Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
You’ve got your blog online. You’re posting articles to it regularly. You’ve signed up for Adsense and some affiliate programs. Now What? This is where the real fun begins! Now you’ve got some decisions to make.
Are you going to do this the inexpensive way and do most or all of the work yourself, or are you going to invest a little money into your online business and get it up and running faster?
The answers to these questions really depends on you, your budget, and your tolerance for risk vs. reward. Wordpress has everything you need and you can get most of it for little to no cost. The downside to this approach is the extra time it takes, not to mention the lost income due to trial and error. I’m going to give you many of these tips at no cost. Unfortunately, the information I’ll give you for nothing will require a lot of work on your part, and a lot of time to accomplish.
The first thing you need to do is make your blog look a little better, and more importantly – more authoritative. This doesn’t require fancy graphics only a professional artist could love, but it does require a little work. There are plenty of free Wordpress themes and plugins available. If you can find one of these that fits your blog well, great! But remember, your primary purpose here is not just a hobby – IT’S A BUSINESS! To that end, you might consider investing a small amount in your business to take it to that next level of professionalism.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to professionalize your blog site, and make it more authoritative looking, is to use one of the many commercial themes that are designed specifically for this purpose. The one I like is WP Remix by Premium Themes. WP Remix is a professional looking blogging theme that is one of the easiest to use I’ve tried. Most of its functionality is drag and drop. It works great and is ready for you to start adding your affiliate links and Adsense ads into right out of the box. I recommend you give it a look and see if it isn’t worth the small investment to save you hours of manual setup and configuration.
If you are the do-it-yourself type, or you’re just on a really tight budget, you can do all of this yourself with free to near-free resources. In the next few articles I’ll show you how to add your Google Adsense ads and affiliate links into your Wordpress theme.
In the meantime, here are a couple of videos that will show you how you can upload a new theme to your site using Filezilla, a free FTP program. You can download Filezilla at http://www.filezilla-project.org.
View the demonstration on installing a theme in Wordpress here.
View the Filezilla upload demonstration here.
Getting Ready For Online Income
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that we’ve started our blog, we need to get working on the main reason we’ve been doing all this in the first place – making money online. This subject is huge. There are as many ways to make money on the Internet as there are Internet sites it seems. Before we can make any money however, we must have something to sell to our blog’s visitors. That’s not quite as difficult as it may seem.
We’re going to focus our online money making efforts in only 2 areas for now. This will simplify our task for now and give us a great starting point on our way to online financial independence. We’re going to focus on Pay-Per-Click advertising and Affiliate Sales.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a marketing model where you place ads on your site that are related to your site’s content. If one of your visitors clicks on that ad, you make a small commission for that click. That can be as little as a few cents, or as much as several dollars, depending on the PPC ad. One of the best known places to get PPC ads for your site is Google AdSense. Google Adsense is easy to sign up for and will automatically scan your blog and supply content-appropriate ads for it.
Signing up for Google Adsense is easy. Just go to https://www.google.com/adsense and click the sign up now button. Go through the help and tutorials to learn how to generate the ad code and then just plug the ad code into your blog pages for instant PPC income. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than I just made it sound, but you get the idea. In the next several articles we’ll be exploring different ways to get this done easily and effectively. All you really need to do now is get your Google Adsense account started.
Affiliate sales is another great way to get started making money online. Internet marketing is growing every day as more of the world’s population comes online and discovers the convenience of online shopping. Affiliate sales is the single most profitable method I use in my online business. I make the majority of my income in Affiliate marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is similar to PPC advertising. You put ads and links on your blog that are related to your content. When your visitors click those links, they are taken to the advertisers site to purchase a product. If they purchase, you make a commission. Commission sales are as old as sales themselves. They’ve been around since the beginning of marketing. They’re an easy way to make money, especially if you want to live the RV lifestyle as I do. You don’t carry inventory or worry about shipping products. You simply refer people to the advertiser and they do the rest.
To get started with affiliate sales you need to sign up to become an affiliate for products that are related to your blog web site. That’s easier than it seems. Even Wal-Mart has an affiliate program! Go to web sites that sell products related to your subject and look for links for affiliates. Search their sites for these links, or even email their marketing headquarters and ask.
Another thing you can do is join several of the affiliate clearing house sites. Sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale and ClickBank all have lists of hundreds of sites with affiliate links. Join these sites and then just sign up for the programs that match your blog’s content.
Again, affiliate sales can seem more complicated that I’ve made them seem here, but they’re really not once you get the hang of it. There are plenty of ways to make it easier and we’ll be discussing them in later articles. All you need to worry about for now is to get signed up to be an affiliate for companies related to your blog’s subject. Take some time to go through the affiliate sites’ help and tutorials. In later articles I’ll show you plenty of ways to get these ads into your blog and start making money online.
Getting Started With Blogging - Part 3
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that you’ve got a short list of your interests, it’s time to get a web site. There are thousands of places on the Internet to do this, many better than others. I highly recommend GoDaddy.com. They’re the biggest and most reliable while still being reasonably priced. Every web site I own that I don’t host on my own servers is hosted GoDaddy through their membership subsidiary BlueRazor.com. Bluerazor is for people like me who have hundreds of sites.
Click here to go to GoDaddy (it will open in a new browser window) and start the process by looking for a good web site domain name. You web site domain name can be anything that describes your subject and it should be fairly easy to remember. For example, if your hobby is star gazing with telescopes you might try something like TheRVStarGazer.com. (which was available when this was written by the way) Any good name will do.
You can research these at GoDaddy’s web site by typing in your choice in the upper right search box where it says “Start Domain Search” and click the GO! button. If your choice is already taken, GoDaddy will even make some alternative suggestions. If you want, just use your name, like GeorgesBlog.com. It doesn’t really have to reflect the subject. One advantage to using your name is you can always write about more than 1 subject if you choose.
Once you’ve picked your name, simply go ahead and purchase it from GoDaddy along with their Economy hosting plan. At the time I write this, their Economy plan is as low as $4.25/month paid in advance, and it is all you need for a blogging site.
Click here to watch a short video on how to set up your hosting account on GoDaddy.com.
The next step is to install Wordpress on your new site. Wordpress is a free blog software package and is by far the most popular in use on the Internet today. It’s easy to use and GoDaddy makes it easy to install. Go to your new hosting account and install Wordpress.
Click here to watch a short video on how to set up Wordpress on your new hosting account.
The final step is to do a little setup work on Wordpress. Wordpress is actually ready to go right out of the box, but it’s pretty generic. You’ll want to personalize it a little, maybe change the theme for a different look, and remove some of the initially installed content. This is quick and easy. For lots of information on Wordpress you can visit their site at Wordpress.org. there’s even a “For Dummies” book for Wordpress that you can buy on Amazon by clicking here.
Click here to watch a short video on how to personalize Wordpress and start blogging.
That’s it. Congratulations! You are now an Internet blogger. It’s time now to start blogging, and more importantly, start making some money with your blog and the Internet. The next few articles will give you some tips and tricks to start getting the cash flowing in your new blog.
How I Make a Living From My RV Working Over The Internet
For some time now I’ve been answering what seems to be the same email over and over. It goes basically like this:
“Phil, how’s it going with CoolRVToyz? I read on the site you’re a full-time RV’er and I have a question if you don’t mind. I’m wanting to go full time as well, but can’t really afford to retire yet. Can you share a few of your secrets about how you make your living over the Internet? You don’t have to get specific, but any information you’d be willing to share would be gratefully received. Thanks.”
Truth is, I’ve received so many of this kind of email from my camping and RV friends that I actually started copying and pasting my answer from the previous one and changing it around a little just to keep from typing so much.
To that end, I decided to open yet another web site - WorkFromYourRV.com. In reality I own over 100 Internet domains that I use for various reasons in my Internet business; so what’s one more. Most of them deal with camping, campgrounds, RV parks or GPS related information. None of them dealt with the subject of internet marketing. I wanted to avoid including this type of subject matter on CoolRVToyz because, well, it just wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of that site. CoolRVToyz is all about cool stuff for your RV lifestyle; in particular the Ultimate RV Parks & Campgrounds Directory - our flagship product. I didn’t want to start cluttering up the camping theme of that site with Internet Marketing “junk”.
Being a full-time RV’er presents specific challenges when you’re trying to run any kind of a Home-Based business. You obviously can’t carry much in the way of inventory in the back of your RV. Inbound shipping is problematic at best, especially if you move a lot like I do. Communications are also problematic since you don’t have many of the normal business tools like land-line phones, fax machines, etc. Those challenges can be overcome however, and it is completely possible to run a business from your RV while still maintaining the type of camping lifestyle we all love and enjoy. That’s why I opened this web site.
The purpose of WorkFromYourRV.com is to pass along what I use to make a living over the Internet while working from my RV. But, before I give away any “secrets”, I must provide a bit of a disclaimer of sorts.
Please read this next paragraph carefully:
In my Internet business, just like any other business, I work hard. If you came to this site looking for a way to get rich quick, you’re on the wrong site. Yes, there are a few opportunities out there that can make you a great deal of money if you catch them at the right time and do everything just right. However, the vast majority of the schemes over the internet are outright scams! Even the good ones don’t always work for everybody. I have failed at some of the things I’ve tried, even though I’m still convinced to this day they would make a profit if I had just worked on them a little harder, or differently. Some of the things I’ve tried made a little money and some made a lot. But, just because one particular idea made a lot of money for me, doesn’t necessarily mean it will for you. Each of us is different and will approach each challenge differently. I have a reputation to uphold, which is one of the primary reasons I’ve avoided this subject in “public” for as long as I have. I will do my best to only bring you ideas that have a reasonable chance of making a profit on your investment, but I can’t, and won’t offer any guaranties. In the end, much of your success will be based on your willingness to pull a few weeds in your garden, and never lose site of the big picture. Working over the Internet is a bit like trading stocks. You have to look at the entire portfolio and not get too hung up on how much you made on one stock versus how much you lost on another. As long as the overall portfolio continues to make you money, you spend your time refining it.
The Internet is a quickly changing landscape. What works today will not necessarily work tomorrow. My efforts on this site will be to keep you up-to-date with what I am finding out there and provide you with pre-screened ideas that I am either using myself or think are good ones to try. I can’t try them all, even the ones I think are pretty cool. After all, it’s just me and my RV. I’ll always let you know however which ones I’m using myself and which ones I just think are worthy of consideration. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you new information as I run across it.
Happy RV’ing …
Phil King
