How To Make Money Online Blogging (Part III)

Author: Mahesh Mohan

9 Oct

Making Money Online

Assuming you took my advice, had a great idea, created and hosted your blog, you want to start making some money with the traffic you are beginning to receive. Next comes the exciting part, making money. The first thing, I always do when making a web site, is look for keywords to describe it. That way I can better identify the site to my potential users. This process usually means making a list of keywords on a piece of paper and refining it until I am down to about five to six quality keywords. Quality keywords would be described as a word that is specific yet ambiguous enough to attract visitors outside the realm of a normal keyword. An example would be boating, if your site is about boating, you could use only that keyword, but you may want to include sailing. Even though you are getting more specific, you are still ambiguous enough to grab the attention of someone who might not consider boating, sailing. This is a hard concept to understand, and takes time and patience to master.

Once your keywords are in place, make sure they are meta tagged within your web site (Meta data is essentially data about data. It describes your site search engines, and more importantly advertisers who advertise content based ads), you can find tons of information regarding this all over the net. I personally use Submitnet; this lets me input the exact meta tag keywords quickly and easily. It’s not a FREE service but it offers a 90 Day Free Trial (A $47 Value). You can signup and then cancel that service after your blog is setup or you can continue with the service, it costs $47 for three months. Or you can use a Free Tool. I recommend SEO Chat’s Meta Tag Generator or Advanced Meta Tag Generator.

Here’s a Sample Meta Tag:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”google, microsoft, yahoo, internet marketing, web hosting, blogging, make money online, wordpress, lifestyle, webmasters”/>

I identify my meta data in the <head> tags of my html, most people do the same. You do NOT want to put keywords in your tags that inaccurately describe your site. If you were to add something you thought was going to drive more traffic, and it has nothing to do with your site, you will be found out and ultimately your site ranking will fall. Site ranking refers to the ranking a site gets by a search engine such as “Google”, or “Yahoo!”. Ultimately site ranking optimization is part of search engine optimization, also known as SEO. Meta tagging is very important when optimizing your site for search engines.

Generally after your meta tagging is done and you have firmly established your keywords, it is time to start putting up ads. To do this, there is only one site I would recommend using, that is Google. They are the only ones who will approve just about anyone, other than adult content sites, and will pay when they say they will. That is why the majority of online advertisements are through them. Their service is known as Google AdSense. AdSense, allows you to offer your users targeted ads that are relevant to your site. It would be bad if your site was about Home Ownership and your ads were about Foot Massagers. Google has come up with a unique method of targeting your customers based on what it identifies as content on your site. It does most of this through the use of meta tagging.

In the next part I’ll tell you more about Google AdSense (Is it possible to earn $100,000 a year from Google AdSense?) and also about how to drive traffic using Google AdWords to your blog.