Entropy

 

If your a blogger or an aspiring blogger I’m sure you’re interested in making either the big bucks with your blog or simply a little something extra on the side. If so, then this is the guide for you.

In this guide, I will explain various different ways of getting passive income through your blog - by this I mean earning money off the users and pages you have without actively doing anything aside from blogging.

Sections

1. Apply For Programs - apply for the right advertising programs, in the right way.
2. Optimize your blog - using plugins, smarter techniques and more you will increase the search engine friendliness, RSS reach and general effectiveness of your blog as an advertising platform.
3. Correct Use - use advertising in the most effective way possible. Correct placement, sizing and more will help you to succeed.
4. Get Known and Get Statistics - get more hits on your blog, increasing your worth, and report on your changes.
5. Final Words

Section 1 - Apply For Programs

In this guide, we’ll be using Google Adsense (easily replaced with YPN if you like) and TLA. AdSense will earn you PPC (pay per click) money and TextLinkAds will help you to earn money passively from your high PR (Page Rank) pages. You’ll understand these concepts as we go on, but in order to complete everything required below you’ll need to apply for AdSense and for TextLinkAds.

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 Section 2 - Optimize Your Blog

Optimizing your blog for money making is really a four step process. The first is to ensure it is search engine friendly - these will always be your biggest source of fresh readers, and people who come to your blog from a search engine are often looking for an answer that an advert can supply.

The second step is optimizing your blog for advertising programs such as Google’s AdSense. This will utilize plugins and correct placement to ensure you get the best CTR (click through rate) and most views you can.

The third step is optimizing your RSS feed. This is terribly important, as the more popular your become the more it will be used and you will need to profit from that, and get statistics from it.

The fourth and final step is optimizing for the big link sharing sites, such as Digg. If you can get your articles shared on sites like these you will be in the money end of story.

Part 1: SEO

Previously I have posted a guide on SEO for your blog, below I will be using some of the plugins and speaking of the ideas mentioned in the post. It is essential you understand the principles of SEO –

Either you know about SEO, or you ought to. Search Engine Optimization (not marketing) has two real paths: white hat and black hat. “Black hat” SEO are practices which deceive Search Engines (such as Google) into rating your site higher, to get either a higher PR (Page Rank) or more hits from its users.

White Hat SEO has the same goal (longer term), but using allowed techniques, essentially, designing your site in a way that search engines will appreciate and utilize it and its content in the best possible way.

It is imperative you follow the guidelines set out in my SEO post. Before reading on, make sure you have gone through it and implemented the suggestions (especially the plugins) — Guide: Search Engine Optimization for Blogs

Part 2: Advertising

For this we will use several plugins which you must install on your WordPress blog. Below is a list of them, and there links –

• Adsense-Delux
• adsenseBeautifier

Install both plugins, and begin to set them up. Adsense-Delux is a script which will insert adsense ads into your blog posts, and adsenseBeautifier will automatically add images to the left of them - this is a great way of increasing your click through rate.

We’re going to create two AdSense ads to start, a 468×60 banner and a

1. Go to Adsense Setup
2. Then Adsense For Content
3. Create an Ad Unit for Text Ads Only
4. Choose 468×60 Banner, and match the colors to your blogs background and links - they must not stand out! This is for a simple reason, we want to insert the ads in the middle of your content, and want it to look natural.
5. Add them to a Channel, it should describe the ad.
6. Continue until you receive the code.

Once you have received the code from google, copy it and paste it into adsenseBeautifier. This can be found under Options in your WordPress admin control panel.

1. Paste the code into the AdSense Code block, and choose Banner as the type.
2. Generate Code and copy the output you are given.
3. Now go to Adsense Delux, in the same menu, and paste the code into the AdSense Code section under New Adsense Block.
4. Click Add Adsense Block

You now have a default Adsense block created. We will use this in posts later to display your 486×60 banner. Repeat the above steps for a 336×228 banner, in adsenseBeautifier it is called “largerectangle”. This time call it “Square” instead of leaving the name blank as it will not be your default one.

You should now have two lines, like so –

The perfect place to include these ads is inside your content, in your blog posts - not on your sidebar, and not in the header or the footer. This is important!

UPDATE! — I have been advised by LiewCF that images next to your ads (adsenseBeautifier) are no longer allowed in AdSense so please do not use these!

Now for Text Link Ads. This is extremely simple - login to their site (with the login you created above) and add your blog to their system. Once they approve it you will be able to download a plugin for your WordPress blog!

This will automatically allow Text Link Ads on the blog - allow up to 10, allow them in your RSS feed and just run them site wide for now. We will talk more about how this works later on - but follow the guide and get the plugin running!

Part 3: Feed Control

You will need another plugin for this section, the Feed Burner Feed Replacement plugin. You will also need a FeedBurner account, the links for both are below.

• feedBurner Feed Replacement
• FeedBurner (Free Account)

If your blog has a standard setup, you can use FeedBurner to burn your feed very easily. Simply add a new feed and set its URL to your blog url, forward slash feed. For example, the pure feed url here is http://www.raven.za.net/feed

You will then be given a FeedBurner url, ours is http://feeds.feedburner.com/raven/entropy

Go to the FeedBurner tab in options (from your Feed Replacement plugin) and enter your URL into the step 2 input box. You will now be using FeedBurner to supply your feed to people instead of directly. This will track statistics on your Feed for you like the image below –

Part 4: Link Sharing Sites

If you don’t understand what I mean when I say the “Digg Effect” then you really need this. Sites like Digg.com are plenty nowadays, and its all about users voting for your content as a popular article, image or video. If you get voted up enough, you’ll appear on front pages and receive whats known as the Digg Effect; where your entire webserver can croak from the users you receive.

You’ll need only one plugin to help with this, Share This.

•  ShareThis

After installing ShareThis go to the Admin CP and enabled it. You will now have a ShareThis icon on the bottom of your blog posts that allows people to easily submit it to Digg-type sites, aswell as del.icio.us and its array of clones.

Section 3 - Correct Use

Part 1 - AdSense

The biggest mistake people make with programs like AdSense is placement. Placement, placement, placement - that’s all click based ads are about. It is a very well known fact that in-content ads get clicked a huge amount more than sidebar, header and footer ads - don’t even bother putting AdSense ads in those places as you are only allowed 3 per page.

The perfect placement can be seen in the image below (and this is from Google themselves) –

You can read more about this on Google’s FAQ entry about the topic. Now for the best ways to use these in your blog posts.

You should have already set up two ad blocks, your default (468×60) one and your Square one. Now its time to set about using them in your posts, and only in your posts.

When you write posts you must remember to include Google Adsense Ads in them. Also go through your old posts and add the code to them. In order to insert the ad, use the “Code” tab of your text editor to type the following in where you want the ad to appear: <!–adsense–>

Optionally, where you want to insert the block called “Square”, you can use this code:  <!–adsense#Square–>

If you aren’t starting a blog, I advise you go back through every post and add them in in clever places. Don’t just put them at the bottom, or at the top, but inside your organic content.

If you have too many blog entries to go back through them all, do your most popular ones first!

Part 2 - Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads are a great way to make hundreds of dollars a month without trying. If you get enough PageRank and spend enough time the figure will soon go into thousands of dollars - for this guide I’ll be simply getting you started.

The purpose of Text Link Ads is something built around SEO. Whenever you link to someone, it counts as a “vote” for that persons site. The more people who vote for a site the more likely it is to come up first in search engine rankings for specific topics, and there is where the money lies.

People will pay you for links to there site, all controlled through the TLA system - all you need to do is include their code!

Section 4 - Get Known and Get Stats

Making money from your blog is a simple thing really. You now have positioned ads on your blog in the most effective way, so the only thing you need to do is get visitors.

And important part of getting more visitors is tracking the visitors you do have, and learning how your changes to the site effect your visitors etc. I advise two plugins for monitoring this –

• WassUp
• FireStats

Download and install both plugins and set them up with the defaults. WassUp will display in your Admin CP Bar, and FireStats under your Dashboard bar. In a few days, you will have statistics which you can draw information from, and monitor to learn even more.

Part 1 - WassUp

WassUp is great for tracking your pageviews, your pages per visit and the paths your visitors take. The graph below will be your primary source of information –

Here you can see how many visits  (unique users) and pageviews (entries those users read. Whats also important is the Pages/Visit - this helps you to see if your blog is well laid out and holds a lasting appeal. If most users (as above) only view 1 page then you are not laying out enough interesting content for the users to browse through.

Consider putting popular posts in the side bar, having category links, related topics etc.

Part 2 - FireStats

FireStats is great for quickly seeing what your top posts are, and most importantly who your top referrers and what your top search strings are. Over time it will build a list of the top 10 posts you have, and the top 10 incoming search strings.

As you can see above, my blog gets a lot of search referrals for Photoshop Layers; because I have made a few posts about it in the past. Its safe to say that writing a full post on using them, getting free ones etc would almost definately attract more users for me!

Its important to use tools like the above two stats engines to know what to do. There is no point writing more posts about topics no one ever bothers to read on your blog - write what the users want!

Part 3 - Attracting Users

Now to get more users. The biggest change towards this will have been you following Step 1 - The SEO guide. Please believe me when I say thats CRITICAL. Also important is the Link Sharing Sites section. But now we have to assume you have the search engine and digg front down, and its time to start getting users from elsewhere.

A great way to get users is through your RSS feed. Ensure that you are publishing feed pings to pingomatic.com - this will ping all the popular sites for you. To check this follow these steps –

1. Go to your Admin CP, then to Options
2. Go into Writing Options
3. Check the bottom of the page, titled Update Services
4. Make sure it says http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the input box, and save the form.

Another great way is to exchange links with other fellow bloggers. Make friends in the blogging community and swap links with them - they will almost always be happy to exchange as it will benefit you both. A good way to do this is commenting on blogs you read - don’t spam comment - read the posts and offer an opinion with your name and blog url filled in.

The final and biggest step here is to initiate your own Digg Frenzies. Write original content that will do well on digg (just check what others are writing for ideas). Once you’ve posted it, use Share This to digg the article and let the feeding frenzy begin - if you have written something they like, your blog will receive thousands of visitors..

Step 5 - Final Words

Remember the following steps as you continue with your blog –

1. SEO, SEO, SEO. Remember you are dealing with search engines and write for them! This is not a newspaper!
2. Content, Content, Content. The more content you have, the more you’ll be on the search engines and the more RSS users you’ll get. Post original, new content daily.
3. Placement, Placement, Placement. Remember to place AdSense ads in clever ways, don’t just slap it on there if you want to succeed.
4. Stats, Stats, Stats. Monitor your statistics, and make sure you are doing the right thing. Use them to decide how and on what to post.
5. Digg, Digg, Digg. Use sites like digg and del.icio.us to get your blog and your posts known.