Alright, we are going to continue on with perfecting your blogs. You should now have fresh content being posted to your blog. That content is absolutely useless if it does not get read.

Most blogs only show a short blurb of the post unless the visitor clicks through to read the full post. So, to have your content read you need to entice the click! You can approach this as scientifically as you choose. Personally, I like to use catchy images and headlines to attract the clicks and then let my well-written and engaging content do the rest.

Your blog will more than likely allow for images appended to your posts. You can add an image by clicking on “set featured image” on the right side bottom of your screen while in the “add new post” screen while adding your post. Then choose the correct method of adding your image. You can either include the url where the image is located or you can upload an image that is stored locally on your computer.

Make the image something relevant to what you are writing about. You also want to make sure the image stands out. You want it to say “Hey, look at me!”.

The next thing is your headline. It must have something to do with your topic if choice but also be engaging. Make sure to remember your audience when selecting your headline. You want to draw attention, but you do not want to offend. “How To Create The Best Damn Blog Ever!” That is just an example, but I like it.

Try these tips out and see how they impact your blog’s engagement with your audience.

How is everyone getting along with their blogs? Hopefully everyone is adding unique content and writing in a style that engages their visitors.

Once you have some content on your blog it is time to start placing banners for the offer you are promoting. There are many different ways to approach this and this is best perfected with testing. Split test between different banners and different placements on your blog. Time will show what works best.

Now you also need to start sending traffic to your blog. The easiest way to get targeted traffic to your blog is through social sharing. You can generate thousands o hits to your site this way and it is FREE!

Create a new Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest account and make the profile for each of these social media outlets targeted to your vertical. Start following people on Twitter, friend people Facebook and Google+, make friends on Pinterest, and join as many groups on Linkedin that is targeted to your vertical and has as many members as possible.

Do not abuse or spam these sites! Do not over do it when trying to connect with people with your new social accounts. Be aggressive, but not overly aggressive. Just take this as a word of caution.

Then, share every one of your new blog posts to everyone on each of these social sites. You should be adding content everyday. And with that you should be sharing this content everyday.

You should already have Google Analytics installed so you should start monitoring the amount of traffic coming in to your site to see what helps and what does not.

Keep up the work! Leave comments and let me know how you are doing. See you in the next post.

Hey everyone. I found a way for you to get $275 in adspend on Bing for $12! Just follow the steps below to grab that traffic. This is a very solid way to get a campaign optimized for close to free!

This will only work with new Adcenter accounts as far as I know. After you create your account go to Bing Webmaster Tools. You will see in red “click here blah blah blah $50″. Follow the instructions after clicking on the link for $50 voucher. Then fill in your info here for another $25 bucks. Now go buy this Kindle book (Search Engine Advertising). Then you need to email Kevin@KevinLee.Net with your Amazon order # requesting your Adcenter promo code. One you have that go here and fill in your info for a $200 voucher. All of these are stackable meaning that after about 15 minutes work you will now have a $275 testing budget. The $200 voucher offer is only valid through June of 2012 for those in the USA.

Now, make the most of this! Why not use the info in the previous posts to build out a blog and then use this free adspend to start sending some traffic?

So far you now have everything needed to start cranking out some killer content to your blog. You have the domain, hosting, WordPress installed on your hosting account, DNS pointing to your hosting account, and you know who your audience is. The next step is to start writing!

It is easy to find out what people in your vertical are looking for. You can visit the sites that your prospective customers are going to and emulate the site’s style. This method is very effective. If you get your customer prepped for a certain tone and then send them to a site (where the conversion takes place) where the tone is completely different you are going to lose conversions and money. Simple as that.

I always try to engage readers with questions. There are many ways this can be used and some are more effective than others. The biggest factors to consider are your audience and your writing style. You will learn this as you go. Strategic questioning will get your reader into a mindset of your choosing. This will allow you to step in and guide them down the conversion process. A lot of money can be made in this way. Ok, would you like to see exactly how to use this? Would you like to learn exactly how to ask the right questions to invoke the action or response you are looking for?

Those last 2 lines were good examples. If you are wanting your reader to continue reading try to ask questions at the end of paragraphs to keep their eyes moving down the page. You can also add questions right before your call to action. “It was an amazing feeling to finally meet someone that I am genuinely compatible with and that I enjoy being around. We have a wonderful time together and always look forward to our next date. I have never been happier. Seriously, wouldn’t you love to find that perfect match?” Something along those lines.

Keep you content fresh, appealing and easy to follow. Make sure that you add a little emotion in there as well. You do not want to come across dry or blande.

Another way a lot of people are able to keep a steady supply of content going to their web properties is by outsourcing the task. You want to still do all of your research as if you were going to do the writing so that you can tell your writer the angle or approach they should use when creating your content. Once you find a writer that fits your needs and writes in the style you are looking for, it is a good idea to stick with them. If it aint broke, don’t fixit.

Now, get started writing content and adding it to your blog. Try for a new post everyday. Make your posts around 500 words or more in length. The more content you add the more love you will get from the search engines.

Next we will go over some pretty solid free traffic techniques.

Alright, you now have a blog, picked out a killer domain name and have it hosted. The next step is to fill that blog with informative and engaging content.

The content you add to your blog is going to be pivotal in its success. You cannot have mediocre content and expect people to keep visiting or even care about what you have written. There are a few pointers that you can follow to ensure that your content is the best it can be for your targeted audience.

Identify with your audience.

You need to know who your audience is and what they are looking for. What expectations do they have of your site? Why did they click through to visit your site? What problems or obstacles are they facing? What types of solutions will your audience be willing to accept or believe?

There are tools out there to help you find out who your audience is. Quantcast.com is simply amazing. You can visit Quantcast to see the demographic data for a particular website. This information is invaluable to you. By finding out who is visiting sites in your vertical you then know how to write content that appeals to your visitors. For example, if your demo is over the age 50, you do not want to use terms that your audience may not identify with. ROFl may completely miss it’s mark and cause your visitors to leave offended and not return.

Let’s use a live example. Let’s see how to write content for a blog focused on online dating. Now, a quick Google search for internet dating brings up the following results:

Now, I didn’t show the full page of results because I did not want to take up too much room here. But, there are 2 widely used dating sites listed with a broad appeal. You have Match.Com in the organic results and you have eharmony.com in the sponsored links. Let’s see what shows up for eharmony.com at quantcast.com. Going to the website I am going to paste the url of the website I would like to further investigate. In this example we are going to use match.com. I know they get a ton of traffic and have had multiple advertisements on TV. Enter the url and then click search. Here are the results for match.com:

This tells us quite a bit of information. First off, traffic dipped for a little bit but is trending back upwards for this site. Secondly, the split between males and females visiting the site is almost even. The age group that has the highest volume is the folks that are 35-44 that have no children, are financially stable, and have graduated college. There is also not much of a split between which races are visting the site.

This data has painted a picture of the typical user to visit match.com. It has also gave you your demographic targeting to start in the dating vertical. There is an amazing amount of traffic going to this site. Personally, I would split this data into 2 parts. Internet dating for men and internet dating for women.

Above we discussed that it is necessary to get into the mindset of our potential visitors by identifying who they are and what problems they face as well as solutions to their problems. We now know who they are and if you are targeting the dating vertical you know what the problem is. They want a date!

Now, your approach to this is really up to you. There are so many ways to tackle this vertical and break it into other verticals. These people do not have a steady date, companion, life partner, whatever you choose to call them. Why? Is it because they work too many hours? Are they self conscious for any reason? Are they incredibly shy? It does not really matter. You can attack all of these issues if you so choose or you can focus on only one issue and build your blog around that. I would attack all of these issues but focus on one at a time. You should view this as a long term project that will bring in money now and a year from now.

You can also start as easy as just doing reviews of each of the dating sites. Sign up for a free trial to each of the largest internet dating sites and write about the features the sites have. You also need to touch on how easy it is to navigate the site and the over all feel.

Well, this post went a little longer than I originally anticipated. In the next post I will go over specific examples of what to write about. I may also start one of these up myself and share it so you guys can see step by step how quickly this can be built up. I will see you guys in the next post.

We discussed setting up hosting, registering a domain, and installing WordPress in that last post. Now we need to explore what needs to be done next to make this new blog the best it can be.

The suggestions that I make here are based on personal experience and common practices generally followed to make the most of you visitor’s experience while visiting you site.

User experience is key. If your visitors are put off by your blog they are going to leave. Quickly at that. We want our visitors to hang out, soak up the info and stick around long enough for us to guide them to the solution/service/product that is being promoted. The biggest thing that will impact user experience is the “granny factor”. If your grandmother visited your blog, would she enjoy the experience? Is the site easy to navigate? Does your site have a fluid and clean look to it?

Another area we want to look into is some of the admin settings on your blog. The first thing I change is the permalink structure. By default the way permalinks are set by WordPress are ugly. In your blog’s admin panel (visit yourdomain.com/wp-admin and log in) click on settings on the left menu then click on permalinks. Here you can change how your permalinks are structured. The standard, and what looks best is to select “custom structure” and enter /%postname/. This will change it so that each post you add can be accessed by a link that looks like this: yourdomain.com/mypost instead of the other random garbage it is set to by default.

Another area you want to focus on is the theme for your blog. The theme is the overall look and feel that your blog will take on. There are more themes out there than one person will ever use. Seriously, there are thousands. Some cost a fee to purchase but a vast majority is free.  Do not discount free themes; my favorite themes have all been freebies!

To change your theme log into your blog’s admin panel and click on appearance then click on theme, and then click on install themes. You can browse from right there. You can also search on your choice of search engine to find themes that other people have created. Find the theme that will work best in the vertical you are going to approach.

Next, I would install Google Analytics. This will give you a lot of information about your visitors. Which pages are they visiting, time on page, ip address, where they are located, etc.

This is a good start to getting a blog live and ready for content. Obviously there are many, many other things that you can do to tweak your blog. The options are almost limitless. This is a good start. Next we will discuss content creation. See you in the next post!

Why A Blog?

Obviously you have heard about CPA marketing and have taken some interest in this area. You may just want to start a personal blog for the fun of it. I am going to cover what you need to do to get a blog on the internet. There is a lot of information out there from the very basics all the way to the most advanced marketing techniques imagined.

There are many methods of generating and driving traffic with the intention of making money off of it. In my opinion, no matter how you drive traffic, it is always best to send your visitors to your site. You can control the user experience and hone everything in to maximize ROI.

With that being said, I highly recommend starting with a blog. A self-hosted blog is going to be much better in the short run and the long run. You are not subject to having your blog removed due to ever changing rules or policies. Plus all of the search engines absolutely love a properly set up blog!

You can also set up a blog with your own hosting and your own domain for very little money and start sending traffic right away! I will walk you through what I suggest everyone starting out should do.

Registering A Domain

The first thing you are going to need is a domain. There are many domain registrars out there. Use the one that you feel most comfortable with. The 2 largest and most widely known are Godaddy and Namecheap. I have used both and have no complaints with either of them.

One of the most important steps in the process is choosing your domain name. You need to choose a domain that is relevant to your vertical (what type of offers you are going to monetize. Weight loss, dating etc.). You do not want to use airplanes.com for a dog training blog. You get the idea. Take your time and choose wisely. Make sure that the domain name you choose does not appear suspicious or scammy either. This could cause your visitors to immediately leave.

Now you have registered a domain you need to make sure that you tie your domain to a hosting account. Hosting will make it so that yourdomain.com will actually be accessible on the internet.

Hosting

There are many, many hosting companies out there with many choices for hosting plans. Personally, I highly recommend that you start with Hostgator. Their services are cheap and their support is amazing. You get quite a bang for your buck also.

In my opinion, it is not necessary to spend much money until you start making money. I recommend Hosgator’s shared hosting baby plan. The cost is minimal monthly and it comes with the cpanel interface. This is a must for me. Cpanel makes things so much easier.

Marry The Two

Ok, now you have hosting and a domain. It is now time to tie everything together. When you signed up for your hosting you received an email with instructions on how to log in to your cpanel account and you also received your new nameservers. You will need to point your domains to the correct nameservers. Go to whom ever you registered your domain with and follow their instructions on doing so. You can contact their support for guidance.

Now you will need to add the domain to your hosting account. This is as simple as logging into your hosting account and accessing “add on domain” in cpanel and then filling in the on screen fields. Again, you can contact your hosting support for help with this. But it is straightforward.

Hello World!

The next step is to add something to your domain for it to be visible to the world. We have established already that a blog is an excellent way to go and WordPress is the most commonly used for a reason. In cpanel scroll almost all the way to the bottom and look for the fantastico icon. Click on it, then click on WordPress, then click on new install, then choose the domain you want WordPress installed on. From there enter the details in the fields and jot them down. Then click on finalize installation. Boom, now you have a blog!

Now, you should be able to browse to your domain in your web browser and see your blog. You can browse to yourdomainname.com/wp-admin and log into the admin side of your blog. This is where you will be able to add posts, pages, and make other admin changes.

Yes, It Is That Simple!

Getting a website online really is this easy. Blogs are very powerful and very easy to use and set up. Next I will go over some common settings that should be tweaked, menus, and other aesthetic tweaks to make things work as smooth as possible. You can also find a ton of WordPress tutorials anywhere online.

Until the next post, play around with your new blog. Try out the different settings and see what they do. Add a new post. Have fun! After all, this is your first step in the online world!