The idea behind a conventional, commercial blog is find a money-making marketing niche and then post large amounts of high-quality, original content related to that niche on a very regular basis. If you are an excellent writer who is an expert in the subject of that blog, you might be able to post new content on a daily basis. If you don’t do this, your blog will slip in the search engine rankings and no longer be a profitable venture. So, by starting a commercial blog, you have just signed up for a full-time profession as a writer and webmaster. It would seem that a single person, regardless of how much of an expert they might be, would run out of new ideas for posts at some time and then the blog would fail for lack of new content. At some point, you might want to think about adding posts from sources other than yourself, as long as the content is original. Original content that you did not write yourself is very difficult to find unless you pay other people to create it for you.
You must also monetize your blog, meaning that you must place banner and text ads for products closely related to your blog theme. The idea there is that you will have already attracted highly targeted web traffic to your blog for the very products you are selling.
In order to have this targeted traffic in sufficient quantities to sell enough products to make all your hard work worthwhile you must do the things needed to rank high in the search engines for the best keywords for your blog. Your blog should be optimized for the search engines and you must build as many quality backlinks as you are able in as many locations as possible, all of them pointing back to your blog.
This may include submitting lots of articles related to your blog theme to different article marketing sites. You should optimize your articles to contain your foremost keyword or keywords in a ratio of 1 to 4 percent of the total words in the article. The “self-serving” links you will be permitted at the end of your article will be converted into powerful backlinks for you in the years to come. You might also want to think about paid advertising such as Google AdWords but I would not recommend that because of the high “cost to result ratio,” particularly when you are just beginning with no profits yet to pay for the advertising.
You can also post positive and pertinent comments to closely-related blogs and forums. After all this additional work is done, you may want to think about adding a squeeze page to your blog, building an opt-in email marketing list and formulating email campaigns with the purpose of encouraging visitors to return to your blog and obtain your products.
If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is and I have simply been talking, so far, about keeping and promoting a single blog related to a single theme and selling only products closely related to that theme. Under the theory that more is better and pretending that you are some sort of gifted being with endless time on your hands, why not create another blog on another popular but different theme and double your profits. How about 4 blogs, thus quadrupling your returns or 7 or 16 or 32 or even 64 blogs and becoming staggeringly wealthy in the process?
I’m sure, by this time, you can deduce where all this is leading: How is a single person going to be ever able to achieve this? This brings me to the subject matter of auto blogging. Auto blogging software was invented to automate the process of periodic blog posting to numerous blogs. At first blush, it sounds like a miracle but it is, upon close inspection, far from a perfect solution. Auto blogging software goes out onto the web and locates articles and videos that can be legally reproduced and which match the keywords related to your niche. You input these keywords into the software during the process of setting up each blog.
After this is complete, you then have to decide whether to let the software robotically post up to a specified number of articles or videos on an hourly or daily basis. Alternatively, you have the option of simply collecting those prospective posts in a folder where they will wait for your personal review. You can then pick which articles and videos will actually be posted on the blog and which will be erased. Using this option will improve the quality of your blogs considerably. It will also take more of your time.
It is crucial not to have the software post automatically. If you automate the process, you will just get a lot of rubbish on your blogs, some of which does not even apply to the individual themes of your blogs. You will be creating a bunch of blogs that no one will want to read. To make matters worse, the search engines will never list your blogs high enough that they will be seen in the listings. In short, all of your blogs will probably fail and you will have wasted all your time and money.
The good news is that there exists a middle-ground alternative to pure auto blogging and that is to post all the articles and videos by hand. It should be understood that the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are biased strongly in favor of blogs using purely-original, high-quality content. As we have already discussed, making such a blog is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming venture but it is frequently rewarded with listings on the first page of search engines in some of the niches that relate to your keywords. These keywords should appear frequently (up to 4%) in your posts to exhibit relevancy to your blog theme.
If you go the auto blogging route but thoroughly screen your posts before permitting them to appear publically, you will increase your odds of excellent search engine rankings. However, you will be still saddled with the search engines determining that your content is not original. The search engines will know that it has showed up elsewhere on the web previously to being posted on your blog. If you keep your content pertinent to your theme and of the highest quality and post systematically (preferably 7 days a week), you can still magnetize an abundance of traffic and fairly high search engine rankings. If you add in some absolutely original articles that you have written, your search engine rankings should go even a bit higher.
Admittedly, you are making a compromise here between top-quality content and saving time and work. Modified auto blogging provides you with a means of making up for using somewhat less-than-original content: You will now have the opportunity to build multiple blogs on different themes and hence promote different types of products in larger quantities. The perception is that while no one blog will perform as well as if it were made up totally of high-quality, original material, some or most of the blogs will, in due course, bring in some amount of cash each day. As an example, if you maintained 50 blogs averaging only $10 each in sales a day, you be raking in $500 each day, on average. That would equate to annual gross sales of $182,500 a year. If your 50 blogs averaged $100 each a day, the annual amount would be $1,825,000. No lone blog is going to provide that for you.
In actuality, you will soon discover that a number of your blogs perform very well in the long run while others bring in no income at all. Even with partial automation, posting to 50 blogs each day and promoting them all simultaneously is going to end up being more than you can manage if you hope to do the best possible job with each individual blog.
When you initially set up your blogs, take care that each is set up to be tracked by Google Analytics so that you can periodically observe and record the progress of each blog in terms of traffic. Keep a spreadsheet of these traffic results and update it frequently. After a couple months of systematically posting to all of your blogs, you will find out that some are beginning to perform very well while others are a big disappointment. You need to give this process sufficient time for your blogs to be discovered and followed.
At this point in time you must cull or get rid of all blogs that are performing below a certain standard while keeping the more lively ones. If you did away with twenty blogs out of your original 50 you could slash your total daily posting time considerably while giving complete support to just high-performing blogs. After a period of time, you might decide to remove even more and replace them with new blogs promoting new products and see how those perform.
Look at it this way: Which is better, 50 blogs bringing in $10 each a day ($500) or ten blogs earning $50 each a day ($500)? The answer is obviously ten blogs each bringing in $50 a day because the labor and time required to accomplish that is just 20% of the first option. Look at the entire process of arriving at that point like planting a garden, waiting for the plants to grow, finding the strongest plants and then weeding out all the lesser plants to provide the sturdy ones the best opportunity to grow while cutting your labor to the bone. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Bob Gillespie
© 2011 Robert M. Gillespie, Jr.
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