This is part one in a series on how to make money blogging. This post is for beginners, and this post assumes you know how to set up a blog. If not then I will create a tutorial later for that.

I guess we could call it blogging if we wanted to, but its not so much blogging as it is marketing. I say that because a lot has to do with who you target. Let me begin by saying that websites which focus on tutorials probably have the least CTR (click through rate) when it comes to making money with advertising such as Google Adsense. CTR is measured by the amount of visitors that come to a page, and the percentage of those visitors that click on an ad.That means if 10 people visited your site and 1 clicked an ad that would be a 10% ctr of your website.

Much depends on not only your subject matter, but the traffic you bring into your blog. The highest CTR is always going to be with sites centered around a service or a product. That means a blog built around Hamster cages will do better compared to a blog built around taking care of a hamster unless you are marketing an ebook or guide for the consumer to purchase which we will talk about in another post. Right now we want the visitor to click on an ad. Unless ads are being served up on taking care of hamsters which is unlikely then the CTR is going to be lower.

Hopefully you are still with me on this. Lets examine why the blog focused more on hamster cages is more effective. First off the person visiting our site is interested in a product. We know they most likely already have a hamster and want to purchase a cage. If you want people to click on ads, then you need the traffic that is looking for a product or service rather than just simply information. I bolded that last sentence, so get that into your head.

lets go a bit further. There was a recent article I saw on Yahoo about the induction of Michael Jordan into the Hall of Fame. I’m not going to say you can’t make money off ranking for Michael Jordan Hall of Fame induction when its a hot topic, but its going to be short lived and probably is going to be a horrible CTR on your ads. Wouldn’t it be much better to rank for Cheap Michael Jordan jerseys instead? Not only will that be sustainable since we all know Michael Jordan is a legend and has popular clothing, but also because its a buying keyword. That means people searching for the latter term want to buy a Jordan jersey at a lower cost.

This should hopefully make it very clear to those of you reading this article how important it is to get the right traffic. Lets talk a little about subjects that get lots of clicks on ads because of having desperate people. Remember that some people that search with Google or any other search engine for that matter search for something out of desperation.

Don’t hate on me for what I am about to write since I have gained a load of pounds since I got married myself, but people who are overweight fall into that desperate group of people who are looking for answers on losing weight. They will try just about anything in hopes for a miracle. Similar to those trying to make money online who think that there is a magical way to make it big if they fork out the big bucks for some worthless ebook. If you have read this far into the blog post you may or may not be that type of person. If you are a person that believes in a magical make money program then you might as well leave this blog right now because I am going to tell you how much work is involved to make it in this biz. If you are hungry to quit your day job like I did and become a professional internet marketer and SEO master with tons of freedom, then read on.

You can make money on the internet with a blogger blog or with a wordpress blog, but key factors that must be taken into consideration to determine whether you are successful or not comes down to the type of traffic you bring in, the keywords you research, getting links to your blog, and how well you keep your mouth shut. Don’t worry, we will cover all of these things if you are scratching your head right now. Lets move on though. Stay with me!

Choice of Keywords

Now that you understand the type of traffic you need from search engines, the next thing is choosing your keywords. Lets talk about the importance of that from a different angle now.

Choosing the right keywords can mean ranking #1 or ranking #1000. Obviously ranking is what its all about. Do you have any clue how much sites make that rank on page one for the term credit cards? Millions of dollars. Could I rank on page one? Sure, with about 100,000 links and some time I sure could. But lets be realistic, for those of you who are beginners, it would be absolutely stupid to go for a term like credit cards right off the bat. Heck, it would be stupid to go for a term like best credit cards for a beginner from the start. Thats why its important that you choose your terms wisely.

Don’t try to rank for something that is going to take you a lot of time from the start. I’m going to say that for beginners… terms that are between 3-7 words long are going to be winners. This is important for being able to not only see some success, but also making a little money quickly rather than targeting and focusing energies on tough keywords.

We will be talking about how to measure how tough a keyword is in a following article, but for now lets think about keyword combinations. So lets say that I have made the decision to build a blog about hamster cages. What type of keywords might I target? I might target blue hamster cages, red hamster cages, large hamster cages, hamster cages with hamster wheels built in, and so on. As a beginner its best to not limit yourself to targeting a few keywords because not ranking for a few things is very much possible. That’s right you didn’t read that wrong so let me rephrase that. I said, NOT ranking for just a handful of selected keywords is very possible as a beginner. That is why I recommend if you are absolutely green to making money online that you focus your energies on tons of keywords at a time.

Lets talk a little bit about planning your niche based on keywords. I like to use the Adwords keyword selector tool to choose my niches, but I do not entirely rely on the number of searches it returns to me after typing in a keyword, and you shouldn’t either. That thing is definitely flawed, and doesn’t track every keyword there is. What you should use it for however is gauging whether there is enough keywords to work in your niche or not. What do I mean by that?

You may be really cutting yourself short by working a niche that is to tight when you are starting off as a beginner. Take this as an example… if you plan on working a subject like black sharpie (I saw a sharpie in front of me so I used that as an example), then you may run into a dead end fast. There is only so many longtails (A longtail could be…. best sharpies in Texas as opposed to a short keyword like sharpies) related directly to a black sharpie you can work. On the other hand, if you are talking about cheap coloring supplies, you could go in a million different directions. You could talk about crayons, markers, pencils, and so on as well as the different brands of coloring supplies, while still sticking to the main subject of coloring supplies.

Remember, you want to stick to a central theme, or subject so you can have good ads and keep tightly focused on something, unless the CPC is high which is another method we will talk about later. But for now focus on this method. This will bring you traffic quickly, and allow you to make some money rather quickly as well.

As I said before, I am willing to help. Feel free to email me. If you ask a newb question, I won’t scorn you, I will merely give you a link to a post that can answer that question. If I haven’t already answered I will either reply directly or write a post to answer it.