Sculpting your content is a magic spell that only wizards and lizards can cast. Common bloggers don’t know Jack about building traffic, as they are trying to gain readers all the time. Chance is you typed into google “increase Blog Traffic”. Now you will get a lot of common sense articles by people who spend their time in creating a blog and building a readership with the hopes of people linking to them for the utterly unique content. Sadly such content is neither unique, nor is it very useful. Blog about your passion you hear. But what is my passion you ask? And how do you gain readers who share it? After all, blogs used to be “the big thing” because they were found by search engines. Loads of text = loads of things to crawl by the search engine spiders and bots. Community = loads of linking to each other = important stuff people care about. This was in the early new millennium. Now everybody wants his 15 minutes of fame and share their story. A story that has either been told before, or that no-one wants to hear. There are three paths you can choose and you have to determine what you want: More readers, more money or pseudo fame.

Getting more Blog Visitors | Readers

So you decided to get more traffic. Well, I decided this for the sake of this article. Traffic equals money, at least if it comes from search engines and NOT from social media. Social media traffic converts differently and you can not monetize it immediately. So you want traffic, the right traffic so to say. If you like the idea behind social media and want social traffic and people reading about what they like and participating in your community, fine, go for social media traffic. Might work. Might not. The only thing that matters though are links you hopefully get from other bloggers, and please let those links have the right anchor tag. Otherwise they are nice, but not that useful. Now you know that you want search engine traffic, not social media traffic. Visitors coming from social media sites are wasting their time. They look for a place to fill a gap in their life that is empty right now. You fulfill that need for the next minute until they hit that stumble/next button or laugh about another link their friends send them. And they will send those links, that’s for sure. Those visitors are neither going to buy something, nor are they really into your stuff. They hop from place to place and you can call yourself lucky and name a star if a few people stick at your site and click on anything at all before they leave.
But how do I get people to like my blog? I put soooo much effort into it. Well, if you want quality readers, as in people who genuinely care, you need fans. So you either create stuff that people like, or you are recommended to them by someone they trust. You can’t get away with some sleazy ass content online. *lol* Sure hell you can, that’s why there are so many self improvement and lifestyle design blogs out there copying the greats of the industry with more than 1000 readers. Fuck all those. You can do better. All you need is another form of traffic, which is the oldschool way to get traffic. Back to the basics so to say: Search Engine Traffic. Search Engine Traffic are visitors, those guys are wandering around with the intention of finding something. They are actively looking instead of passively browsing like social media fanatics. How do you get search engine traffic? Through quality content. Ok, you knew that. Now you have to be actively promoting that content, either through asking others to link to it, or by doing incentives for others to link to it, or building your own small network and interlinking all of your content. It’s an old story, the story of getting links, links and some more links. Quality links. Links from places that are in the same niche. Links that are keyword related. In short, links that are usually too got to be free. The problem you will face, others know about link building as well, they don’t give away their links easily. They want you to pay for it. They want you to beg for it. And every once in a while they do it for free when they find something they really care about, which is almost never unless it’s a buddy.

Keep the content simple

Keeping it simple is easier said than done. With all those beautiful how to build a better blog in the back of your mind, you have been running your great lists, pushing old content forward and made up some great, engaging topics. Forget it. It’s nice advice, but the best advice you can get out of this article is to keep it as simple as possible. Like explaining your topic to a 4 year old, descriptive, short, easy to read. Underline the intention you have with an article instead of rambling about everything and nothing. I know, everything and nothing is a lot fun, but… it does not drive traffic. People care very little about individuals unless they are at least C level stars. And all of those internet celebrities are, maybe besides of Tucker Max and some Pick-up Artists, M Level celebrities. They are known on their convention, but that’s about that. They might have 10.000-120.000 readers, which is a lot, but even less than the city I live in. It’s a nice amount to make money from, build a fanbase, but all this shit takes time, commitment and a topic where you already are an authority. Sorry. If you have no credentials you have to fake it until you make it. Or you have to sell your skills to someone else and build from there.

Start with your most popular hobby

You are not successful yet? You already have a blog and can’t drive traffic to it? If you are not specialized on a topic, take the time and do that. Don’t build a make money blog if you don’t know jack on how to make money. Don’t write about SEO if you are not willing to tell people to buy links. Don’t write about blogging. It’s good to
start out with your most popular hobby and build a site around this. Simply the best way to go. If you want to make money blogging there are basically three models:

1. Blogging for advertisements, Sponsorships and Products on a Blog about popular topic.
2. Blogging for Bloggings sake with the goal of building a huge publisher deal and cashing in on this.
3. Blogging to promote your own products, ideas and texts to make money from the loyal fans you have.

Blogging for advertisements is our goal. Advertisements are anything from adsense, to direct ad sales or affiliate marketing. It’s the thing that will get you started. It will pay your hosting bills and earn you a few bucks here and there. You will start to have knowledge on how to leverage a blog. You will learn, network and build connections. It probably won’t make you rich, but if it does you will have a lot traffic. This is why you are gunning for good topics. Do not build a niche site, but a site, that will work on a certain topic. And I would tell you to stay away from news topics, as you will have to hardcore update your site and burnout pretty fast. doshdosh is mr. marketing. shoemoney made a fortune back in the days with ringtones. mr. problogger is running his photography blog. All those are legit sites that produce income. Well doshdoshs, I don’t know, it’s more of a case-study, yet there are some gems in his posts. I have a few different pair of shoes myself producing me a decent amount of traffic. I picked niches that are not saturated, yet have people who are willing to spend money. It’s fuckin hard to find these nowadays. I want to branch out in my local market a bit more, as there are some topics that I would love to cover. There are still a lot niches that are not saturated, but you have to be willing to go with less traffic, as there are far less people reading sites in my language. Creating Blogs to earn money for advertising are not the main goal for such a market. It’s more to push my own products and get a few gigs along the way.

Build Links Links Links

I am probably not the first one to say this, but the most powerful way to gain traffic and dominate the search engines is to either team up with a few blogger in the same niche, who are actually your nemesis as they target the same peer group. Unless you just want them to read your stuff you are not having big problems. If you start to sell your own stuff, they might actually help you, but if you are trying to get your visitors to buy an affiliate product that all the other blogs are promoting, you have shot yourself in the leg. You don’t need friends if you want to build a niche blog system. Once you have identified a small well paying niche it is time to build 3-5 blogs and create a network building links to each and every network pointing to your main site. Build a few blogs on different platform, create satellite pages on a few other free platforms, write comments on a few blogs to get the search engines started and build more links. The beauty of this concept is that there is only one site that should be really powerful, your main-base so to say, while your other sites may remain smaller with just 10-40 articles. It’s far more important to get links and new people visiting existing sites than trying to push out more content that is read by the same people over and over. Readers are nice for your ego. They might even buy your products and give you good money, yet it is the hardest way to go. It’s tough to sell advertising spaces in a downswing economy. It’s tough to get people to buy your stuff. Yet it is easier to lead people, who are willing to buy to places that offer what the people are looking for.

A 10 Step guide to dominate a niche

1. Find a niche that is searched and has potential for the sake of an example: Pocketsized Nuclear Powerplants
2. Get a domain with the keywords in it. PocketsizedNuclearPowerplants.com would be the best, words added to the back are ok, words added to the front will decrease your search engine ranking. Keyword domains usually rank better for specific search terms than arbitrary words.
3. Get a few more domains relating to your niche.
4. Publish content on each of those sites and link them together. Don’t link all sites together, maybe even consider different hosting accounts and platforms (html site, wordpress, blogger, typo3). Try to make those sites look real. Add a few deep links from articles on your satellite pages to other articles on satellite pages. Don’t link to your satellites from your main page, instead link your satellites there.
5. Build more niche sites for each and every blog. Squidoo, hubpages, tumblr, posterous, all those sites are great to create small niche sites with a few posts about your topic. Content is king as they say and your ultimate goal is not to have 1 site sitting atop of the serp ranking, it’s to have 2-10 in the top10. That would be called total domination. Post articles to ezine articles and hope people use them. Learn that it is less about content, it’s about content with links to the right sites!
6. Interact with the community. Write comments, don’t spam. Write good guestposts to get backlinks. Get people to write articles for you. Do whatever it takes to write content to accompany your links.
7. Ask for links from others. Bribe them, flirt with them, do whatever it takes to get more quality links. Not those cheap mass links from russia or wherever that will probably only hurt your rankings in the long run. Make it natural and stick through the first dry months. It might take 3-4 months, or even longer to gain traffic. Work on other projects. Build something everyday and at the end you will have spread your assets and hopefully a few will start turning a profit.
8. Make sure you can make money with your pocketsized nuclear powerplants, or all this hard work will be useless.
9. Try to catch the beginner. Those are the guys willing to spend money. Looking for shortcuts without having found their leader yet. Those are the guys that use a search engine to find what they are looking for. Don’t rely on people who have read everything.
10. Build more links, write an occasional article every month and enjoy the money that starts to tickle in. The more sites you call your own, the more money you can make. You can always try to get a homerun, it’s probably less work. Yet you need a lot more love from Lady Luck than you can probably afford.

So now you know, making money online is not that easy. It’s hard work. But it is work that can turn into a muse, which means you use all your energy to push that lazy car until it starts again, or leave it on the side of the road if it does not start at all. The better your car, the less pushing it needs.

What can you do to improve your pictures? What should you avoid? What makes someone a pro? What an amateur? What’s the difference? Great video interviews covering all of this.

Even though I think about creating a premium theme, I really love the stuff he is saying and what wordpress stands for. A lot of people creating themes are scared that they will get ripped off and say stuff like: Oh it’s time to switch to something else. Truth to be told, people use wordpress. The market is for wordpress. You switch to something else, you won’t even make half of what you will make when you publish a premium theme. It’s great that the basics come for free, that you can build on it, we should not be scared of the possibilities others will use our stuff.

There is no value in digital products. Absolutely none, you can copy them, reproduce them, mix them and offer them to be downloaded and shared. Unless people understand that there is no money coming from their products, there will always be the fight we are seeing right now. Music/Film industry versus some mid-aged digital pirates sharing their products. I can understand every artist who hates people downloading his stuff, but truth to be told, it’s the fault of the industry. Offering shallow artists a way to broadcast their message towards millions of people was never good! There were simply enough kids who did not know better and bought all the bullshit stuff! Those kids don’t have to buy it nowadays, they will simply hit the internet, download it, listen to it 5 times and get another bunch of songs, ultimately to be sued by some kind of industry who gives a rats ass about the fans. Everybody else stops tripping on the bullshit music once they discover their own taste in music. The problem we face though, is that this mentality has hit every other creative industry as well.

The old business model is outdated

The old business model is simply no good anymore, people are sick of buying stuff they can create with a blank CD and some MP3s themselves. Why should you buy a CD? To support the artist, yep, that’s about the only thing. You could probably simply send some money to the artist via paypal or wire transfer and be better off. At least you would be sure that he receives the money. Noone cares about artists! People simply want their cool products, and a lot of them don’t want to pay for something that can be easily reproduced.

Offer value instead of products

In case you want to sell digital products such as e-books or programs, forget about it unless you target companies or have a bigger picture behind your marketing efforts. There is short term profit, but actually you should sell a service that offers more than a simple product. Why do you think should the average Joe buy something he can get for free? Think about adding additional value, and use the standard edition as promotion or marketing. You want people to buy your product so you have enough money to make ends meet(if those ends are a Sports-car or whatever, so be it)! Joe does not care about your needs, he wants something for his money, so you better offer some additional value. A special edition, unique prints with signature, something that will have value in the future!

Digital mass Products are marketing

Digital Products are nothing more than marketing. The costs for online products are extremely low, and people can even go on the dark side and share your stuff without costs. If you compare the real value of a creation process with the value of a digital product, the digital product will always kill your profit margin. There is no value in an item that can be copied without the loss of quality, everything you can get for that is a compensation for your efforts or some goodwill spending. Think of your digital products as a marketing product instead of something you will make a lot of money with. Share your digital products with private users and charge companies who want to use them Out aim should always be a big audience and influence. Use your Creation to build a fan-base that pays for unique items & promotes your stuff freely.

Do what you love

First of all, if you are in this creative business you should either do what you love, or do what you have to do(some people are forced to express themselves creatively). In case you are into this there is usually the urge to create. Simply create and do what you love, follow the true artist’s spirit. Earning money with the creative industries has been the save road for the feint hearted who did not dare to enter the art circus. There will always be a need for designers, creatives and people who create stuff, but you have to measure up against people who care less than you and create something unique. The mediocre creatives will starve, there is simply no room for overpriced products on a market where everything can be outsourced.

Unique things have value

Whatever you do, it has to be unique, or at least have your signature on it, otherwise it’s worthless. Sounds harsh, but it’s simple as that. This is what makes stock art & photography possible. Devalue your work and compete with the amateurs if you are up to it. Be aware that you compete with people who do it for fun and earn their main income with something else. They don’t need the money, so they can compete cheaply!
There are loads of artists making a good living with their works, even street artists who do not charge their creations on the public walls. You have to find a model to monetize your efforts in case you want to make a living out of it. Creative works can be easily reproduced and have little to no value, as long as the living expenses for people around the globe differ widely. If you want to go the creative road nowadays you have to face the brutal truth, there are loads of people from other countries charging less and working harder. There are people who want your stuff for free and will not spend a dime on your works and go for people who think promotion will pay the bills. Outsourcing & no material value are the poisons of the creative industry. Make sure that your works, no matter what you do, have an additional value attached to it that can not be digitally reproduced if you want to charge for it, otherwise there will always be someone sharing it or picking the cheaper alternative!

There are many fish in the river of ideas, but do you have what it takes to create your own affiliate product? It’s actually pretty easy to create one, especially for creative people like us, but do you think that there is a serious website to cover this issue from scratch?
The sites that offer a guide to affiliate products are usually plastered with their affiliate links and tell you something like this:

Man it’s great to create your own kickass product instead of just selling products from others without offering something yourself

Great. We knew that …. that really helped… not. *sigh*

Back in the days I have been thinking about offering my own affiliate product in the form of an ebook, somehow I never got along writing that, but it’s time to share what I discovered on my research concerning affiliate products & create a short 20-40 page book to accompany this guide and illustrate how it is done.

The idea behind an ebook and creating an affiliate program for it is creating a long term stream of passive income. There is still a big market for good ebooks, but a lot of the niches are saturated, and to be honest, most ebooks offered are not worth what you have to pay for them.

The questions are, how do you find the right partners for your venture and which steps have to be taken to be successful? This guide covers the basic steps from finding a site that will handle your selling, someone that will deliver your digital product and different ways to create a successful affiliate product site.

This guide will not teach you how to create your own affiliate service from scratch, here you will learn how to create your own products and to outsource everything else. So let’s create a product and let others take care of additional promotion and someone else should provide the hardware to handle all the monetary aspects of this side. The set budget for this upcoming experiment will be 100$ for everything from hosting to selling.

Enough introduction, let’s get down to business.

Step 1, finding the – product – publishing – pricing

Narrowing down a niche

How do you choose a niche? Do you want to be part in a hard fought or soft market? Here comes the big secret: It does not matter how hard the market is fought! It only matter how good your product is. A soft market has usually less competitions, but there are probably less potential buyers, hence the soft market. A hard market basically three things:

1. first of all there are probably a lot of buyers

2. there are people who have authority and a name

3. there are a lot of people promoting the products of number 2

Harder fought does not have to be harder to sell stuff, you just have to create a great product. A soft market does not have to be enjoyable on opposite, as there might not be people who are going to buy your product. The golden rule is to make sure you offer an unique product that has big value.

Good niches?

A good niche is a niche where you have a set of knowledge and skills. There is virtually a market for everything, ranging from dating to creativity or internet marketing to name a few of the big niches. Just make sure there are people willing to buy your product.

The pricing?

Depends on your product and your name! For this guide we’ll play wit a product in the price range of 20-30$. To promote the product an offering of 50-70% to your affiliates seems to be reasonable. At least for a digital product.
Basically there are two possibilities, you either look for the big fish and offer expensive products or you sell some small-time stuff and have a supermarket mentality. The bigger and better your name is the more you can charge. A good way is to prove your status by creating a very solid product for a very fair price and offering follow up products and coaching, that will make you the real money.

To be honest, I never understood the price tag of some ebook guides. Most of those books are create to make the no-name author a fortune and offer some basic knowledge that you can find online for free! Do you think a price tag of 50-300$ for a simple ebook sounds reasonable? Go into a bookstore and have a look at the price tags, … tell me how many books you find there that cost that much money. Let’s not forget that most people would be better off with a printed book about marketing and sales management than a get rich book.
So pick an affordable price and start to sell. You want to sell those products to brand and underline your reputation as an expert. In case you create a great product it will sell.

The publishing

Self publishing has never been easier. A nice layout is great, but to be honest it’s not necessary for your first book, you probably don’t have the money for a great designer. And since you are creative, just do it yourself You can hire someone for your next books when you have the cash. In case you want to illustrate something buy cheap stock images and add them. The most important part is to get someone to proofread. Errors and typos have to be avoided at all cost
Then just go on a create a .pdf and add a disclaimer to it.

The goal

This is the first part, we should all have a general idea about what we want to create and should start creating our affiliate product. What’s on the list so far?

1. Pick a niche you have knowledge in.

2. A niche doesn’t matter, they all have advantages and disadvantages, make sure your product is good enough that people will be willing to pay your for it.

3. Pick a realistic price tag.

4. Offer a generous share of your profits.

5. When you publish an ebook it should be available as PDF, you should know how to create one and have someone else to triple check your typing and grammar.

In the next episode we’ll cover how you find partners to sell your ebook, until then I will write a short ebook about creative capital.