How To Make Money With Your Blog?

Here's how to have a blog that makes money. As with virtually everything else in Internet marketing having a blog that makes you money is a combination of the two main Internet marketing ingredients; targeted traffic and a good, compelling offer. You can start your blog for free using blogger or one of the other free blogging platforms out there, but I don't recommend it for two main reasons.

The first reason that I would eschew free blogging platforms, such as Blogger, is that when your blog is hosted on Blogger, the domain, traffic and content is theirs, not yours. Google, who owns Blogger, really doesn't need any more free hands up, do they?

The second reason that you should steer clear of free blog hosting platforms when you're building your blog empire business is that, because of the first reason, you're not building your business, you're actually helping to build someone else's.

The first thing you should do when starting a blog that you hope will bring in a healthy income for you one day is actually plan things out. That's right; you should actually sit down for a few hours and make a business plan. That will help make sure you don't miss any of the details you'll need to be successful. Be sure you include everything, such as what the main theme of your blog will be, the monetization strategies you'll use, a financial plan, a growth plan, and an oft forgotten part of many business plans, the exit strategy.

Most highly successful blogs are tightly themed. That means they focus closely on a certain subject or niche, such as local residential real estate, working from home income techniques, '60's muscle cars, or needlepoint. This focus will help you build a core base of loyal readers and subscribers. These are very important for the immediate and long term success of your blog. In addition, having a large, vibrant subscriber list adds a large amount of value to your blog should you want to sell it. If you're having trouble choosing a theme, look for one with a large profit potential. There will be more on this later.

Decide on what you'll call your blog and get your own domain name. These are very affordable, and will help you sidestep the problems of using a free hosting platform. You will own the domain and will be free to do with it as you please. You blog will actually be an asset that you control.

The next decision you'll have to make is what blogging platform you'll use. The two largest are Movable Type and Wordpress. Wordpress is open source, meaning basically it's free. Because it's open source, many developers freely create things for Wordpress, so there are a huge number of add-ons, widgets, templates, and plugins available for it. You can even publish your Wordpress blog from your iPhone now!

Movable type is not open source, but you may still be able to get it free, as many web hosting companies offer it as part of the hosting package. It too has many different things available to enhance the functionality and appearance of blogs published with it. I've used both frequently. You can have many fantastic, and profitable blogs with either publishing system.

So you've got your blog up and you're posting to it with reckless abandon. How can you make some money for your efforts? That's sort of a balancing act. You want to blog about a topic that interests you, or keeping up an aggressive posting schedule will become very difficult. You also want to blog about a topic that is profitable, or you won't make any money.

To help find what blog subjects can earn you some decent profits, head to Google and see what keywords are going for these days. Use the free Google keyword tool in Google Adwords. You can type in keywords and keyword phrases and the tool will show an estimate of cost per click that advertisers are willing to pay for ads targeting a given keyword or phrase, and an idea of the number of advertisers that are advertising using them.

Keywords that are relatively expensive and have substantial competition mean that many advertisers are willing to pay fairly large amounts of money for those keywords. In theory that means that there is profit to be made by creating content that features those keyword phrases.

Remember that it is only an idea, and there are two schools of thought on earning money from your blog. You can try to find a narrow niche with little competition, and dominate it. The other approach is to head to a very large, but profitable niche and try to get enough traffic to skim some profit from the niche. Basically you'll either a small fish in an ocean, or a large fish in a pond. There are successful bloggers using both strategies.

Next you'll want to decide on a monetization strategy for your blog. In most cases you'll use a combination of them to bring home the bacon. The three main strategies are:

1) Sales of your own products or services
2) Affiliate marketing
3) Advertising. This is usually contextual advertising, but some bloggers are successful with other forms, such as banner ads.

With affiliate marketing you'll be paid a commission for referring a visitor to a company's site. If the person you referred does the desired action you'll earn your commission. In the majority of cases the desired action means the visitor buys something, or fills out a lead form.

Contextual advertising automatically places ads on your site that are targeted to your site by the context of your site. The ad publishers have algorithms that look at your blog and decide which of their advertiser's ads would best go with your blog's content. In most cases, you're then paid a percentage of the advertising fee when one of your visitors clicks on the link in the ad. This is known as pay per click advertising. The leader is this is Google, with their AdWords / AdSense program.

To have a blog that makes money, you need to have targeted traffic, the more the better. That is largely a function of the content. A large amount of good, original content (not content scraped form other blogger's RSS feeds). Some on page search engine optimization techniques won't hurt either, but good, high quality content will get you both search engine visitors, and repeat traffic from people that just want to read your stuff.

Make sure you target the proper keywords in your posts and post titles. You're looking for profitable keywords that have relatively low competition. By optimizing for words and phrases people are actively searching for, you'll do better in the search engine rankings, and you'll be giving your readers exactly what they were looking for. That double whammy is a true recipe for blog money making success.

What's The Secret To Building Real Wealth

What would your life be like if you doubled your income this year? What if you doubled your income AND you doubled the time you spend doing what you love with the people you love?

How can you go from dream to reality?

Think it's impossible in this economy? It's not! In every shift of the economy -- down or up -- there are winners and losers.

Even in the Great Depression, people came out new millionaires. Today will be no different.

The Secret You Need To Know
The key to being successful in life and with your business is focus.

Focus? What am I talking about?

The key to being truly successful is knowing how and where to focus your time and efforts. For example, just yesterday I was talking with someone who sells fiber optic cables and computer hardware. He wanted to know if I thought it was a good idea to diversify and try to resell self-improvement programs online.

Here was someone who was doing fairly well with one business and about to take his eye off his primary source of income and try something he knew nothing about. Bad idea!

If you want to be successful, the key is finding something you're good at and focusing your efforts to help people...and become rich doing it.

For example, every successful business owner knows they need a marketing strategy to attract new clients and make more money. But most don't know how and where to focus their marketing. They try a little of this and a little of that and get little in the way of results.

Knowing how and where to focus your efforts is the key to success.

With a proven system for getting prospects' attention, generating leads, converting leads to clients, maximizing sales and generating repeat sales you can easily double your income while cutting your time on the job in half (or even more).

4 Options For Achieving Your Dreams
Try copying what others are doing This could work. Anything is possible but most new businesses fail. Even if you try copying one that appears to be making money, it's impossible to know what's working for them and what's not. You could easily end up copying one of their failed strategies.

Wait for lightning to strike in the form of a revolutionary product or service and then hope you get featured on Oprah. Your odds are slim but again, this could happen. Counting on it would be a mistake.

Maintain a positive attitude
I'm sure you've heard it before: your chances of success are higher when you focus on creating opportunities...but at some point you're going to need more than just a positive attitude. You're going to need guidance and tools to reach your dreams.

Find a proven system, one that shows you exactly how to become a sought after expert, how to grow your business, and how to maximize your profits so you have a steady stream of leads, sales and profits (so you can make more money).

RM1 billion up for grabs by shoplifter

MALAYSIAN shopkeepers, department stores and others in the retail industry will be faced with a RM1 billion loss -- to theft by customers, employees and even suppliers.

Half of it, or RM500 million, will be lost to shoplifters while employees will steal goods worth nearly RM200 million.

A survey on shoplifting estimated that suppliers will also shortchange their clients by nearly RM80 million in the amount of goods invoiced but not delivered.

The RM1 billion loss is estimated to occur in the 12 months to June next year, and represents a 15 per cent increase from a year earlier.

"This is a very conservative projection. It could be worse," managing director of Checkpoint Systems Sales (M) Sdn Bhd, Polly Tan, says.

Checkpoint in Malaysia is a subsidiary of US-based Checkpoint Systems Inc, sponsor of the Global Retail Theft Barometer 2008. The survey was conducted by the Centre for Retail Research.

The industry term for retail theft is retail shrinkage.

Findings from the Global Retail Theft Barometer were released recently for the period between July last year and June this year.

The survey, carried out in 36 countries, revealed that global retail shrinkage for the July to June period amounted to US$105 billion (RM378 billion).

Of this, retail shrinkage in Asia-Pacific covering countries like Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, amounted to US$15 billion.

In Malaysia, 18 retailers with a 252-store network and a combined sales of US$1.2 billion participated in the survey.

As a percentage of total sales, retail shrinkage in Malaysia was 1.53 per cent -- the fifth highest among the 36 countries surveyed.

What do Malaysians steal?

Top on the list are apparel and accessories, followed by auto parts and hardware products.

These were followed by cosmetics, perfume and health and pharmaceutical items.

This was followed by employee theft at 22.5 per cent (US$58 million) and supplier or vendor theft at nine per cent (US$23 million).

The remaining 19.2 per cent of financial loss amounting to US$49 million was due to administrative errors.

More preventive measures should be taken to control this, for example, using source tagging and surveillance system to help monitor internal systems, Tan says.

"With the release of the data, retailers are now aware of the source of theft and can boost efforts to enhance security."

Retailers have, in fact, indicated that they want to invest further as more people are stealing.

She says security cost in Malaysia was US$34 million last year but investments could increase this year.

Thinking Out Of The Box

Improve the Quality of Your Thinking
Human beings are mental organisms. Everything we are or ever will be, will be as the direct result of the way we think. If we improve the quality of our thinking, we must improve the quality of our lives. And, there is no other way to do it.

Youth and Creativity
In one series of I.Q. tests given to children age 2 - 4 years, 95% of the children were found to be highly creative with curious, questioning minds and an ability for abstract thinking.

When the same children were tested again at age 7, only 5% still demonstrated high levels of creativity. In the ensuing years, they had learned to conform; "If you want to get along, you had better go along," is what they had discovered.

The Dangers of Conformity
They had learned to color between the lines, to sit in neat little rows, to do and say what the other kids did and said, and to do as they were told. Over time, they lost the wonderful fearless spontaneity of youth and learned to suppress ideas and insights that were unusual or different.

Aggressively Seek New Ideas
Most of us have had similar experiences. The "Not invented-here" syndrome in many large companies is simply the adult version of "not rocking the boat." But fortunately, since creativity is your birth right, a fundamental part of your nature, you can tap into it at any time, no matter how long it has been since you really used it.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to start thinking outside of your mental box.

First, imagine that there was a vastly better, cheaper, faster way to do your job - and somebody else had already discovered it and was going to put you out of business.

Second, imagine doing exactly the opposite of what you are doing today. Allow your mind to float freely and consider how current trends will change your business.

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The Law of Investing

The Law of Investing - investigate before you invest. This is one of the most important of all the laws of money. You should spend at least as much time studying a particular investment as you do earning the money to put into that particular investment.

Check Every Detail
Never let yourself be rushed into parting with money. You have worked too hard to earn it and taken too long to accumulate it. Investigate every aspect of the investment well before you make any commitment. Ask for full and complete disclosure of every detail. Demand honest, accurate and adequate information on any investment of any kind. If you have any doubt or misgivings at all, you will probably be better off keeping your money in the bank or in a money market investment account than you would be speculating or taking the risk of losing it.

Money is Easy to Lose
The first corollary of the Law of Investing is: "The only thing easy about money is losing it." It is hard to make money in a competitive market but losing it is one of the easiest things you can ever do. A Japanese proverb says, "Making money is like digging with a nail, while losing money is like pouring water on the sand."

The Best Rule of All
The second corollary of this law comes from the self-made billionaire, Marvin Davis, who was asked about his rules for making money in an interview in Forbes Magazine.

He said that he has one simple rule and it is, "Don't lose money." He said that if there is a possibility that you will lose your money, don't part with it in the first place. This principal is so important that you should write it down and put it where you can see it. Read it and reread it over and over.

Time Equals Money
Think of your money as if it were a piece of your life. You have to exchange a certain number of hours, weeks and even years of your time in order to generate a certain amount of money for savings or investment. That time is irreplaceable. It is a part of your precious life that is gone forever. If all you do is hold on to the money, rather than losing it, that alone can assure that you achieve financial security. Don't lose money.

Be Smart About Investing
The third corollary of the Law of Investing says: "If you think you can afford to lose a little, you're going to end up losing a lot."

There is something about the attitude of a person who feels that he has enough money that he can afford to risk losing a little. You remember the old saying, "A fool and his money are soon parted." There's another saying, "When a man with experience meets a man with money, the man with the money is going to end up with the experience and the man with the experience is going to end up with the money." Always ask yourself what would happen if you lost one hundred percent of your money in a prospective investment. Could you handle that? If you could not, don't make the investment in the first place.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to apply this law immediately:

First, think back over the various financial mistakes you have made in your life. What did they have in common? What can you learn from them? Accurate diagnosis is half the cure.

Second, invest only in things that you fully understand and believe in. Take investment advice only from people who are financially successful from taking their own advice. Play it safe. It's better to hold onto your money rather than to take a chance of losing it, along with all the time it took you to earn it.

Multinationals in Penang preparing for the worst

GEORGE TOWN: US-based multinational companies (MNCs) in Penang are adopting various cost-cutting measures as they brace for the anticipated impact from the global meltdown.

Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers northern branch chairman Datuk O.K. Lee said several factories have shortened their working days from five to four days.

“Some have frozen employment while others have shut down operations for Christmas and New Year,” he said, adding that a few companies are quietly offering a voluntary separation scheme.

A check revealed that at least two electronic giants here – Agilent Technologies and Jabil Circuit – will shut down their factories in Bayan Lepas for Christmas and New Year.

Employees have been asked to take their annual leave for about a week because of a drop in product demand.

“The global directive is a two-week shutdown but individual plants need not follow strictly. I think precautionary measures like these should be able to help cushion the impact,” said an executive of one of the affected factories.

“Most of my colleagues are happy to go on a break first before we ponder over the future,” she said, adding that the last time the multinational company had a year-end shutdown was during the last economic slowdown.

A Jabil employee said the company’s shutdown would take place from Dec 24-30.

“Usually, our Christmas break is one or two days only.”

An ASE spokesman said the company was shutting down for four days in November and December while a Fairchild Semiconductor employee said the factory would be closed from Nov 21-24.

Between 35% and 50% of the MNCs here have their headquarters in the United States and over 60% of the products made are US-bound, according to an industry insider.

“We are experiencing low export demand. Some MNCs are taking the opportunity to conduct their usual attrition exercise,” he said, noting that the first and second quarters of next year is expected to be “very soft”.

Commenting on the impact of the global credit crunch on the country’s technological sector, US ambassador to Malaysia James Keith said it was “very difficult to predict”.

“The global picture is dark. Even for the United States, we cannot make a prediction (of what’s going to happen). Obviously with slower global flows, bilateral trade will also fall.

“Every company is under pressure to reduce costs. We all have to tighten our belts. The United States has not seen such a situation in a quarter of a century.

“Companies would rather look at measures to reduce cost than lay off employees so hopefully the Federal Government can help us,” he said, adding that the United States was committed to ensuring a “sense of confidence” in Malaysia.

“But there must be give and take in bilateral trade. That is why we hope to conclude the final rounds of negotiations over the Free Trade Agreement soon.”

“US companies are always looking to reduce cost. No doubt this year, Malaysia has been getting many contracts but the future will depend on the decisions made today,” he said, adding that every country has to continuously re-evaluate itself to attract investors.

He was speaking at a press conference after the American Malaysian Chamber of Commerce Penang annual summit with Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng yesterday.