as an authority. These can only add up to one thing, a great business for you.

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The great thing about a blog is that you can change the products as and when needed. If you have a steady stream of regular readers, you are getting new products out in front of loyal followers. Something other affiliate marketers cannot do when they are using other marketing methods.

Please remember, blogging is one of the easiest, quickest and cheapest ways to start an online affiliate marketing business. And it starts your business in the right way, giving great regular content, building up a following of loyal fans, getting love from people like Google and creating you an online presence as an authority. These can only add up to one thing, a great business for you.

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Is blogging the new way for stay at home

mothers to make a great monthly passive

income? And Dads?

Is blogging the new way for stay at home mothers to make a great monthly passive income?

What is a blog? Well in short it is nothing more than an online diary. For example…

If you weren’t already aware, the highly popular UK TV show ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’ was based on the online diary of a real life anonymous call girl, who was ,ahemm, well you know… earning money doing ‘things’ to fund herself while she studied. They became so popular her online tales became a book then later a popular TV show.

Blogging can be very lucrative. There is one blog I visit regularly where the owner generates an average $20000 + each month from his blogs.

Recently a new trend has been sweeping through cyber space and that is the phenomenon called mommy blogs. Stay at home mothers have been taking to the internet and started to ‘blog’ about day to day parenting issues and topics which has gained popularity with readers.

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These blogs have grown and keep growing to a size where they have been noticed by big companies who have started to pay good money for these blogs to advertise their products and send them plenty of freebies to be reviewed by the blogger.

Many of the mommy bloggers now earn thousands of pounds each and every month in advertising revenue and affiliate commissions.

So what do you blog about and how?

Here is our 7 step plan to achieving success as a mommy blogger.

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1) Get Focused: find a topic.

A mommy blog no longer has to be mom related (being from the UK the word mom seems so odd! Lol). You must find something that you enjoy writing about, it is hard to write for any length of time on a subject that does not interest you. To have a successful blog you will need to write about your chosen topic over and over again in several different ways.

Jessica Benton, a US based mommy blogger started her blog on saving money at home which she later changed to a tech blog focusing on all things gadgetry.

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2) Get a name & get a plan.

If blogging is new to you then you need a plan, especially when it comes to the name of your blog, once your blog takes off you are stuck with it, so think ahead, what do you want to blog about and what do you want to call your site?

Several of the top mommy blog authors admitted that they never planned to have a professional blog and were lucky that the names they chose worked out nicely when their blogs grew. Their advice; Think seriously about your blogs name.

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3) Practice.

Start blogging at a free blog site like Blogspot.com or Wordpress.com. Spend 3 – 6 months writing about your chosen topic and spending time on your blog to see if you can do it and more importantly enjoy it.

If you don’t make it through those first six months then you will not make it. At least this way it never cost you a penny. If you do enjoy it and think you can make it work then it is time for the next step. Get a domain name.

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4) Register your brand.

Once you have decided that you can make blogging work for you, you need to invest in getting a domain name. At the same time it is advised to get a Facebook page and Twitter account set up with the same name.

Making all 3 the same helps in getting noticed and creating that all important brand feel.

When registering your domain, having the word ‘mom’ in it can help you get noticed by companies looking for blogs to partner up with. For example one successful mommy blog is simplybeingmommy.com.

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5) Start writing.

The professional mommy bloggers are writing 1 to 10 posts a day. They are writing good quality content that other people are interested in reading. It is advised to write from the heart and write in an easy and friendly manner, as if you were talking to a friend of a friend. Not too technical or complicated but not to ‘matesy’ with slang and terminology only your best friends would understand.

Writing regular good quality articles will help with your search engine rankings bringing in plenty of organic traffic. (People who found you without you running costly advertising campaigns or social media promotions)

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6) Review your own life.

Mommy bloggers started to review the things that they enjoyed or things they used at home. This could be from food to TV shows they watched. Before long companies would see that they were getting rave reviews for their products and an endorsement from happy users is one of the best forms of advertising you can have. These companies would send the mommy bloggers free stuff to enjoy and review. A win-win situation for both parties involved.

To attract brand name companies into your blogging business, it is important to have product and item reviews visible on your blog and very importantly to be honest. Show bad points if there are any and not just the good. Don’t write over the top praise that looks false otherwise they will think that you are not genuine and just after their business. It won’t work.

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7) Connect with other blogs.

This is not to be confused with blatant self-promoting but genuine connecting with other blogs and sites. Again, being genuine is the name of the game, why? Because it works best and creates lasting relationships with trusting customers in the long run. Blogging is a long game and not a get rich quick system.

You need to find websites or blogs that are in the same topic as you and leave proper comments regarding their posts. Do not post comments such as ‘Come and check out my blog’ they annoy site owners and readers and they will be deleted.

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7) Connect with other blogs. (Continued)

Creating genuine relationships with other blogs will have them regularly coming to your blog to read what you have written and share your articles and reviews with their readership. You will have traffic coming to your blog from these other blogs.

Remember to include a fully working link or website address with your comment.

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Like all walks of life, there are un written rules and the big un written rule in the mommy blogging world is; do not ask other sites or blogs for favours.

For instance, if you see a review of a product on a site you like, you then contact the site asking for the contact details to the person who sent them the product, so you too can do a review.

They will not give you the contact details, why would they and why should they? However, what do friends do?

They share things even contact details so it makes perfect sense to become friends with other sites first.

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Final word on mommy blogging; it may be called mommy blogging but it isn’t just for the women of our world. Daddy blogging is also becoming big; in fact with so many lifestyles and niches out there blogging is big business.

Household gadgets and products might not interest you but travelling does. Could you write about that? You might not have children and instead spend your day doing winter sports.

Would that be something you can write about? Do you have knowledge on a subject that you can help people with, like Autism for an example?

Whatever you like and enjoy, there is a huge potential of blogging topics out there. So, is blogging for you?

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Building a lasting Relationship between the Guest Blogger and the Blog Owner.


Guest blogging is all the rage at the moment with blogging ‘Gurus’ telling you all about the great traffic benefits of guest blogging on other peoples sites.

And you would be right to listen; they do bring in good traffic if you post to really great blogs. The writer gets exposure and many important backlinks as well as a new audience who are likely to visit your site to read more!

But there is one important thing guest bloggers fail to do, and that is to create a great long lasting relationship with the owners of the blogs they have posted to. To many newbie bloggers guest posting is where they write as many posts for as many blogs as they can and do the cyber equivalent to a ‘drive by shooting’.

Posts and articles are pinging off to every corner of the blogosphere.

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This is great for traffic if the blogs have a high readership and that your posts are of great quality. But then what? Do you do it just the once? Of course not. It would be good if you can write great guest posts regularly for several different sites. But for that to happen you need to establish a relationship with the site. Site owners/editors may not grant you another guest posting slot if you just road off into the sunset, holding several of their readers under your arms without saying a word.

Networking is a must, keeping in touch with the editors or site owners regularly or even doing post swaps would be a fantastic way to build that all important relationship. Even commenting on their posts with helpful tips could go in favour for you doing another guest posting.

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Having a network of great blogs that you can contribute to regularly is a far better way to get traffic to your own blog. Imagine writing to loads of blogs then doing nothing again, you will get some visitors from your posts but then your name and post will disappear into the archives.

However if there were a few sites that you constantly wrote for, your name will become recognizable, and if readers of your past posts like what you wrote, they are more likely to read your new post and re visit your site. The same is advised if you have a Facebook Fan Page. Interacting regularly with other pages creates a friendship that will help you to ‘go places.’

As for the blogs, yours and theirs, the benefit of having a network of great writers is that you will find people who can add content to your site without you having to do so much of the work. That is, as long as the articles and posts are in keeping with the style and feel of your site.

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So many opportunities can arise from having a network of writers, editors and site owners. You may get recommended by one of your new friends to write for other blogs that they have a relationship with giving you even more exposure. A recommendation is great for business, it is great for your reputation and that alone can open doors.

Keeping in contact these days is not hard to do so do not use the excuse ‘I am too busy’ or even ‘it’s not worth it’ Believe me, it is worth it. Most bloggers these days use Social Media to increase traffic and build relationships with their readers and customers.

You can also keep in contact with your new blogging buddies by posting comments, questions or answers to their Facebook or Twitter Pages. Bloggers use these platforms to let their readers know when they have posted new content, replying with comments or information gets your name out in front of new people which again is good for traffic and being seen.

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After all, why do you have a blog if you do not want people to know it’s there? And they will not know it’s there if they are not shown.

Writing your posts are important but getting them, your name and your blog name out in front of as many people as you can is the name of the game.

To help win the game, I recommend you start networking, besides it’s a lot cheaper and effective than Google Adwords.

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Need to make a list building free report?

Here is why I love blogs.

Need to make a list building free report? Here is why I love blogs.

The most important thing all online businesses need to do is build an email list of regular customers and potential future customers that they can promote to. To build up a large list of hungry buyers the website/business owner usually gives something away for free. This can be a report, an eBook or a set of free video tutorials amongst other things.

The idea is to give great content that your blogs visitor (your potential client) wants or needs, or at least wants to read. This means that you either pay to have something created or create it yourself. At first this can be daunting. If you have not written a report or eBook before it can be hard to make a start. Even a short 12 page report needs 12 pages of content.

When starting you can feel like you are stood at the base of a mountain that you intend to climb and it can be scary, in fact it can make many give up before they start. It is easier to not bother than it is to get writing.

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So what can you do? Well, this is one of the many reasons I love blogs. It is a content generator. To add new content to a website/blog you only need to write one post at a time and they can often be as little as 500 words.

Writing a 500 word post isn’t as frightening as writing a 12 page report or a 90 page eBook. Doing just a short 2 minute training video is easier than a making a series of tutorials. I think you know where I am going with this.

Here is the thing I want you to think about, having a blog is great for 3 reasons.

1) When you are starting to build a blog, adding new content is great for your search engine rankings. As the saying goes, ‘if you build it, they will come…’ Adding new fresh content will keep bringing back people who have found and liked your site. Someone who has enjoyed reading your posts will keep checking every now and again for new posts, if you keep adding they will keep coming. You are actively building a growing site for your business.

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2) After a month of regularly posting content, you will have without realizing it, written or filmed enough content to make a report/eBook or video series to give away as a freebie to start building a list!

At the very least you will have several documents of content ready to edit, and believe me, it is soooo much easier to edit content already written up in a Word document than it is trying to edit stuff that is only in your head! Not only have you started to build up your site but you have started to make your free list building report. And that is important to your business.

3) When you start to build up an email list you have to engage with them and build a relationship with them, again this will need content. As you are now in the habit of writing posts, you have things that you can refer to when writing your ‘follow up’ emails.

You can elaborate in more detail about a past topic, or you can simply send an email telling your list about a new post you have just added to the blog.

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So what I am really trying to say here is, you should be taking small daily steps (we Minions are small and have no choice but to do small steps!).

Trust me those small regular easy to do tasks that come with having a blog will build up into something you can use in a bigger and better way. Content is king, so get creating.

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Top 5 Types Of Articles That Can Go Viral.


Writing good content for your website blog is a must. Not only does it please Google and help with your ranking in the search results but it keeps the reader on your site and with luck, the reader will suggest it to their friends.

If the article is on an article directory like Ezinearticles.com then the reader may be one of many looking for content to put on their own site.

The more sites your article goes on the better. Article directories insist in their Terms & Conditions that the authors name and link must stay visible when the article is placed onto other sites.

Which is good for you, not only does it give you Google friendly backlinks but it can be seen by many more eyes. To get people wanting to share and use your articles they need to be captivating, here are 5 of the best types of articles that can go viral.

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1) List Posts

List posts are great posts to write, they are easy to compile and have a higher chance of going viral. When you are reading through the top blogs take a conscious look at how many posts are list posts. You will see that a great many of them are. For example…

The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers (Copyblogger) was retweeted 1200 times, received 200 comments and was shared 446 on Facebook.

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2) How To Posts

How to posts have a great chance of going viral as they are very informal and people love to have their problems sorted.

Many people searching for information will also start their searches with ‘how to…’ so a post starting with ‘how to…’ has a greater chance of appearing in the search results, resulting in you getting great organic search traffic.

Again a post from copyblogger ‘How to use Twitter to Grow Your Business’ was retweeted over 680 times, received 434 comments and was shared on Facebook over 375 times.

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3) Case Studies

Another type of post that goes viral is the case study, they are practical and informative which is what readers love. They love to see people’s ideas in action and take great interest in seeing you get the results they think you do.

A blog post from legendary Pat Flynn on his blog SmartPassiveIncome ‘The Backlinking Strategy that Works’ received over 1,452 comments.

A good case study is loved by readers, they love to see the truth, they love to see the process and the results.

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4) Controversial Posts

This one can go wrong if done wrong, and can be dangerous to your business if you just try to be controversial however if you genuinely disagree with some current news or trending topic you may find that your post will go viral.When writing your controversial post, it is imperative that you write it to get good quality traffic and not bad traffic that in truth has no interest in your site or products.

When trying to write a controversial post, it’s important to make sure you don’t write a post that can bring about negative traffic, but rather use your controversial post to try to get quality traffic.

To see a great example of a viral controversial post read ‘Twitter Lists – I’m Not Down’ by Chris Brogan. This received over 160 comments and was retweeted 326 times at time of me writing this.

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5) Top Posts

Writing top posts is a great source of traffic, a top post is where you rank the top 10, 20 or whatever you choose in a certain niche for example a dance music site might have the ‘Top 10 Trance Tunes of 2011’ people love to read about the top people and things in all walks of life. How popular is the yearly rich list?

A great example of a top post is '50 Most Influential People in Blogging 2010' from IncomeDiary with over 373 Facebook shares, 90 comments and over 240 retweets.

ConclusionNot every post will go viral but if you have planned your article properly, implemented certain strategies and made it as interesting as possibleWhen trying to write blog posts that go viral, you should also know that luck does play a role. But, if you implement the right strategies you will give your blog posts a much better chance of going viral and finding success.

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5 Top Tips For Creating Content


How many times have you met someone who wants to be an internet marketer or in their words ‘make loads of money online’ but never actually start? In my job I have met many, and many of them have paid huge amounts of top dollars to learn from the experts but still do nothing.

I believe that these people are not particularly lazy but have jumped so far ahead that they have overlooked the most important aspect of any online business and that is creating content. So much so that they fail to even understand how to do it or where to start.

They know you can make a lot of money online selling information products etc., they know about outsourcing but after paying out large sums of money for that information they usually have nothing left to get started with. We all know that you need content, So what can you do to get started when you have no money to invest?

I am going to give you my top 5 tips for creating content that you can sell or use to create traffic for your site if you are an internet marketing newbie.

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1. Writing a blog.

This one is really the top tip for me and one that is not often mentioned by many people. A blog is a great content creator. Why? Because it needs to have great content on it regularly for your readers to enjoy otherwise they will stop coming to your site.

Writing a blog post for instance every couple of days is great because it not only gets you and your mind trained in the art of writing but, this is the bit I love, after several weeks of writing you have a ton of re-usable and editable content that can be used to create free reports, slide shows or even scripts for Podcasts or videos.

It is far easier to work with and edit something written than anything that is just a thought in your head. Posts can be as little as 500 words; they do not need to be long. Over time several posts will add up to a sizeable chunk of workable content. Do yourself a favour, get a blog, and get writing now.

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2. Creating Slides.

People love slides and in truth they really are not that hard to make. Most computers these days usually come with a slide creating program like PowerPoint but if not there are free programs available. If you have a Google account you will find a great program in Google docs.

Remember Tip no 1? Well to create a quick and easy slide presentation go to your pre written blog posts and find one that you want to reuse then simply copy and paste it in chunks into a series of slides.

Changing fonts and colours can add an extra dimension, if you want to add bits or take out parts to make it a bit more unique then you can but essentially your work was kept to a minimum and you now have a professional slide show ready to send to the four corners of the web bringing you traffic back to your website.

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2. Creating Slides. (Continued)

If you want to make your slide presentation that bit more professional then you can spend time making a great background for your slides or you can buy some fantastic professional looking slides from places such as GraphicRiver.net for just a few dollars.

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3. Videos

This one scares people a lot. But again just like making slide presentations it can be simple enough. When starting out you may not be able to afford screen capture software like Camtasia but that is ok, there are several great free versions available to use. Jing and Screenr are two free software that will do the job nicely. They only allow you to record 5 minutes but that is more than enough to start with.

Screenr is part of the Twitter family and any videos that you make can be Tweeted to your followers as soon as you have finished recording giving you instant exposure. Now you can record a screen tutorial live but if you are not yet that advanced and not quite sure what to record then I have an idea, remember that Slide presentation you have just made? Yes exactly, now you are thinking like me.

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3. Videos. (Continued)

Record the slide presentation that you made in tip 2 and this time you read it or parts of it as you go along. Stopping to elaborate more on parts of it will give the video more of a unique feel. The video is then ready to be uploaded to video sharing sites like YouTube or embedded directly onto your blog.

You will need a good microphone or head set, I use a Logitech headset that can be found on Amazon, it is cheap and does the job perfectly.

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4. Podcasts

There are two ways to create a great podcast, the quick and easy way for instant exposure is to take the URL of your recently made video, paste it into the bar on listentoyoutube.com and hit ‘Go’.

This site will instantly rip the audio from your video and give you a downloadable mp3 ready to upload to Podcast site like Podbean or iTunes.

I prefer the more professional approach myself which, before you panic, does not need to cost the earth either.

You now have a good headset: all you require is some free recording software like Audacity (Available to download form the internet) and possibly a piece of royalty free music as an intro to your podcast. (This bit is optional)

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4. Podcasts. (Continued)

Take one or more of your pre written blog posts and read it into the microphone and record yourself as you read.

Tip here is not to just read but talk as if you were on the radio, so you want to make it sound more like a discussion but using your posts and the points within it as the backbone of your podcast.

Once done, upload the recording to your blog, iTunes and other podcast sites for traffic and exposure.

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5. Free Reports and Ebooks

I think now you are getting the idea here and I am sure you have figured out where I am going with this one. After several weeks or months of blogging you will have a nice collection of posts that you can reuse or edit into those all-important give away reports and eBooks that will help build your email list.

Again you can edit these posts so they do not look just like a collection of posts but a proper report.

You will have several posts covering the same topic and from different angles which will group together nicely. The important thing here is to remember that once written it is far easier to edit than if it was just an idea floating around your head.

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5. Free Reports and EBooks. (Continued)

For a giveaway report I do suggest spending some time editing and adding to the posts for your reports. Adding a few extra images to the report will make it look better and longer which in the eyes of the person who exchanged their email for it is good. Of course it has to be full of great useable content.

The other method is to group similar posts into a report or eBook and convert it into a PDF document to share on sites like Scribd and free-ebooks.net for the sole reason of traffic generation. People will read your books and if they like what they read they will share them on creating a possible viral effect. They do not need to be overly edited; you can simply copy and paste them all together to make a longer report.

Remember, when you wrote your blog posts you wrote them to be as high quality as possible so in reality you are giving lots of high quality posts away together. Readers will not be disappointed.

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So there you have it, 5 great ways to start creating content that can help your business grow and give you more exposure.

I have seen information products sell for a lot of money which were nothing more than a re-edited and re hashed compilation of reused stuff. If they can do it, so can you.

Maybe it is time to start that blog and create your very own content library. What do you think?

Blogging can be done anywhere in the world but usually you will spend most of your blogging time at home. So I have included here some important work from home tips.

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5 Important Work From Home Tips.


For many of us, the idea of working from home is really appealing, many office workers wish they worked at home, away from work colleagues they do not like, out of the stress and strains of deadlines or office politics, no longer under the eye of a supervisor or boss. The idea that they can be home in comfort, near the ‘kettle’ and having access to TV and music is very appealing but in reality, working from home can be hard.

So what is working from home really like and what should you do to make working from home a success?

Technology has fallen in price dramatically and the range of things that we can do from home is now so huge that many budding entrepreneurs have taken the plunge to work from home, many of them using the internet to make their money. The technology at hand and the vast openness of the world wide web does make it easy for us to do things not possible ten years ago, and reach far more people ever imagine but the story always stays the same.

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At the start of any new business, whether it is at home or not, online or off, the hours will be long, the work will be hard. You have to build up the business, the customers, the brand and the reputation. This doesn’t happen without some degree of hard work, commitment or a plan.

If you work from home while your partner or family are there it is very easy to be distracted, often playing with the kids or getting into conversations that just sap you of important time. You will need to be disciplined and set a time to work, what time you start and what time you finish.

Now no one is saying that you cannot be flexible now and again but if there is no time management in place, your time will soon be eaten up.

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It is very important that your family and partner (if you have one) are supportive and respect that you need time to get on. If you were at an office you wouldn’t be there to ‘help move boxes’ or ‘pop to the shops’ yet strangely for many, when they work from home, the fact that they are ‘at’ home results in their partners forgetting that they are supposed to be working.

Here are our 5 important work from home tips.

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1. You must have a separate room for work.

It sounds obvious but many do actually start their new business venture from the kitchen table and do not realise the benefits of having a dedicated separate works space. One with a door is even better where you can shut all the chaos and home life behind you.

Another great advantage of having a separate office space is that when you walk to it and into the room your mind is moved from home mode to work mode. It can create a separation of mind not found when working on the kitchen table with washing machines whirring away or pots on the stove.

Once inside your home office your family need to be aware that you are not to be disturbed.A converted garage, spare bedroom, attic or even well insulated garden shed can make great small home offices. Tim Lowe went on to build a multi-million dollar business from a small log cabin in the back of his garden.

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2. Set clear Boundaries- and stick to them

Having a plan for your working day makes the day run a lot smoother, If you have to take the kids to school at a certain time, write that into your schedule, having your day planned into blocks keeps your mind focused and more productive.

You can schedule in time where the phone goes onto answer phone so you can concentrate on writing that article or making that video. Set time for going through the emails or Social Networks if you use them.

Once you have decided on what time you are going to spend on what, it is vitally important that you stick to it! Badly managed time and attentions can seriously damage any chances you have of success. After all you want to make money from home, so why would you jeopardize your chances before you have even started?

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3. Be prepared for success.

It is vital that from the start you have a good business plan, this doesn’t mean full of figures and charts but more of a fore thought of what you will do or which way you will go if suddenly your business takes off.

You should expect success; a lot of people who start a home based business do it as a hobby or side line and don’t really expect it to be anything but that. When success hits and orders come flowing in they are under prepared and overwhelmed which can lead to long hours and a suffering family life.

It is all about the planning, having a plan detailing how you want the business to be, how you will deal with increased popularity, how flexible you will be in your approach should things take a turn for a slightly different direction and how you will deal with any problems will help you when these things do eventual come.

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3. Be prepared for success. (Continued)

The main advice here is to not panic. Pre think up a flexible business plan with contingencies will stop you from becoming overwhelmed should it all suddenly ‘get on top of you.’

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4. Take a step back from your product.

This depends on what sort of work from home business you are doing but if you are focusing on a product that is a passion of yours and very niched targeted it could be worth taking a step back and doing some research into whether the market is wanting what you are offering.

When you create something or love something it is very easy to get into thinking that it is the ‘best thing around’ and that everyone will ‘want one.’ But your love and passion for something can easily cloud your judgement. You do not want to be wasting valuable time creating or promoting something that isn’t wanted. You want to make money, not lose it.

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4. Take a step back from your product. (Continued)

Ask friends and people who are an important part of the niche or subject that you want to get involved in, see if there is a calling for it. You might love surfing and Tie Dye T-shirts, but many of the new younger surfers probably prefer designer branded shirts so your Tie Dye T-shirts venture might be doomed to fail as soon as you start.

Market and product research is important if you want to leave your job and start to make money working from home. It is often cited as the most import part of any new business venture.

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5. Outsource.

As I said earlier, a lot of home based business started from a hobby or passion of some kind and never expected to grow, but they did. They sold a product or service that catches the consumer’s interest and their business is thrown into rapid growth.

When a business suddenly booms and you have an influx of orders you will find that your time is suddenly swamped and that you are in fact not getting important jobs like promoting and marketing done. If you are selling a physical product you could be spending a lot of your time packaging and posting the item.

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5. Outsource. (Continued)

Outsourcing is very important, if you are busy and you do not out source then it could in fact cost you money. Most jobs can be outsourced, web design, emailing, writing web content, fulfilling orders one home based business woman outsourced the cooking and cleaning of the house to free her up more time to get vital company work done.

You might quickly find that the way to make real money is when you actually stop doing the work. You become a director more than a worker. Captaining a ship of capable people all doing separate jobs that keep the whole boat running smoothly.

Final word, to succeed as a work from home business you must learn that you cannot do it all. Trying to do it all, without a separation of business and home life, will lead to one cataclysmic outcome; failure and not only do you not want that, there is no need for it to happen.

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The Best 15 Wordpress Plugins The Newbie Blogger Needs


Wordpress is an awesome website building platform that is relatively easy to learn, within days even the most timid internet user can have a professional looking blog and website up and running.

With Wordpress there is no need for HTML or Javascript coding skills. Everything is created with an easy to use ‘plug n play’ style system. I guess that is why they call the add-ons ‘plugins’

Once you have Wordpress installed onto your server a default theme will be visible, this is usually the ‘Twenty Eleven’ theme, if you do not like this theme all you need to do is change it.

We will talk about how to change themes in another post. For now, the default theme is good enough to start your newbie blog.

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Wordpress functionality may seem a bit basic at first and it is, but even the basic theme can look great if you use it well, once you start to add the plugins then the magic can really start.

Plugins can turn your blog from just a one or two video posts to a complete video style website or it can become a photo gallery. You can add podcasts, sales pages, and ecommerce stores. The possibilities are endless. Anyway, I better not get you either too excited or frazzle your brain with ‘too much to learn syndrome’.

I will take it easy and start small. I am going to give you a list of plugins that I think every new blog owner should know about and install before you go into the seriously good plugins. Some are essential and some are, well you guessed it, not. These are in no particular order

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1. Akismet

Great plugin that stops spamming comments and deletes automatically saving you the time and annoyance of having to go through the comments left by people pushing porn or Viagra!

Akismet is usually pre-loaded into Wordpress and should be found in the plugin section.

This will need a key for it to be enabled and you will need to register with Akismet to get a key.

It used to be available from Wordpress.org but unfortunately they have stopped doing that. [Essential]

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2. Contact Form 7

Great plugin this, adds a contact form (if you hadn’t already guessed) to your site.

You simply add in your email address that you want emails sent to, and any other info you require then copy and paste the simple code it gives you into a page.

Give the page a name like hmmm ‘Contact Me’ hit publish and you are done. [Essential]

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3. Ezine Articles

This is a cool plugin, when you write a blog post, before you put links or pictures into it you can hit a couple of buttons and send your fresh article straight to Ezine articles for distribution.

Now article marketing used to be big but since Google have taken a bit of a dislike to article sites I am not sure how powerful article marketing is however, it can still be good for you if other websites and newsletters to take your article with a link to your site and use it.

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4. Google Privacy Policy

This is a must if you want to monetize your site with Google Adsens.

They will not add any adverts to a site that doesn’t comply with their terms and a site must have a Privacy Policy.

This sorts it all out, similar to Contact Form 7, you copy a bit of code and post it into a page and hit publish. Job done. [Essential]

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5. Google XML Sitemaps

The best way to describe this is by using the plugin description itself ‘This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog’.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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6. CKEditor for WordPress

This is great for copying and pasting from Word etc., keeping the text and font formatting. Better than the standard default text editor in Wordpress.

It gives you more choice and control when writing your blog posts or importing pictures.

This is not an essential plugin really, more a preference.

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7. cbnet Ping Optimizer

This stops the over excessive ‘pinging’ of your website to search engines. Wordpress by default will ‘ping’ your blog posts to help them get index by the search engines.

If you are like me, you will create blog posts by adding bits, publishing it, taking a look, editing it, updating it etc. etc. This can go on time after time after time.

Every time you hit ‘Update’ Wordpress will send a new ‘ping’. You may think this is good, it is not. Too much ‘pinging’ can in fact go against you. Google may think you are spamming and trying to get index really fast for naughty reasons.

So you could in fact be punished for excessive pinging. Installing this plugin is a must. Essential]

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8. Share and Follow

This is a social share plugging that adds all those lovely Social Media and bookmarking buttons at the top/bottom of posts allowing people who like your posts to share and bookmark them (obviously)

There is also a ‘Follow Us’ bar where you can add your Twitter and Facebook links so your site visitors can easily join up and follow you on the popular Social Media networks.

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9. Yoast SEO

Search Engine optimization is a must for websites to help them get higher rankings in the search engines.

This great plugin checks your posts before you publish them to see if they are written as best as they can be with your chosen keyword for them to have a better ranking in places like Google.

Alternately you can use All in One SEO Pack plugin.

I prefer the Yoast personally. [Essential]

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10. Digg Digg

Another Social Media plugin that allows your site visitors to ReTweet or Share your posts.

Digg Digg has a great funky floating bar that runs up the side of your posts. I run this alongside share and follow.

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11. Statpress Reloaded

This is great little plugin for showing you how many visitors you have had to your site, where they came from, what page they looked at, what search terms they used etc.

Once you have activated it, it is up and running unlike Google Analyticator plugin which requires you to set up a Google Analytics account and get an ID password before you can use the plugin.

Statpress Reloaded is straightforward and fast working. [Essential]

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12. Wptouch

Awesome plugin that automatically turns your site into a smart phone friendly version.

Most smart phones these days can view normal websites well and the new version of Wordpress seems to adapt automatically when viewed in phones, however saying that.

WP Touch makes your site look a lot better and arranges your posts into an easier to read list. Install, give it a try, if you do not like it deactivate it and delete. Not a problem.

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13. Related Posts Thumbnails

This cool plugin allows related posts to be seen on the side bar and at the bottom of your posts with the featured image, giving your reader something else to see, possibly capture their attention and have them clicking through to your other posts keeping them where you want them, on your site!

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14. WP Photo Album

Another excellent plugin that gives a greater visual dimension to your blog.

This plugin allows you to upload loads of photos, create albums and galleries.

You copy some code into a page, give it a title and hit publish to create picture galleries within your site.

It has several widgets that can be placed into the sidebar creating a picture of the day/hour, a slide show of pictures and a top ten pictures section giving your site an incredible visual experience.

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15. FeedWordPress

This is for the lazy people who don’t like creating their own content. Plugin this baby and it will pull content via RSS from the websites that you choose and place them onto your blog as posts.

As long as they have an RSS feed of course. Great for news type of blogs. Use this alongside your own content then you have a winning combination.

Regular posting of content is good in the eyes of search engines, they don’t normally like duplicate content but if you use it wisely it can do you good.

The only drawback is that you must choose the websites that you pull your feed from wisely otherwise your site could get populated with rubbish.

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So there you have it 15 essential and non-essential Wordpress plugins for the newbie blogger.

Plugins can be deactivated at any time so try them out and if you don’t like them then stop using them.

It will not affect your site. I advise you to keep the essential ones in as they are important.

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5 great plugins to help you make money from

your blog.

5 great plugins to help you make money from your blog.

Do you have a blog? Is your blog just a personal blog where you can jabber on about your favourite things? Or maybe a specific hobby that enjoy?

There are many reasons for people having a blog, some are for fun and some are purely designed to generate money.

Whatever your blog is about, if you have a good following of regular readers and have not monetized it in any way, you might as well make some money from it.

Let’s be honest here, we enjoy blogging and we enjoy having money. So it makes sense to combine the two. Doesn’t it?

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There are many ways to monetize a blog, the usual way is from promoting affiliate products or selling advertising space.

This is usually done by copying and pasting code into parts of your site. Which isn’t hard, but it can be a bit of a ball ache.

If you are not sure about HTML coding and where to put it then you may shy away from doing it entirely.

However I am here to save the day, well I say me, these few plugins are. (I cannot really take the credit lol)

As ever, your trusted Minion has done some research and found some great plugins that you can install which will take a lot of the hard work out of it all. And make you some money.

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1) WordPress-Amazon-Associate

This is a great plugin if you have an Amazon Associate account. (Amazon affiliate) Once this plugin has been installed you will need to set it up with your Amazon affiliate access keys which you will find in your Amazon affiliate profile. Adding affiliate links to your posts is really very simple.

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There is an Amazon search box found in the New Post section. You highlight the text you want to link to, enter the search term that is relevant to your post in the side widget, select a category and hit search.

A list of products will be brought up from the search and you chose which one you want to use then hit the ‘Insert Link’ button and it will put the link into your post.

There are also several types of Amazon sidebar widgets, found in the widget are of your Wordpress site, you just drag the widget over to where you want it, open them up and edit them.

You can set up a product carousel, favourites, a product cloud, MP3 clips and there is also an Amazon search bar. When a visitor on your site clicks through to Amazon and buys through your affiliate ID you earn a commission.

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2) Ad Rotator

This plugin will require some copy and paste but it works well if you sell advertising space on your site. Whoever buys the space will send you the code or it will be accessible via a dash board if you use a company to sell your space like buysellads.com.

This plugin gives you a widget very similar to the default text widget. You can drag and drop these widgets into the side bars or footers and they work for any ad size.

You simply paste the ad code into the widget and in between different ad codes you paste in <!–more–> to separate the code. Every time you refresh your page a different advert is shown.

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You can have more than one Ad Rotator block in your side bars so you can have static adverts as well as rotating ones. There isn’t a CPM system with this plugin so you can charge whatever you like.

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3) MediaPass

This is a great system, really great for content based sites and educational sites. MediaPass plugin allows you to hide certain content behind a ‘pay to view’ box.

For instance you may create a site where 4 tutorial videos on Wordpress are free to see but the remaining 12 tutorials that you have made can be locked off to people unless they pay to see them.

Once the plugin is installed, you chose which content you want hiding behind the paid wall, click one of 3 boxes on the posts tool bar and chose which subscription model you want. Big magazine and papers use this system a lot.

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You need to set up a MediaPass account before you can use the plugin but once it’s set up they do all the work. They take the card payments and then send you a cheque every month. They do take out a hefty 35% of the price but imagine what they save you. No faffing with card problems, you don’t spend time taking the money, setting up merchant accounts, posting and packaging DVDs. You just have to concentrate on the blogging side of your business.

You could try charging more than the price you want to ask for to cover the 35% and if your customers are happy to pay that then you are on to a winner.

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4) Skimlinks Affiliate Marketing Tool

This plugin is great if you want to go down the affiliate marketing route. This plugin will turn any product links and references into affiliate links.

There are over 17,000 merchants in the Skimlinks database.

The big advantage of this plugin is that it frees you up to concentrate on what you do best which is blogging.

You will need a Skimlinks account and then they take care of business, they do all the tracking codes and maintaining of accounts.

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Skimlinks take 25% commissions from the merchants. You get a percentage of that but consider the amount you would have made if you had to source the affiliate products and set up the links yourself, it would have been a lot less and very time consuming.

With Skimlinks you can concentrate on creating more and better blog posts to bring more visitors and re visits to your blog.

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5) Kontera Plugin for WordPress

Again this is another great affiliate plug in. Very handy for those with blogs that do not use side bars.

This plugin adds contextual ads within the text of a page. Like amazon and Skimlinks you will need an account first and you will be given a publisher ID which you enter inside the plugin setup.

All you do then is choose the colour for the links and add in the generated code into the pages that you want the ads to appear.

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Ads don’t appear straight away, it can take up to 24 hours for them to appear in your pages so be patient. Kontera isn’t just for Wordpress, if you are also a fan of Blogger or Drupal then you can also use this plugin to monetize those types of sites as well.

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For more blogging, affiliate marketing tips, Internet Marketing ideas, traffic generation, Twitter & Facebook marketing or just to pop and say hello please visit

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Blogging the beginners guide to blogging for profit

Technology

Transcript of Blogging the beginners guide to blogging for profit