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This is how people are making money on the Internet right now. Today they are going to make money at home surfing the web in their underwear while you run another day in the rat race. Well, screw that. You can make money from home too. Here’s how to make cash off a blog where there are literally thousands of business opportunities.

The broad steps you want to take are:

1. Find a market
2. Find suppliers
3. Publish content

Finding A Market

Finding a market is easier than you think. No, I’m not going to start crapping on with ultra vague advice like, “just think about what people around you might want“, or “just do what you enjoy“. Why is this poor advice? Consider two people out fishing on their boats. Fisherman A believes he has a genuine intuition for finding fish, Fisherman B has the latest Humminbird fish finder that can display anything larger than 2 inches between him and the ocean floor. While Fisherman A is finding locations that he thinks is housing fish, Fisherman B is finding locations that he knows is housing fish. No points for guessing which Fisherman is going to starve. The trick is to find hard numbers to backup your “gut”. There’s four ways to do this that I know of, and two of them will cost you more money than you probably want to spend.

The two expensive options:

• Get a market research company to do research for you
• Buy some pre-made market research from places like Forrester Research

This is old school. The sort of thing you’ll pay thousands for. Those services are probably reasonable if you’re already running a successful business, but for those of us living off canned food and packet noodles, it’s not really an option right? So how can low budgets find a business opportunity?

Here’s two inexpensive options to find a market to help you make money at home with your blog:

• Overture
• Wordze

You can use the Overture Keyword Selector Tool to get a good idea of what people are searching for. Let’s say you’re interested in blogging about Beagles. You need to work out what people want to know about Beagles so you can work out what to write. Let’s see what Overture can tell us…

The left column is the number of searches performed in Yahoo! in November 2006 for “beagle”. Notice the specific queries:

• puppy
• picture
• for sale
• breeders

…and so on. Those Beagle topics are what you should write about if you’re blogging about Beagles. Too easy hey?

There’s a few problems with the Overture method. The first is that it’s only Yahoo! data so it’s biased towards Yahoo! search users. You will find that different demographics have preferences for different search engines. The second problem is that the Overture tool is pretty slow, and doesn’t come with any extra features.

I use, and recommend Wordze instead of Overture’s tool. Wordze takes data from Internet service providers and processes the data to find what people are searching for so the data is not Yahoo! biased. It’s also much faster and has a lot of extra features that are very useful like the ability to store keyword lists, and to automatically expand your keyword list to related terms. These features are important because not everyone uses the same keyword to find the same information. For example, using Wordze I see that if I’m interested in writing about Beagles I should probably consider the keywords “hunting dogs”, “hound”, “snoopy”, and others. Wordze is a subscription service, but there is also a day trial.

Finding Suppliers

Stop! Don’t start writing yet. Before you can commit to creating a new blog you need to work out if you can make money with your efforts.

There are many ways to make money from your blog. These are some broad categories:

• Ads
• Affiliation
• Links

Ads

No doubt you have seen many ads on web pages. I will keep this brief as you probably already know lots about adverts on blogs. The short story is that ads is that they don’t pay very well. Ads should be your very last line of revenue. There are exceptions to my advice, and some pay per click keywords pay extremely well such as insurance and forex related. Once you build significant traffic volume, ads become more attractive but you’ll probably need to find advertisers privately. Starting out though, you are going to have to look to alternative revenue paths.

Affiliation

Affiliation is where you promote products on behalf of suppliers. An example would be where you review a book you just read, and link to the book on Amazon. Affiliates usually get paid a percentage, or flat rate for each item sold. Affiliation directories exist to handle payments and connect publishers with suppliers. There are many affiliation directories out there, but some are more professional than others. Here’s a couple of the better ones:

• Commission Junction
• ClickBank
• Chitika

Chitika is a pretty nifty service and they pay well. They make selling goods a bit easier with their dynamic and rich display called an eMiniMall. Here’s an example of an eMiniMall selling seasonal specials. You will notice that it is much more interactive than typical promotions.

Links

You can make money on the internet from selling links from your page to other pages on the web. There’s two reasons people want links to their site from your site. The first is to improve their natural search ranking because by adding a link to their page from a relevant site, search engines “trust” them more. The second is to advertise to your existing readership. You may not believe the amount some web sites will pay for links. I encourage you to take a look at these sites.

• Text Link Ads
• Text Link Brokers

$100 Free! Text Link Ads will give you $100 in credit to advertise your own site on other sites!

Publish Content

Most people think that actually writing the content is where you earn money. Hopefully I’ve demonstrated that a lot goes in to a site before you ever start writing. By now you now know what you’re going to write about, and how you are going to make money from your site and your efforts. You’re now ready to write some content.

Whatever you write, it must add value. This is an absolutely unbreakable rule. You’re not going to get far splashing random junk in front of people.

Second to writing good content, is to connect the article, the readers motivations, and the revenue streams as closely as possible. For example, if you write about a bunch of great Beagle image directories you know of, you may want to promote Beagle posters, Beagle plush toys, and whatever else you think might be relevant to someone interested in Beagle picture directories.

Know your audience. Who would be interested in Beagles? Male/Female? Teen, Twenties, older? Also interested in cats, horses? It usually helps to think of people you know in this case. You can almost always identify your market with someone you know. It’s worth noting that you will probably have a few different personalities in mind for your site - but you can only market to one type at a time! It’s also worth realizing that teens are unlikely to have access to credit cards, etc. The more you know about your audience the better you can write for them.

Be mindful of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means naming your article titles with search engine friendly titles. Say you were writing about the pocket Beagle breed, your first reaction may be to title your article “The Pocket Beagle”. However, according to our earlier research using Overture you can see that the search term “Miniature Beagle” has almost double the searches “Pocket Beagle” had in November 2006. In this case you would probably be better of using the title of “The Miniature Beagle”. In doing this, search engines will index your article for the more popular term. Of course, how you want to be indexed depends on search levels and competition for that keyword.

Conclusion

I hope this article will help turn your blog in to a money making machine. After following all these steps you should have a business plan for your home based business. There is lots more I have to say about making money online which you will be able to read in my coming ebook. I go in to much more detail and cover more than just blogs. Subscribe to my mailing list below to receive an email when my ebook is published!

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