Ways to Make Money While You Sleep - Episode 1 - The Successful Blogger

by Graeme Benstead

You may be lucky enough to have a job which you love and which supports you in your chosen lifestyle.

You may, like the majority of the population, be working in an unrewarding job with an income which only just sees you through every month.

Either way, one thing is true for all of us no matter how high our income - earning money whether we are working or not, even whilst we are asleep at night, is the best position to be in when it comes to earning an income.

This type of income is called residual income. The difference with residual income is that once you have finished a successful piece of work it will carry on earning money for you, with no more effort on your part, for an indefinite amount of time. Further more it all stacks up, the more work you release the more residual income you will build.

This is a far cry from the traditional model of employment which involves completing a piece of work and being paid just once for the hours that you have put in. No more money, just more work.

So, the good news is that there are many great ways to build up a residual income. The internet has opened up a huge number of opportunities for individuals to share their knowledge and to showcase their creativity. With these come further opportunities to gain residual income from the work that you love.

In this series I will be discussing a number of ways to earn residual income.

In this first instalment of 10 ways to make money while you sleep I will talk about making money by setting up a useful blog site.

Creating a successful blog site

There are an awful lot of blogs out there on the web and of course relatively few of them are making any money.

However there are some great blogs which have allowed their owners to quit their day jobs to work on their writing with a secure residual income.

For some inspiration here are some of the more successful blogs of the moment:

Although the majority of us won't become blog superstars overnight I believe that everybody has enough talent and interest in at least one topic to create a blog which a number of people will use and find useful.

From there it is only a small step to making money!

"So what are the steps for creating a successful blog?", I hear you say. Well let me tell you...

Decide on what you would like to write about

First things first and I believe the most important thing here is to choose to write about something you really love.

Its important that you don't choose something just because it sounds like there might be a lot of money in it, If your not interested in your topic your work will be uninspired and both you and your readers will lose interest very quickly.

So make sure you have a have boundless interest in your topic, even if it is a very specialised and won't appeal to everyone.

In fact the more niche the better, there are always going to be other people with the same interests as you and they will probably be searching for the content you will be providing. With niche content you'll have less competition from other sites and most probably a more loyal fan base.

Create your site

Believe it or not this is the easy part of starting up your successful blog! There are a number of free online software packages which you can use to create a blog page. The one you take really depends on your level of technical knowledge.

If you have relatively little technical knowledge you might be better off signing up with a blog website which requires no installation such as Blogger www.blogger.com. Owned by Google Blogger is probably one of the easiest tools to use to start a blog with no technical experience.

To create a blog on blogger all you need to do is visit the site, sign up and start writing... very easy!

For those of us with a little more technical know-how it can be very handy to keep a bit more control over our blog by installing some blogging software on our own servers. There are some great packages available.

Wordpress www.wordpress.org is a very popular piece of blogging software. Easily installed on your web server wordpress allows for a huge amount of customisation of both your site and your blog. This can come in handy when you are trying to optimise the position of your advertising to increase revenue.

Of course if you want to take it further and you know a bit of code you might even build your own blog site from scratch or use some CMS software such as Drupal or Joomla which allow for some great community features and unlimited control.

Which ever way you choose to set up your blog the most important aspect is that you can easily control the content you put on the page. Once you have chosen which blogging software is most suited to you take a little time to learn how to use it.

Get writing

And this is the fun part!

There are lots of great resources on-line to help you to improve your creativity and writing techniques but I maintain that the most important thing is to write about something that you are interested in. If you find what you have written interesting it is a fair bet to say that other people will as well!

The best way to ensure that your blog is successful is to make sure that each of your posts provides a solution. By that I mean that every user who reads your post should have come away with something useful, preferably something that they can act on to achieve something valuable.

Finally try to tie your posts in with topics that your target audience are searching for. The chances are that more people will be searching longer and harder for content focusing on current and relevant topics.

Here are some resources I have found useful for both good blog writing and writing in general

Monetising

Now that you have some relevant, well written, useful content on your site its time to start making some money for your efforts!

The easiest way to monetise your blog is to introduce relevant advertising on your site. A lot of people are wary of cheapening their site with adverts but most users won't mind a couple of adverts if they are getting something valuable for free... after all these adverts are supporting your article writing... its not too much to ask...

There are a number different types of advert that you can use on your site these days and the majority are easy to source and to implement.

Google Adsense

Currently the most popular source of advertising on blogs is Google adsense (shown below)

Every time somebody clicks on one of these links I get a share of the money that Google makes from distributing these adverts. Its only a small share but with a lot of users it can start to add up! A lot of people make a reasonable amount of money from adsense alone and its very easy to use.

The clever thing about adsense is that it decides which adverts to display based on the content it finds on your page. This saves you lots of time finding relevant adverts for your site.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a similar advertising model where a merchant, somebody who wants to drive traffic to their site, will pay an affiliate a small amount every time somebody clicks on their advert on the affiliates site.

There are a number of affiliate schemes available to join. Some are based around just one merchant such as Amazon and some allow you to choose which merchants you advertise from a long list.

The benefit of an affiliate campaign is that you can hand pick the adverts you want on your site. If you know your user base well you may well be able to use adverts that correspond better to their interests than Googles automatic efforts.

Make sure that your advertising is relevant to your pages content and doesn't get in the way of the user getting at your content. In the long run a loyal user base is more important than a few extra clicks on your advertising.

Like anything the secret to successful advertising is to keep an eye on your performance and play around with different adverts and positioning to find the most effective configuration for your site.

Here are just a few affiliate campaign sites to get you started:

It's worth noting that it can take a couple of days for a Google adsense campaign to be authorised so make sure you sign up before you need to use it.

Marketing

Now that everything is in place its time to go and get famous! Well... let's at least get your seen by some people for the time being!

There are a number of ways to market your site to increasing its visibility to people who will appreciate your work.

Here's a quick guide to the options available to you when marketing your site:

Search Engine Optimisation

Ah, the old classic!

Search Engine Optimisation involves working to improve a websites rankings in the search engines and can be boiled down to two main aspects. On-page optimisation involves optimising your site content so that the search engines will know what your page is about. Off-page optimisation involves increasing the number of relevant sites linking to your own so that search engines know that your site is well received and, in some ways, voted as relevant by the on-line community.

SEO is a big topic and there is only so much that I can pack in to this guide so here are the basics of on-page optimisation.

Page Title

Your page title is the most important part of your page for the search engines. If possible make sure that your title is wholly relevant to the pages content. Include phrases that people may search for when trying to find articles with your topic. If you are writing about Surfing Techniques you might like your title to read along the lines of:

Learn how to surf – 10 Surfing techniques you need to become a pro

This title includes both a searchable phrase "Learn how to surf" and the specific post title.

Page Content

The search engines will also look at your pages copy. Try to use those phrases that you expect people to search for in your main blog copy.

Remember that search engines see phrases nearer the top of your copy, in bold or in a heading as more relevant than copy at the bottom of your article.

Page Images

Make sure that you add relevant alternative text to each of the images on your site. This will both improve site accessibility and tell the search engines what the image is about.

Make sure that the alternative text gives a full description of the image and any message it conveys.

Further SEO

This really is only the tip of the iceberg! There is a lot to learn about SEO and the more you know the easier it will be to integrate some SEO techniques in to your blog writing.

Always bear in mind that you are writing for humans first and search engines latter, if your content isnt accessible to your readers a high search engine ranking wont do you much good

There are hundreds of great tutorials and guides out there if you would like to learn more, here are just a few of them:

There are also many techniques for off-page optimisation but, as luck would have it, the majority of the following marketing techniques increase your inbound link count anyway

Article Submission & User generated content sites

These are my personal favourites! User generated content sites are community based tools which allow blog and article writers like us to submit our content to be rated by other users.

If your submitted article is of a high quality and happens to spark the imagination of a number of users they will vote for you which will further improve the visibility of your content. With the right article at the right time these sites can drive huge amounts of traffic to your site.

There are many sites that you can submit to, some of the more popular of these sites include:

Forums

Forums, or message boards, allow users to post their own content, points of view or ideas for discussion.

Forums are a great way for users to share and discuss topics. Official contributors can create specific topics to lead the forums and moderators can make sure that any problem users are dealt with.

If you discover any forums focused on your specific topic is is always worth contributing and if possible pointing people to your article.

Social Bookmarking

Creating a Social Bookmark is similar to adding a site to your favourites list on your website browser. However, instead of being stuck on your computer your new bookmark can be seen by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us allow users to bookmark their favourite sites and share them with the public.

When a user creates a bookmark they ascribe a keyword or a 'tag' to the site so that they can categorise their bookmarks to be easily found later on.

When a number of people bookmark the same page with the same 'tag' it becomes more visible within the bookmarking sites for that word effectively creating a social search engine where users can search for a certain tag and find the most popular sites as chosen by other users.

If you have useful content which a number of people might like to save for later on it is worth encouraging them to bookmark you.

Some Popular Social Bookmarking Sites:

Persevere

And that's about that!

As I'm sure you can already tell if you have read this far, this isn't a get rich quick scheme! It's going to take lots of hard work and effort on your part and its not all going to happen over night.

However, if you persevere not only will you build an additional residual income, you will become an expert in your field and I don't think there are many more rewarding than being renowned for your knowledge of the things you love.

So... theres blogging, a nice way to make some money whilst you sleep if you put in a bit of effort ! Next in the 10 Ways to Make Money While You Sleep series we will be looking at making money from your photography, Music and Video.

See you then.