Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging technology. However, very few people manage to reap the profits they want from their blog. Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons. Often, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging. The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you. However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in order to make a profit isn’t easy. As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. To be certain, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati, and once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so don’t skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors by setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in the blog community, and following other established modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

You have finally got your blog up and running and you are posting information there that is helping your readers. What you really want now is to get some visitors or traffic to your site.

What is the best way to achieve that? These are what I would suggest you do.

1. Sign up for a autoresponder account. I prefer Aweber for this. Go and create an opt-in box and offer your visitors a free gift that is applicable to you niche. This means if you are in the golf niche you can offer them a free report on how to improve their golf swing or something similar. They have to sign it to get the gift.

2. Share your blog with other through the social media sites and social networking sites.

This is a list of some you can use.

http://stumbleupon.com

http://digg.com

http://reddit.com

http://delicious.com

https://facebook.com

3. Read and post comment on other peoples blogs. Make sure that the comment is meaningful. Read the person’s blog before you add a comment. This will also give you a link to your blog as long as you include your URL in the correct box.

4. Make sure that you add your site address to your signature when you are sending out correspondence.

5. If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, it will automatically ping your posts, but you can also manually ping them yourself.

6. Manually submit your blog to Google, Yahoo and Bing.

7. Include your blog URL on your business card or a flyer you may produce.

8. Make sure you include an RSS feed on your site. This is very easy when you are using WordPress.

9. If you have other sites, you may want to set up a “Blog Roll” and have the sites linked.

10. Write content for your blog on a regular basis. Include external and internal links in your posts.

11. Write some articles and post them on these sites and link back. Unique content is best but always when using blogging platforms, check out there terms and conditions.

Squidoo.com

Hubpages

Blogger

Ezine Articles

If you follow these guidelines you will definitely start attracting traffic.

To YOUR success

Sue McDonald

This is the best offer you can find – take a FREE test drive from Aweber.

Aweber is the best autoresponder that I have ever used.

You often hear people asking “what is a profitable niche that I should pick”. The obvious answer they are given is pick a niche that you know something about or you are interested in. Now, that may not always work because it may be a very difficult market to compete in or the reverse – no competition at all. If you want to enter a market where there is a lot of competition, why not pick a micro niche.

To find a profitable niche, requires some research. These are two ways that may help you find a niche.

The first is to go to www.google.com. On the left hand box, as facing your computer, you will this at the  “categories” click on this and pick a category. This will give you a list of sub-categories . Now type the sub-category you pick into the top box “word or phrase.”You can now see the relevant key word, monthly searches, competition and the suggested bid for that particular word.  This now will let you know if the category you have in mind would be a profitable niche.

The second tool to use is Amazon. Yes, this is a very good place to find a niche or how popular your chosen niche could be. Just go and click here:  http://www.amazon.com/ .

Click on the “Books” on the top left hand corner and then click on “magazines”. On the search bar at the top of the page click on “Browse subjects”. Now this will give you the category and if you click on the category you will be able to see the magazines that are available for that category. All these magazines would not be produced if there weren’t people searching for information about that particular niche.

Click on a category and again on the left hand side you will see how many subcategories there are and then click on one of these and you see how many magazines are written on each one. If they are publishing several magazines on a particular subject, you will know that you have probably found a profitable niche.

Hi Guys cannot tell you how glad I am that we have finally started the Advanced Course. I know my fellow students feel the same. Mark actually told us what we are going to learn and explained exactly what we would be doing during the course.

When he was going through everything and explaining that we would be expanding on the previous Newbies Course, it made me remember what my journey into Internet Marketing over the past year has been like. Yes I basically started out as a newbie about 18 months ago and for the first 6 months never really advanced. In fact, my back account was going backwards because I was buying courses, DVDs, CDs and ebook and any other information I thought would help me. There is a term for this – information overload. It was not till I joined Mark’s Newbies Course that I started to move forward. Now the reason for this is very simple.

Mark designed the course for people just like me who have little or no knowledge. It is a structured course each week building from the previous week. You have to learn all the basics before you can move onto more challenging things.  By the end of the course what had I achieved?

I started with my blog and driving traffic to it to build my list. Now I had a list of 3 when I started and now I am nearly near 2,000. It is really not about the size of your list it is about the quality of your list. Don’t get disheartened when people unsubscribe from your list because they would never buy from you in the first place. They only joined your list for the free items you were providing.

So as well as building my list (which is always an ongoing proposition) Mark got us all to produce our own ebook and get it up on Clickbank. There was a sense of achievement when I completed that part of the course. During this course, I have even managed some sales of some of the products I have – not a fortune but at least a start so you know that what you are being taught and what you are putting into action really works. Another amazing thing that I have been able to do, is get a PR2 ranking in Google for my blog and it is not even a year old yet.

So I am really looking forward to gaining further knowledge and creating more products and getting further sales. It is certainly going to be a great course – especially the section about creating multiple streams of income.

So this is Sue McDonald saying if you want to learn like I have, just join Mark’s course.

Hi guys – I did say in a previous post that two days after I got home from the US, I was going to start the Advanced Course but unfortunately my Coach/mentor was too ill to teach the course on the nominated start date. However, I have just had a skype conversation with him and we are all set to start this Wednesday, he is much better.

I really can’t wait till it starts. I asked Mark what we are going to learn and he reluctantly leaked some of the subjects that are in the Advanced Course. I don’t know whether I can tell all but I am going to tell you some – because, to be honest, the list he was reading out was massive and there was no way I had time to write it down.

One major lesson we are going to learn (and I know anyone would want to learn this) is how to create multiple streams of income. That is what we all want and to learn the exact method how to do it is super exciting to me. Imaging knowing how to do it and then repeating  the process? Yes, we will still be doing some of the basic things that we did in the Newbies Course but this time we will take some things to the next level. There is always driving traffic but there are many ways to do that. Once again, we have product creation and that is always interesting but I know Mark is going to have us making more videos – not my favorite part of the course.

So if you are a constant reader of my blog, and have followed my IM journey with me, you will see where I started and where I am now. I have even managed to make some sales along the way and now have a list approaching 2500. Now considering I started with zero that is not a bad effort even if I say so myself. You can learn how to do it also.

If you want to start making money in the field of Internet Marketing as I have done, you first have to master the basics. There is no easier way to do this than by joining a course that will take you from where you are now to where you want to be. Mark Terrell has written this course to help you achieve results, just sign up for a seven day trial for just $1.00 and get the unlimited access to Week 1 of Coaching Newbies and the member’s area. Then you will start to see that you can be successful and learn exactly how to achieve all the goals that you set yourself.

So this is Sue McDonald saying why not take the first step to learning how to make money online.

Hi Guys – I guess you are wondering what I have finally done. I stood in front of a video camera and talked. This was definitely something that I have put off more than once – but I finally had to bite the bullet and do it. It is strange when you do not feel comfortable in doing something, you always can find an excuse not to do it.

Because I want to be a success at Internet Marketing, I have had to move out of my comfort zone so I have to complete everything that my coach Mark has taught in his course. This was the last thing left to do. I still have a few videos to create but that was the first one so the others are going to be easier.

So this is not just a step forward for me but a giant leap. This is my trusty Flip Cam so I hope it will look fine when the video is edited. I now have to do some slide presentations and then I have completed that part of the course. I think they will be so much easier.

I really enjoyed this course because we learnt so much new material. Now what I want to do is start at the beginning of the course videos presentation and anything that I struggled with on the way through – do it again and practice. I have more time now and hopefully the second time it will be really easy.

Well, I have finally conquered my fear about making this video so I will just have to keep going. Sometimes I wonder how hard Mark is going to make the Advanced Course because this course Newbies 2.0, that I have just completed, was pretty full on. There have been a few people unfortunately left, probably for various reasons, but it is so rewarding to have completed it.

So this is Sue McDonald – saying be like me – conquer your fears and you will be on the road to success.

Hi Guys! Well it is now a week since the Newbies Course officially finished. I still have one thing remaining to complete but I completed 98% of what was required. In my own time I will definitely complete that missing bit.

So what did I achieve by doing the course the second time? Well the results speak for themselves. This time I was able to produce my own product and get it approved and up on Clickbank and even put it up as a Warrior Special Offer (WSO). This was one thing that I did not complete last time. Since I first started, I have enjoyed my time on the Warrior Forum and I have been able to get traffic from there. It has been a give and take where you can get good information and if you can answer some of the questions, you give back good information.

Another of my achievements was learning Microsoft Expressions 4 but this would not have been possible without guidance from Mark. Instead of using FTP to upload, we were shown how to use our cpanel and uploaded our product there. This is a  much easier way. I will certainly be looking at purchasing this software because at present I am only using the 60 day free trial version.

When you get that approval from Clickbank, you know you have achieved what you set out to do. Now the challenge is to repeat the whole process and get another product ready to launch. So in my “spare” time, this is what I want to do and I am going to see if I can do it before I go to the US.

I also have to market a physical product and get sales in the next few weeks. This is both daunting and exciting at the same time. So as I progress with this I will keep you all posted.

So till next time this is Sue McDonald saying enjoy life and stay focused on your task at hand and I hope you are able to achieve whatever it is you want.

Well my friends this was the last lesson in this course. A little bit sad really, and I am definitely going to miss my weekly webinar. Well as always Mark packed the last lesson full of good information.

He showed how to write a Hub page, a Squidoo lens and an Ezine Article. Then he talked about joining the Warrior Forum and doing some posts and how to get our product up on the WSO (Warrior Special Offer) page. This is the only thing I have never done. I have been a member of the Warrior Forum since last October 2009 and have over 230 posts there so I can post my WSO immediately. I have found it a little daunting before but I am now armed with the necessary confidence and I am definitely going to do it this time. I am a member of other forums in the internet marketing niche but I would have to say Warrior is my favorite.

You will recall last week that I told you part of our homework was to post 100 videos. Well I prepared all the slides to do the voice overs and then found that my microphone allowed to much back ground noise.

So this morning, while I was listening to the webinar, my husband went out and bought me a brand new Logitech mic that reduces back ground noise. He had ordered but it was not there until today. So I will definitely get some videos up on to youtube this week. It is still a daunting task to do so many and I am not even sure I will reach the total, but I will definitely get some done. I have done some slides that are not even really on Internet Marketing but they mean something to me so I wanted to include them. I have a very funny one that I am thinking of uploading. Hopefully I will get them up this weekend.

Well this is Sue McDonald saying thanks for stopping by and reading my blog again. Just because the course has finished and the Advanced does not start till January, it doesn’t mean I will not be posting to my blog. I will still be doing regular updates to let you know what I am doing and where in the world I am because for the month of December and half of January I will be in the United States.

Hi Guys! Well can you believe we have just finished our second last class of this course – just one more week to go. It has just flown. It really seems like we have only been doing this for about 4 weeks but this time Mark is teaching so much new information.

I wish I could say it is easy but I can’t. There is so much technical information being taught to us over the last few weeks and again today that it is really heavy going. We have been using Microsoft Expression Web 4 to create our sales page and our download page and now today Mark introduced an affiliate page. Firstly, we have all had to learn how to use Microsoft Expression because most of us had used Kompozer before but Expression is different. So after you start using this, you have to create a sales page from nothing and include an image of your ebook and of course we want people to buy – so a buy button also. So you can see that as a Newbie – this is all new and requires our full attention.

Now as if that wasn’t enough, Mark has given us another challenge of making 100 videos. Yes, I typed it correctly – 100. This is a real test and taking some of us right out of comfort zone but depending on time I will see how I will go. Then we have to uploaded every one to Youtube. There is a prize for the person who creates the most videos.

So I apologize to all of you – getting this ebook up is taking longer than I thought but I should be able to complete it this week. I can honestly see why people give internet marketing away because there is so much to learn and we are trying to master it in 10 short weeks! Without Mark’s teaching we would certainly not be where we are today. How many other Newbies do you hear of that are getting their very own product up on Clickbank so quickly?

So this is Sue McDonald saying I will definitely achieve the objective and have this book on Clickbank and available to you all.