How Students can Earn Extra Money Blogging

By Bob Bentz

 

Students Who Need Money: Try Blogging

 

Students need money and there’s never been a better way to get it than by blogging.  Besides, starting a successful

blog is going to teach you business skills far more important than slinging burgers.

 

 

A blogger improves his or her writing skills and learns internet marketing and search engine optimization.  Besides becoming a published author, the blogger also learns marketing research and how to run a successful small business.

 

Getting Started with Blogs

 

The great thing about a blog is how easy it is to get started with one.  There are many easy tools available that can help you begin, even if you aren’t majoring in engineering.  Look over all of the choices, but WordPress is one you will definitely want to consider.  Blogger, Google’s blog product is another one, but I don’t think it’s as good as WordPress.  WordPress is easy to learn and provides many options for customization.

 

You are going to need to invest a small amount of cash upfront.  Although most blogging software is free, you need to choose a domain to host your blog.  The easiest, and cheapest one to work with, is GoDaddy.  Plus, you’ll get to enjoy the GoDaddy girl commercials more during the Super Bowl when you tell your friends that you are one of their customers.  Purchasing a URL will cost you less than $10 per year.

 

The second thing you will need is a hosting company.  GoDaddy can provide you with this as well if you want to keep it simpler, but there are probably better options.  Blue Host, for example, has an easy-to-use hosting interface and will allow you to host up to 50 URL’s on it.  Blue Host will cost you a little over $100 per year, but in a minute, I’ll tell you how to get it for even cheaper.

 

Why is this important? Later in the article, I’ll talk about search engine optimization.  You need to obtain rankings in Google and Yahoo to get found.  If you don’t host the blog yourself and have your own URL, all you will be doing is generating inbound links for WordPress!  They already have enough inbound links (x million according to Yahoo); get the links for yourself.

 

Content is King and Queen

 

It seems silly, but the most important aspect of blogging is blogging about something that you are interested in and have a passion for.  That may be college cheerleaders, college fantasy football, reading Shakespeare, text messages, lusting after Rihanna, playing online bingo, or even drinking beer.  If you aren’t writing about something you are interested in, you simply won’t do it for very long.

 

When it comes to blogs, you need to get found.  And, new and unique content will get you found by the search engines.  It’s important that you update every day.  The more often that you update your blog, the more often that the Google and Yahoo search engine spiders will come back to visit your blog.

 

It’s best to update your blog every day.  If you can’t update every day, try partnering with another student to help you.  You want to train your visitors to come back and come back often. 

 

Be controversial and opinionated.  It works for talk radio and it will work for your blog.  You won’t get mentioned in mainstream media if you are like everybody else.  Writing something controversial will also get your readers commenting on your posts and you want your readers involved.

 

If you’re not sure what to write about, check out Google Trends.  Google Trends will give you the latest top searches that are the minds of its users.  Getting listed for the hot topic of the day in Google News will bring visitors to your site.

 

When you are totally out of ideas, try finding an article about your topic on an article marketing site like Articles Base or eZine Articles.  Don’t rely on these, as you need original content to keep people interested, but they are fine for filling in the gaps when you don’t have time to write like during Finals Week or during your fraternity pledge week.

 

Getting Your Site Found

 

The hardest thing to do with a blog is get your blog found amongst the din of blogs in the world.  There are a lot of ways to get this done.

 

The easiest way is to trade links with other blogs in your category.  It’s interesting that bloggers seem to be the only businesses willing to help out competitors in their own category.  Trading links in WordPress’s BlogRoll will get you on the home page of competing blogs.  Not only will this get you click-through traffic, but it will also help you get important inbound links.

 

Read your competing blogs in your niche and when you read an interesting story on another blog, send a link to that post.  After it’s done, send an email to the owner of the competing blog and tell him or her that you’ve posted the link and would appreciate a link in return.

 

When it comes to ranking in Google and Yahoo, the most important single element, besides having good unique content of course, is having inbound links, also known as backlinks.  Links should be from quality related sites as much as possible, although links from all sites can’t really hurt you either.

 

It’s easy to check the amount of backlinks that you have.  The best way to do it is through Yahoo rather than Google, because Yahoo seems to count all links regardless of their value; Google, on the other hand, won’t count all of the links, but only the most important ones.  To find out your quantity of links, go to Yahoo and type in: link:http://www.yoursitename.com.  It’s important to check out your links once a month to see that they are growing.

 

One of the easiest ways to get links is to list your site in directories.  Directories are usually not high quality links, but they will help get your site found by the search engines if you submit to enough of them.  The bad part of link directories is that they are tedious to submit to and most of them won’t do you a bit of good.  If you can afford it, use Submit Edge or a similar site that will submit your site to link directories for free.  Your time is better spent writing great content for your site.

 

Another way to get links is to make comments on other sites and include your URL whenever possible.  Like BlogRoll links, comments are valuable for click throughs, although their linking value for search engine optimization is probably not very valuable anymore.

 

Most of what you’ve read in this section involves search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.  It’s important that you read as much as possible about SEO and internet marketing and there are many great resources on the internet that can help you learn more about how to get your site on the first page of Google for some keywords.

 

Making Money: The Good Part

 

You can easily make enough money from your blog to pay for your living expenses while at college.  By living expenses, I mean beer and pizza, of course, plus an occasional cheap date with that cute girl you stare at in your economics class.

 

The easiest way to make money from your blog is to write articles for other sites.  Sign up for services like Blogsvertise.  Blogsvertise will pay you for writing articles that promote other sites.  The fee is usually about $10 per article.  If your site has a page rank (page rank is Google’s relative value of a site) of at least 3, you will get more opportunities to write articles for Blogsvertise.

 

Another way to make money from your site is to sign up to allow for advertising on your site.  You don’t have to know any html programming to place advertising on your blog.  Simply cut and paste the html provided by the site into your “widgets” on the blog and you’ll be off and running on making money.

 

I recommend using sites that will pay you on a CPM basis.  CPM means cost per thousand if you have never taken a Latin class.  Some of the best places to get CPM advertising is on sites such as AdBrite, Adify, Traffic Marketplace, and Find It Quick.  With CPM, you’ll be guaranteed to make money for every thousand visitors to your site so it makes the most sense for a college student in search of his next dozen wings.

 

Some CPM ads are banners, but there are other advertising opportunities available as well.  Other opportunities include pop-up ads, full page ads that cover your site temporarily, and in-text ads that will create links out of your already existing copy.  Maybe it’s just me, but I think all of these kind of ads look spammy and are a net negative to your site and repeat visitors.

 

Other advertising sites fall in the category of affiliate networks, the most popular of which is Commission Junction.  Other affiliate networks to consider are Share A Sale, Link Connector, and Primary Ads.  With affiliate networks, you will usually get paid on a CPA basis, meaning a cost per acquisition.  In this case, you’ll receive a commission when somebody clicks on the advertisement of your site and purchases something from the advertiser.  In this equation, the blogger is known as an affiliate and the advertiser is known as a merchant.  CPA deals work best when you have a real niche subject and appropriate niche advertiser.

 

Remember earlier when I said I’d tell you a little trick about getting a discount on your URL purchase and your web hosting?  Here it is.  Sign up for one of the affiliate networks first and agree to promote GoDaddy and BlueHost, or whomever you decide to use.  Then, you will be your own first customer and your own first affiliate network commission.

 

Still another way to make money is to sell text links.  Advertisers love text links within your copy, because it helps their search engine rankings when other sites link to them.  Sites like Text Link Ads and Text Link Brokers are easy to use and will sell links on your site for you.

 

You should also take advantage of pay per click advertising.  The most used pay per click advertising opportunities are provided by Google AdSense.  With Google AdSense, you promote Google’s paid advertisers on your site.  When somebody clicks on those Google links, you get paid.  Google is certainly not the only place to obtain these kind of links, but it is the easiest to use and is perfect for beginners just getting started.

 

Finally, put a page on your blog that is about advertising.  Make sure that it is linked to a paypal account so that potential advertisers can pay you directly as some won’t want to even contact you.  Keep the cost of your advertising very reasonable, especially in the early days of the blog. 

 

Click Fraud

 

Why can’t I just click on my own ads and make money? 

 

The answer to this question is that you absolutely can click on your own advertisements.  The problem, however, is that its short-term thinking.  Advertisers on CPM deals are monitoring your site for its return on investment (ROI) more than anything else.  Internet advertising is just like any other advertising that they do.  If it doesn’t produce results in terms of e-commerce sales, then it simply isn’t going to last very long.  They will pull the ads from your site.

 

Of course, the more important reason why not to click on your own ads is that it is illegal and frowned upon as a black hat internet technique.  Is one click here and there going to kill you?  No, but don’t ever click from your own IP address.  The internet advertising systems do monitor this and they will take away your account if you click on your own advertisements too often.

 

Bob Bentz is the president of Advanced Telecom Services and the owner of Olympic Internet which provides search engine optimization consulting.  He regularly writes and promotes for over a dozen blogs, but still finds time to play a little fantasy baseball in his spare time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.