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INTRODUCTION

Once you’ve got your blog in place and have added plenty of good-quality, search-engine optimized content, you may be wondering when the money will start rolling in.
If only it were that easy!

The thing about making money on your blog is that blogging is the vehicle for your actual business, not the business itself. Let’s say you own a flower shop. You have the physical location, you decorate it all cute, you install a cash register and take out ads in the local paper. You even stand outside the door, handing out tiny blossoms and busi-ness cards to people who walk by. That’s all well and good, but until you start actually providing value to your market, you’re not really in business.

The same is true for your blog. Until you actually provide a product or service that people can pay money for, you’re not in business.

This short report will give a brief overview of the top ten ways you can make money from your blog. Not every method may be right for you, right now – and that’s okay. Read through all ten, make notes, and pick one or two to start with. Then you can add on additional methods until you’re well on your way to making money from your very own online business – your blog.

Possibly the oldest business model of all-time is also the most familiar: Selling your own physical products. It’s a concept we’re all familiar with, and we see it play out from the corner lemonade stand to Mrs. Fields Cookies. I have something you want, so I sell it to you. Simple and straightforward.

WHEN SELLING ONLINE, however, there are a few questions to answer:

What am I going to sell?
How am I going to accept payment?
How will I let people know about my products?
How will I handle fulfillment and customer service?
LET’S look at each of those questions in turn.

What am I going to sell? Choose a product that is of interest to the majority of your readers. For instance, if you have a Hawaiian vacation blog, your readers won’t necessarily come to you for the brand-new flea collar you invented. A few might be interested, but keeping synergy between your blog theme and your product is essential. Any disconnect will lead to confusion on the part of your blog readers, and confusion leads to distrust. Sell those Hawaiian vacation dreamers your own ukelele music CD, or your audio guide to the Big Island, or posters you’ve made from photographs you took on your last excursion to Maui.

How am I going to accept payment? Ten years ago, would-be online entrepreneurs would have had to dream up some complicated work-around for customers to get them cash. Now, we’ve got a number of options. The easiest is PayPal, which will allow your customers to pay using their credit card, debit card, or PayPal balance. Go to www.paypal.com and click on “Business” for more information. PayPal can help you create “buy now” buttons for your site, issue invoices, and more, and it is easily integrated into your blog.

If you outgrow PayPal, there are a number of shopping cart services you can check out, including 1shoppingcart.com, Americart.-com, vshoppingcart.com, and many more. These services are more expensive than PayPal, but will add functionality you may eventually desire, such as affiliate management.

How will I let people know about my products? Marketing your wares is an essential part of your business plan. No matter how good your mousetrap, ukelele CD, or homemade cookies are, if no one knows about them, no one can buy them. You can spread the word through forums, search engine optimization (SEO), Google AdWords, Facebook advertisements, and a number of other methods. The key is to know beforehand how you’re going to tell people about your products.

How will I handle fulfillment and customer service? Unless you enjoy making numerous trips to the post office and answering calls 24/7, as you grow you will need to have a scaleable plan for shipping out orders and handling customer questions and complaints. You can outsource fulfillment to a local business or individual (try Craigslist.com), or through a service like Amazon’s amazonservices.com. Likewise, you can outsource customer service to a virtual assistant, or to a company that specializes in customer service.

Selling your own goods online can be a profitable and satisfying way to make your mark on the online world – and to make money! Many businesses of all sizes incorporate a physical sales component to their offerings.

Affiliate marketing is a great complement to any other business model. Basically, you recommend products and services to your readers, and every time one of them makes a purchase through your referral link (a piece of code inserted in your blog), you receive a commission. Commissions can range from a few percent of the purchase price, to upwards of 50%. Physical products usually have a lower commission rate, while digital downloads have higher commissions.

The upside of affiliate marketing is that it’s simple. If you’re estab-lished as an expert in your industry, you likely already tell people what products and services you use in the course of your business. You’ll continue to do the same… only now you’ll get paid for it!

BEST AFFILIATE PRODUCTS REVEALED!

FINDING THE BEST AFFILIATE PRODUCTS TO PROMOTE

The Internet has become a virtual world. There is nothing that you can do in the real world that you cannot do in the virtual world including buying and selling products. This has been a known fact for some time, and when you promote prod-ucts on the net it is called Internet marketing.

There are a number of websites that sell products and a few large organizations that dominate the market. Companies like Amazon and eBay are some of the most commonly known names although there are a few others as well.

While Amazon and eBay sell products, they do not actively adver-tise for them. Considering their sales volume and growth – Amazon grew 16% last year when compared to 2.4% for retail sales, it is possible that they feel that they do not need to advertise. Yet everyone knows the value of advertising.

This gave birth to what is called the affiliate websites. When you are selling a product, and someone comes to you and tells you that they are willing to promote your product, they are vendors. When they do this online, they are called affiliates.

Affiliate marketing works because it is a win-win situation for both parties. The affiliate takes it upon themselves to promote his website. He toils hard and puts in a lot of effort to increase his ranking on Google. The result is that any product that he is promoting for you will also get the increased exposure, and you have not spent one dime, or one minute of your time to do this.

The affiliate is paid a commission that can range anywhere from 4% to 30% on profits depending on the product that they are market-ing. He is paid only if any person who he directs to your site makes a purchase. You may miss your profitability per product here, but your overall profits will increase because of the increase in sales volume.

You keep track of who comes to you through whom by giving each of your affiliates a different cookie. This cookie has a definite expiration date and is installed in the system of any person who visits the affiliate site.

When said person comes to you, the cookie in his system will tell you who has sent him allowing you to keep track of both the number of people he directs to your site and the number of sales made. Most of this is automated and it is a system that works for everyone.

If instead of being the person who sells the product you are the affiliate, the process is the same, but in reverse. You contact the seller, get his cookie, and you are set. All you need to do is to put in the legwork to increase your web traffic because it is the basis of all conversions and ultimately the amount of money you make.

Because you go to such lengths, investing your hard-earned money and time into promoting a product, you need to make sure that the product that you choose is the right one. There are millions of products being sold online, but not all of them will give you what you are looking for. Then there are the scam artists who are out to cheat you.

This being the case you need to be careful how you choose the product that you want to market. There are a few ways to do this and we will discuss them in detail below.

WHERE DO YOU STAND?

This is the first thing that you have to think of. Either you will be creating a completely new website or blog to market a said product, or you will be integrating it into your already existing site. There are pros and cons to both of these.

PROMOTING products on an already existing site

If you already have a site or a blog up and running, you are lucky in that you would already have a certain ranking with Google. You can focus your attention on your one site and over time you can get quite a high ranking with all search engines. The advantage of this model is that you already have a certain amount of traffic that you are getting on a daily or weekly basis, which means that the chance of you getting a sale quickly is higher.

In addition, if you have more than one product in your site, even if you put in activity promoting one product, all the other products will reap the benefit. You just have to concentrate on improving the ranking of your one site so that you increase traffic. Once you do this, if you have made a good choice on the products and if you have designed your web page well, the sales will come.

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What Is Search Engine Optimization And How Can You Implement It?

THE CLASSIC DEFINITION

Search Engine Optimization, known with the acronym SEO, is the process of improving traffic and exposure to a website via search engines to get the website ranked highly in the resulting search results pages. It helps to build an online presence that is bigger and better than just slapping a static website up on the Internet and hoping that some people drop by the site. It is a strategy whereby how you create the site, what you do to promote it, and how you analyze the results of those actions that help the website owner to develop bigger and better online exposure.

GOOGLE STARTED IT ALL

Google is the main search engine that started it all. It was through their AdWords campaigns that Internet marketers became more savvy about using the power of the advertising model to help shoot certain pages to the top of the search results pages. They noticed that the same keywords that online businesses were buying because their research showed many people were searching for them could be used to attract those same people to other sites. Soon, it became a standard SEO strategy to include keywords in content that was used to get pages ranked highly in Google's search engine results pages (SERPs).

IT'S DEVELOPED OVER THE YEARS TO INCLUDE MORE

Since then, a variety of services have popped up to help the online business owner compete against others for maximum website exposure. Some of these techniques deal with how the search engine classifies a page topic and what types of elements in a Web page create or obstruct high page ranking.

It wouldn't be fair to neglect mentioning that some SEO tricks are called “black hat” because they tend to exploit weaknesses in the search engine model and can lead to a site using “black hat” techniques to be sandboxed (dropped to the bottom of the SERPs). Marketers trying to game the system may get away with it for a while, but Google has been known to severely punish those that are caught, making it unwise to implement black hat techniques.

Other techniques, known as “white hat” or organic strategies don't carry the risk of being sandboxed. They use the guidelines that carry a sense of integrity and authenticity while gaining wide exposure through providing value and understanding SEO. These are the techniques that we are going to discuss in this report. To caution further, always avoid techniques like keyword stuffing, spamming people by sending unsolicited emails, and generating false websites with commercial links only and no content (link farms). These activities are considered black hat techniques.

HOW KEYWORD USAGE HAS S CHANGED

In the past, keywords were used in meta description tags to give a search engine the hint about what the page talked about. Black hat marketers began to exploit that vulnerability by adding highly searched keywords into that area and basically making that criteria useless to Google. Thus, Google decided to downgrade that criterion, and as a result, keywords are evaluated as a percentage of the actual content on the site for relevancy, not for just showing up in coding. If you know how the search engines rate keywords, you can still game the system a bit, but not without actually creating content that has some value. That's the entire point. Here are a few things to know about keywords when you are writing content for SEO.

STUFFING IS ONLY FOR TURKEYS

Stuffing tastes great at Thanksgiving time, but stuff too many keywords into your content, and you'll get a rapid case of indigestion when Google sandboxes your site. The moral is clear: Stuffing is only for turkeys. This might have been a great black hat technique in the past, but today, Google's analytics are so powerful that they not only look for relevant keywords on your pages, but they also determine how often and where you've placed them. On average, if you put more than 2% of your content as a single keyword, it will count against you, not for you. That means that if your page is a 500-word blog post, at most, any single keyword should not show up more than 10 times. Between 5 and 10 times is average and expected; anything else is considered as stuffing.

USE YOUR KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

You can put the keywords anywhere on your page, but they count more towards relevancy in the search engine analytics when they are placed in headers near the top of the article and are bolded. These actions indicate to the analyzer that the topic is important to the writer and will carry more weight in the search engine.
Matching keywords to powerful keywords that you've already researched as having a high searchability and low competition is also an easy way to get a higher ranking. It's not just the amount of times you use the keywords, but what keywords you use that determine your SEO ranking. If you use a highly competitive keyword, it doesn't matter if you follow all of the guidelines, as other people have mined that attention long ago. You'll automatically fall near the bottom of the SERPs. Pay attention to how to find good keywords in order to attain higher rankings in the search engines.

HOW TO SELECT YOUR KEYWORDS

When you first start out, you might want to hire a company to develop a list of keywords for your SEO activities. It's going to take some time for you to understand what makes a good keyword selection, and during that time, you don't want to put up content that has no keywords. As you use those, you can start to look at some of the tools and techniques to develop your own keyword lists that you can give to your staff writers to include in their online content.

THE GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL

This tool is available online at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. It is created to help online marketers using the AdWords program to create effective marketing campaigns. By entering a keyword or phrase, the Google Keyword tool will give actual metrics that have been measured by Google on various characteristics of that and other similar keywords. For finding rich keywords that can help you gain maximum exposure, it is a first stop for any budding Internet marketer.

After entering the keyword or phrase you are researching, the tool pulls up the advertiser competition and search volume as the default listing. You can modify this listing by pulling down the list box at the top that says, ”Choose columns to display.” From that list, you can expand the elements that are shown for each keyword and derivatives of that keyword to include CPC (cost-per-click), ad position, volume trends, and the time when the highest volume occurred. All of this is important information for figuring out if the market for that keyword has been saturated and the competition is too stiff to really help you with search engine placement. Take a look at this tool and see if you can find high CPC keywords with a high search volume and low advertiser competition. These are the keywords that will get you noticed quickly.

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BEST BLOG WIDGETS AND PLUGINS

MOST EFFECTIVE AND USEFUL BLOG WIDGETS AND PLUGINS

These days blogs seam to make the internet go round. In fact, the numbers are staggering- 50 million and growing every day. Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life. Whether you are keeping your clients abreast of the current real estate market or you are blogging about your pet, there are all kinds of effective and useful blog widgets and plugins that can make your blog more exciting and appealing.

Widgets are a simple, effective, and handy way to add a little flare and excitement to your blog. Since the number of widgets and plugins available is virtually endless make sure you don’t go overboard.

Popular Blog Sites

Before we start looking at the various widgets and plugins you can use on your blog, let’s look at some of the most popular blog hosts. Everyone knows about WordPress, the number one used blog site, but there are plenty of other options you should be aware of so let’s get started.

Danga Software Powered

Danga Interactic was the brainchild of Brad Fitzpatrick’s company that created Live Journal and the backend to drive that soft-ware. There have been a number of contributors to this software since its early inception. The following are three of the main sites that are Danga powered.

1. InsaneJournal.com

InsaneJournal offers both free and paid accounts, with additional enhancements. It is a simple online diary that is very customizable, built on open source software. InsaneJournal lets you keep in touch with friends and family. Don’t let the fact that it’s free fool you. This is an excellent tool and the community is very tight-knit and accepting of everyone young or old.

2. JournalFen.com

JounralFen is directed towards “fandoms” such as various TV shows or movies like Harry Potter. It is designed for those over 18 years of age and is considered a journaling service for fans of televi-sion, movie, and music, as well as other media entertainment forms.

3. LiveJournal.com

Live Journal is one of the most well known and well used blog hosts offering its users multiple account types including paid and ad supported. This vibrant virtual global community is a social media platform where passions can be shared. There are hundreds of communities. You can keep a journal, diary, or blog.

Themed Blog Sites

Best Blog Widgets and Plugins

Blogabond.com – This is a blog site dedicated to travel blogs and it includes map integration. Here you’ll discover tons of travel journals and photo blogs from individual travelers of the world. There is also maps, research, and plenty of resources if you are planning some backpacking.

BlogCheese.com – A video blogging site that’s packed with all kinds of great blogs. Whether it’s a blog on new electronics, the internet, or playing golf you’re sure to find one of interest here. It’s also a great space to start your own blog and get a little practice in.

BusyThumbs.com – This UK based blog site is designed for camera phone images and text messages. It offers free moblogs, which is a mobile phone web log or online journal that you send via a text message.

Registration is free. There are hundreds of blogs to choose from, and it ranks well in the search engines. You can upload from your phone to your blog in minutes, and is an excellent choice if you want to be able to Trippert.com – Create and share your blogs that are related to travel. This is a strong community with a strong following and a great place to start your travel blog no matter where you live or travel.

Ufem.com – This is a blog site for women. There are multiple themes and plugins to choose from, and if your blog topic focuses around women this is a great place to start. It’s a well visited site thanks to the great content and the additional resources relating to topics of interest to women.

WordCountJournal.com – This is a new blogging format. On day one you’ll write one word, on the second day two words, on the third day three words, and on it goes. By the end of the year, you will have written more than 65,000 words.

WORDPRESS POWERED

WordPress is one of the more popular blog publishing companies with a focus on usability, web standards, and aesthetics. There are a number of sites that are powered by WordPress.

Blogetery.com – Is a little-known WordPress platform used by more than 70000 blogs. There are more than 140 free customizable themes, brilliant plugins, free sub-domains, anti-spam, and plenty more features. There’s an opportunity to make money of your blog.

Edublogs.org – WordPress powered blogs for educators is a resource that continues to grow and attract new visitors. Whether you are a teacher or a student you can quickly customize and design your own blog to include photos, podcasts, and videos. It’s secure, safe, and easy to use.

WordPress.com – This site offers you free, easy to customize blogs. Everything including, backups, spam blockers, security, upgrades, and setup is taken care for you. However, you have to use one of their themes and you cannot use plugins. There are plenty of widgets you can add, and tags are easy to add. You are not allowed to sell anything unless you are an artist or author.

WordPress.org - This site requires more technical skills. It also has to be installed onto a server and upgraded by you anytime there are upgrades. You can sell things, post paid ads, and include a shopping cart. The software is free but hosting might cost you a few dollars a month.

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INTRODUCTION

From the time we are born, many will be educated to be a version of themselves that please others. Whether it comes from the way you were raised or how you were taught in school, we often learn to put a mask on and be an actor in our life.

Unfortunately, that behavior will not lead you to be happy and live a fulfilling life. You can discover the best version of yourself and transform your life so that you are no longer an actor in your life. Choose to live the life that was made for you.

In this book, you will have to commit to exploring yourself, try to be aware of your behaviors, and be honest with yourself. This book is for you, and no one other than yourself can know who you are.

With commitment, vulnerability, and curiosity, you will be able to be the best version of yourself and put away the mask that you’ve to wear for much too long. Are you ready to claim your power?

Then let’s start to explore your current life and see how much you are currently your true self!

“The power you have is to be the best version of yourself you can be so that you can create a better world.”

CHAPTER 1: BEING YOURSELF

The best version of yourself is being true to yourself, but what does this mean? It is sometimes easier to explain something by identifying what it isn’t. That said, here’s a list of what is not being the best version of yourself:

- Being true to yourself is not about pleasing others;
- Being true to yourself is not about hurting others;
- Being true to yourself is not about doing things you dislike;
- Being true to yourself is not about forcing yourself to do something;
- Being true to yourself is not about being hard on yourself;
- Being true to yourself is not about judging others and comparing yourself;
- Being true to yourself is not about being a victim of your surroundings;
- Being true to yourself is not about acting in a way that will attract more fans on social media.

Being true to yourself means that you behave and communicate in complete integrity with your belief, values, and, most of all, with what feels right in your heart. When there is an alignment with your inner self (emotions, states, and desires) and outer self (behaviors, communication, and relationships), you are the best version of yourself.

Assessing Yourself

Have you ever felt like your behavior and the way that you held yourself varied depending on who is around you and where you are?

We tend to play a different role when we are with individuals that we want to please or want to make sure that they like us. For example, you might behave in a completely different way if you are at work or with people you just met and want to be friends with them. We tend to be ourselves when we are at home or with childhood friends. That is when we let our guards down and become more vulnerable and less worried about how others might perceive us.

The following questions will help you identify which area of your life you are the best version of yourself. The answer is yes or no, pick the answer the closest to how you feel (mostly yes or mostly no).