• You can quickly put together speedlinking or link luv posts based on keywords.
• The built-in authority sites that Link Luv Post Builder crawls can help you gain authority.
• You are able to add to the built-in list of searched sites to include your favorites as well.
• You can help you expand your blogging circle and find new reading material within whatever niche you choose
• By running regular searches, you will be able to stay on top of trends and breaking news
• Entering a keyword and searching brings up a hundred links from as many sources, this can help you break writers’ block, expand story ideas and think in fresh ways.
• When you link out, you often get a trackback. This means that Link Luv Post Builder can also help you build incoming links to your blog, not just outgoing links to others’.

There are more things I could add, but I’m going to leave it at that. Again, use the link above to read my full review at Pajama Professional or you can purchase here:

Download Link Luv Post Builder

Blogs today are about information. Successful blogs today are about very specific information. For example, a blog about English Literature probably will not be the biggest success because the topic is too wide. However, if you build a blog about the poetry of John Donne, you stand a fighting chance of dominating your niche.

After having created several niche blogs, I’ve narrowed the process down to seven specific steps. This article is an introduction to these steps and this website. This article will be followed by articles discussing the seven steps in more detail and sharing resources I use when building and advertising my niche sites.

• Step One: Brainstorm

  Perhaps the hardest part of creating a blog is choosing a topic. If you’re looking to make money or bring in visitors, your topic could very well make or break your success. The first step I take when choosing a new niche blog topic involves making two lists: a list of topics I love and a list of topics about which I am know ledgable or would like to become knowledgeable. If you are new at this, I suggest choosing something you already know about, but if you are willing to research it isn’t strictly necessary.

  To create the lists, I simply brainstorm. Let your mind wander and write down anything that comes into it. There’s no editing required at this stage because these lists will be just for you. Once your lists are complete, compare them. It’s quite likely you’ll have some topics on both lists. These are the topics with which you will move on to the next step. Choose your two or three favorites and get ready to do some research.

• Step Two: Research Keywords to Target a Sub-Niche

  You could spend anywhere from ten minutes to ten days researching keywords. In fact, keyword research is an excellent way to procrastinate. Don’t let it be. Allot yourself a specific amount of time (no more than an hour) to research each of your potential topics. There are many tools you can use to discover a niche’s profit potential. You want to make sure that there are plenty of products available in the niche (Amazon and Clickbank are both great places to do that) because if people are selling, that means that people are most likely buying. Run your keywords through Google: you want enough results to show there’s an interest, but not so many that the niche is super-saturated. I will cover this in much more depth in upcoming articles.

  Once you’ve accumulated the information necessary, choose a broad topic and then use the same information to narrow it down to a sub-niche. With so many niche blogs out there, the smaller your target, the better chance you have of scoring big. There is, of course, a fine line between targeted and too small. For instance, don’t start up a blog about a certain brand of contact lenses; the chances of getting either traffic or sales are very slim.

• Step Three: Choose a Domain (And Buy it!)

  All the good ones are gone. That’s what you’ll hear about domain names from many people. Is it true? Only if you’re looking for a single word or popular two-word combination. When people refer to the “good ones” they’re not generally talking about the type of domain name that is well-suited to a niche blog. Your topic is specific and your domain name should be as well. By this point, you should have a list of keywords for your niche. Use different combinations of these to find an effective domain name.

  For finding domain names, I recommend a few resources: Go Daddy’s Smart Search and Make Words dot com. Both of these free search engines will add popular terms to your keywords if your domain isn’t available. For instance, you may want to buy ContactLenses.com. Sorry, you’re way too late for that. However, these searches will automatically add words like “the” or “best” or “your” to create domain names that actually are currently available. It’s very helpful and sometimes you end up with a domain that’s even better than the one you were originally hoping to purchase.

  If you are willing to shell out some cash for an existing domain, I recommend checking out the Digital Point Forums. You can usually find some great names here. However, as I said, keyword domains are generally better suited for targeted niche marketing.

• Step Four: Choose a Blog Platform, Design and Begin Posting

  Wordpress…Wordpress…Wordpress. Trust me, it’s easy enough for a newbie to customize and robust enough to keep a hard-core techie feature-happy. Wordpress is free and it has everything you need to build an original, eye-catching, easily navigable blog.

  There are tons of design resources online both in template and how-to guide formats, so I’m not going to delve into that topic too much in this article. I’ll just share with you what I consider to be the three most important aspects of a well-designed blog: (1) It’s not over-designed or too busy. (2) You limit yourself to ten categories or less. (3) Stick with a regular posting schedule - whether it’s once a week or twice a day, readers like consistency.

  Once you’re up and running, start posting. Writing style, length and content is all up to you. If you feel stuck, visit some other sites/blogs in your niche for ideas or check out some forums. One thing to keep in mind is that consistency is key. I highly recommend setting a posting schedule. You don’t need to post every day, but if you start out posting every Tuesday and Thursday, then stick to that.

• Step Five: Advertise and Build Traffic

  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Let me rephrase the question. If you write the best post in the whole blogosphere and visits your blog is it still the best post ever? The answer to the question is this: if you do not have traffic, you do not have a blog. It’s as simple as that. You must let people know that your blog is awesome and get them to come visit it… often.

  There are as many options for advertising as there are niches, but some art more effective than others. A few of the most effective free ways to advertise are: RSS feeds, Technorati, Stumble Upon, article directories, site maps (for natural search engine results) and Craigslist.

• Step Six: Start Building Your List

  The money is in the list. Repeat this over and over in your head until you believe it. The best way to look at this is to view each subscriber as $1 a month. The trick is that while you view them as $1, you also need to view them as an individual person.

  It may seem that if you are building a blog you don’t need to build a list. While it isn’t strictly necessary, it is highly advisable if you are looking to make money online. In order to build a list you need an information product to give away as an incentive for sign-up and an autoresponder. Though I loved using Aweber, I didn’t use it often enough to justify the charges. I will discuss autoresponders in depth a bit later, but you definitely need one for your list.

• Step Seven: Monetize

  Making money online is a huge topic. There are as many ways to do it as there are dollars to be made. From affiliate marketing to private advertising, you have a huge array of choices when it comes to monetizing your blog. On Choose a Niche, I will be discussing many of them, starting with some of the simplest.

And there you have it: the seven essential steps to building a successful niche site. Tomorrow’s post will focus on Step One: Brainstorm.

To create the lists, I simply brainstorm. Let your mind wander and write down anything that comes into it. There’s no editing required at this stage because these lists will be just for you. Once your lists are complete, compare them. It’s quite likely you’ll have some topics on both lists. These are the topics with which you will move on to the next step. I’m a visual person, so I like to use a Venn Diagram to map out my list. It makes it easier to find comparisons:

During this stage there are also some questions you will want to ask yourself:

1. Is it possible to build an entire blog around this topic?
2. Will you get tired of writing about it?
3. Is there enough content to write about indefinitely?
4. Is there a strong community of hungry buyers (I will discuss this more in the next step as well)?

As you become more experienced you will come up with your own list of questions, but these are good basics with which you can start.

Once you have narrowed down your lists, choose two to three topics to carry over to the next step. Because of the over-saturation of many markets, you will want to narrow down your topic to a sub-niche. This will be down in Step Two: Research Keywords to Target a Sub-Niche.

Search engine optimization is important for a blog in any niche and choosing the right keywords can be crucial to a site’s success. At this point, you are going to run each of your narrowed down idea through these steps because they will (1) help you determine whether the niche is oversaturated and (2) help to build a list of keywords to target when you are optimizing and writing articles for your blog.

To determine market saturation, we will use a formula called the keyword effectiveness index. KEI compares the number of search results for a particular keyword or phrase with the number of web pages returned by that particular keyword or phrase. Easy, right? Sure, just as easy as any other aspect of search engine optimization. Which is to say that it sounds straightforward and simple, but after three days of research on how to optimize you feel that perhaps you’ll just write that Great American Novel after all.

The formula looks like this:

In English, the formula says that as popularity increases and the number of competing sites decreases, the better choice a keyword is. To get a clear picture of the situation, I generally build a spreadsheet with four columns: keyword, # searches, # pages, KEI.

Open your favorite web browser and pull up Overture’s Keyword Selection Tool. Type in your primary keyword and click the little blue arrow. You will get a list of suggested keywords and the number of searches conducted. Copy and paste as many results as you wish into the spreadsheet you created (in the keyword and searches columns).

Next go to Yahoo and search for each of the keywords you got from Overture. If you use a spreadsheet application, you can enter the KEI formula in the fourth column so that calculations are made automatically. Below is an example of a completed KEI spreadsheet:

The two keywords I highlighted are distinctly different. The first one is somewhat usable. I think with a few cleverly placed articles it could work. However, the second one that is highlight is completely hopeless. I have no idea where the word “hulk” comes in and how there could possible be over 300 people searching for that term. You will often find anomalies like that as you conduct your keyword research. They provide nothing more than a bit of comic relief.

Since we are looking for the highest KEI, you are now getting even closer to your topic. This is a good point to touch base with your topics. If you can see that there just aren’t enough searches for any of the keywords in one of your topics, don’t waste any more time with it. Otherwise, let’s move on to the next step: assessing the competition.

If you are going to attempt to infiltrate a niche in the hopes of financial success or social popularity, you need to know your competition. The KEI of a search term can give a good indication of where it stands, but it can’t tell you how tough it will be to get noticed. Even if there were 50 million searches and only 50 competitors, you could still be sunk if those 50 competitors have huge budgets and you are working with $100 a month.

There are some very cool niche marketing keyword tools available for a price. Wordtracker is one of the best known and you can use the free trial to see if it feels like a good fit for you. If you know of a tool that is not already on the Keyword Research Tools list please leave a comment and I will check it out.

For finding domain names, I recommend a few resources: Go Daddy’s Smart Search and Make Words dot com. Both of these free search engines will add popular terms to your keywords if your domain isn’t available. For instance, you may want to buy ContactLenses.com. Sorry, you’re way too late for that. However, these searches will automatically add words like “the” or “best” or “your” to create domain names that actually are currently available. It’s very helpful and sometimes you end up with a domain that’s even better than the one you were originally hoping to purchase.

One more thing to keep in mind: keywords. When you’re choosing your domain you have to decide if you want a name that will brand your site (like Google) or a name that uses your keywords to tell exactly what your site is about (like ContactLenses). For a niche blog, I highly recommend going with the latter because you want to utilize your keywords as much as possible. Also, within laser-targeted niches, it’s best to tell potential visitors what the site is about while they’re searching. If someone is looking for contact lenses, he/she much more likely to visit a site with those words in the domain name than a site with an obscure branded name like TrickyFly or MosheMashe.

I’m not going to recommend a specific host. You’ll have to decide your price range and the features that are personally important to you. There are, however, a few things you must have if you’re going to run niche sites:

1. Unlimited Domain Names: Unless you want to pay for several hosting accouts, you’ll want a host that allows you to have unlimited domain names on one account. As your traffic increases, your bandwidth usage will increase and you’ll have to pay more for that, but your traffic and income should increase relative to each other. Meaning that by the time you need to upgrade your hosting account, you’ll be bringing in enough profit to afford it.
2. Plenty of MySQL databases: Wordpress runs on MySQL, as do many other blog engines. If you’re going to host many sites under one account, you’ll need to make sure there are enough databases included in the account.
3. Uptime: Believe me, you don’t want to go with an unreliable host just because the price is right. Check uptime guarantees and don’t settle for anything less than 99.99%. If you have to pay an extra $2 a month for it, you’ll be glad you did later. I made the mistake of going with a super-discounted host when I first launched Pajama Professional and it was a nightmare in terms of both reliability and customer service.

   I now use Quality Host Online and they are outstanding. Last May when I’d just started marketing to my list, I sent out hundreds of emails at once (not realizing that I needed to use a service for this) and crashed the server my (and several other clients’) websites were on. They got the server back up quickly, but kept my sites shut down. Once I explained what I’d done, they made me promise never to do it again, but turned my account back on.

   Oftentimes internet hosts offer free or reduced domain names with the purchase of a hosting plan. This is a great way to get a good deal and avoid paying for at least one of your domains. Just remember, read the fine print and make sure the hosting account meets all your criteria.

There are tons of design resources online, both in template and how-to guide formats, so I’m not going to delve into that topic too much in this article. I’ll just share with you what I consider to be the three most important aspects of a well-designed blog: (1) It’s not over-designed or too busy. (2) You limit yourself to ten to twenty categories. (3) Stick with a regular posting schedule - whether it’s once a week or twice a day, readers and robots (search engines) like consistency.

There are two types of SEO that relate to your site: onsite optimization and offsite optimization. I am not an SEO expert, so I will just briefly cover some basic optimization methods that you should employ as you build your site. If you took my advice and installed Wordpress, then there are several SEO plugins available to you.

Let’s start with on-site SEO: meta-tags, keywords, and internal linking structure and robots.txt. These may sound a bit overwhelming at first, but I promise they are a lot easier to employ than you’d think. In fact, the two most complicated - meta-tags and robots.txt - can be almost completely automated by some very cool plugins.

Meta-Tags

You have already chosen your domain name with your keywords in mind so now we are going to embed them in your pages as well. When I say “embed,” I’m not talking about any black-hat tactics (never put hidden text on your pages!). You will not find any of those on Choose A Niche simply because they rarely have longevity when it comes to SEO. If it works this month, Google will learn it next month and then you just have a bunch of junk code clogging up your pages. We will be using good old-fashioned white-hat SEO tactics with the help of a seriously awesome Wordpress plugin.

You can write meta-tags by hand if it floats your boat, but my highest recommendation goes to All-in-One SEO Pack. It is easy to optimize and automates all the meta-tagging that you don’t have time to learn about right this minute.

If you are looking for a killer theme that is SEO Pack-enabled, I suggest you pop over to Court’s Internet Marketing School and see his SEO Wordpress Themes. While you are there, don’t forget to subscribe to his feed so you can read his blog regularly and catch up on the archives later. Court gives away invaluable information with every post he writes. Now, back to work.

Keywords

Another on-site SEO tactic is the use of keywords in your posts. Some internet marketers are very mindful of this, making sure each post consists of a certain percentage of their primary keywords. I do not recommend becoming obsessive about it. If you are over-concerned with including keywords in your posts, your content can sound unnatural. The key to keywords is to find a happy medium: use them enough to make your site topic(s) clear to the spiders, but not so much that your readers begin to feel the repetition.

Internal Linking Structure

To achieve the best rankings possible throughout your site, you need to make sure your entire site is being indexed by the bots. The first thing you can do to help this along is to create sitemaps. Most of my sites have two: one for my readers and one for the spiders. There are super Wordpress plugins that automate the creation and maintenance of sitemaps. For my robot sitemap, I use Google XML Sitemap generator. For humans, the Dagon Design Sitemap creates a user-friendly organization of my posts.

With Wordpress, you have the option to place posts in categories. I highly recommend that you use this feature, but plan it out carefully before you begin writing. Choose about 10-20 categories to post within. It is very easy to let your categories get out of control and it will be much harder to fix them later if you don’t plan well now. Trust me, one of my blogs has over 100 categories and it is taking me forever to reorganize it.

An often-overlooked area of on-site search engine optimization are the links you place in your posts to other posts on your blog. If you are discussing a topic that relates to another about which you have already written, link back to the related article. To increase internal links, you can also install the Wasabi Related Posts plugin or something similar. You will need to insert a tiny piece of code into your Wordpress theme, but this is very easy and it is a skill you need to develop as a blogger anyway. Unless you want to pay outsourcing fees every time you want to alter any tiny bit of your layout.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file lives in the root directory of your blog. It is important because it tells search engine robots (hence the name) what parts of your site to index and what parts to skip. Wordpress creates a ton of duplicate content because it automatically makes pages for each category, archives by date and all sort of other instances where your posts are … well … reposted. With the robots.txt file you can tell the spiders not to index those pages and you won’t have to worry about being penalized for having duplicate content. The Google supplemental index is not a fun place to find your page.

If you aren’t a coder, creating your own robots.txt file is a bit of a daunting task. There are articles online that can help you out. However, if you are new to this, I recommend using the Robots Meta plugin by Joost de Valk. After filling in just a few (well-explained) options, you will have an optimized, customized robots.txt file of your very own. The plugin even puts the file in the right place for you so you do not have to even upload anything.

Incoming Links
Off-site SEO is primarily concerned with getting others to link to your site. You can do this by trading links with other bloggers, but the best type of link is one way. You could pay for links, but Google considers this cheating and your pagerank could seriously suffer. The very best way to get quality one-way links into your blog is to comment on other blogs and make friends.

The key to making friends through comments is to write constructive, interesting things that actually add to the conversation. As my college history professor used to say when we did peer editing of essays: “This isn’t about sending Valentine’s!” Meaning that writing “Great post!” is as useless as never reading the post in the first place. If you put time and thought into your comments people will be intrigued and often they will come check out your blog.

Once you’re up and running, start posting. Writing style, length and content is all up to you. If you feel stuck, visit some other sites/blogs in your niche for ideas or check out some forums. Mark at 45n5 hosts the Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs list. These blogs are all well-written and full of great content on how to make money online. If you are stuck this is a killer place to start.

1. Install the RSS Feed Plug-in for Wordpress and submit your feed to Feedburner

   Feed subscribers are very important to the success of your blog. By installing the feed plugin, all of your feeds will be routed through Feedburner so you can get a somewhat accurate count of your subscribers. I saw somewhat accurate because feed reader counts can be skewed by many factors, including search engine bots.

   Once you are on the Feedburner site, be sure to read up on allowing users to subscribe to your feed via email. There are a ton of ways to optimize and advertise your blog RSS, so be sure to spend some time deciding which methods you would like to try.

2. Register at Technorati, My Blog Log and at least three other blog directory sites

   When you register for these sites, you become part of a community. It really is not about being listed in the directory, but about finding other bloggers in your niche and networking with them. Although you don’t want to spend too much time on these sites, I recommend dedicating a couple of hours a week in your schedule to making friends with other bloggers in your niche via blog directory sites.

3. Add your index page and at least two posts to Stumble Upon

   If you aren’t comfortable doing this under your own Stumble Upon login, create a new one or ask one of your new networking buddies to submit your articles for you. Just be sure this gets done. Stumble Upon can bring a huge influx of traffic to your blog. Because Stumble Upon users can narrow down the topics they surf, some of this traffic is highly targeted and that makes it high quality. Yes, some of these hits are simply empty numbers, but if you can get a few articles regularly Stumbled, you can count on it as a fairly steady source for targeted traffic.

4. Write an article with your new blog linked in the resource box and submit it to EzineArticles.com

   I have an article on Speed Reading that gets front-page Google results because it resides on E-Zine Articles. There area few keys to this. You need to submit content that has not been and will not be published anywhere else. It needs to be well-written, 100% original and exclusively submitted to E-Zine Articles.

   There are other article sites that may work just as well, but I haven’t tried them out for quick results, so I can’t vouch for them. Within a couple of weeks to publishing my articles to E-Zine Articles, my work was syndicated several times and ranked. Before you do this, spend some time on your resource box. Think of it as a mini advertisement for your blog. You only have a few sentences, so make them count.

5. Register for Google Webmaster Tools (it’s free)

   Once you are logged in, add your blog to your dashboard. Be sure to include the XML sitemap created by the Wordpress plugin. This is a much faster way to get your new site indexed than simply submitting it to Google. Though this does not guarantee that your site will be crawled, this method has never failed to get my new sites indexed within the first couple of days - no more than a week.

6. Start commenting on other blogs

   This is the very best way to get 100% targeted traffic. Find some blogs in your niche and get to know them. Read the archives and start commenting on the newer articles. Many bloggers don’t pay much attention to comments on posts older than a month, so don’t waste your time commenting on those. Stick to the new stuff and you’ll soon be noticed.

   Here’s the thing: be useful. If you jump around leaving comments like “Great post!” you are doing nothing but filling space. The way to get noticed (and get clicked) is to contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. Share your opinion, answer a question or find some other way to be sure your comment adds actual value. Spam commenting will never bring positive results.

As I said, there are a million ways to advertise for free, but those six will get you headed in the right direction. You will notice that most of them focus on community. The blogosphere can be a tight community and, at times, hard to break into. If you and your site contribute original content and insights then all it takes is persistence to get noticed.

The best way to look at your list is to view each subscriber as $1 a month. The trick is that while you view them as $1, you also need to view them as an individual person. Your list needs to be nurtured or your subscribers won’t stick around very long. If you only contact them when you want them to buy something, you might be seeing dollar signs instead of names. But more about that in a few minutes.

It may seem that if you are building a blog you don’t need to build a list. I mean, you are already trying to build RSS subscribers, so what’s the difference? The difference is huge, really. If you want to seriously make money online, you need a list of hungry, trusting people to contact when great offers come your way.

If you are just blogging because you enjoy it, then you don’t really need to concern yourself with list building. However, if you want to make money online, your blog is the perfect hub for this activity.

Building a list can be a time-consuming and tricky process. You need to start with an incentive. Though you might pick up a few subscribers here and there without one, the best way to hook people is to give them something for free. Here is the trick part. If you give them something super-valuable to get them to join your list, you might just hook freebie seekers. On the other hand, you do not want to hand out junk or you’ll lose them fast.

What I have found to be the best list bait is a high quality report. It needs to impart knowledge that is original, but nothing too in depth. Your subscribers need to be left wanting more and thinking that you are the only one who can give it to them.

Once you have chosen your report, you will set up a sign-up form on your blog. I recommend you place it on the sidebar so that it is viewable from each page on your blog. For an example, you can look at the Newsletter Sign-up on Pajama Professional. I do not push the list on that site very hard, but I do get regular sign-ups simply because of the form placement.

As users sign up, you need to make sure you immediately start building trust and establishing your expertise. This is why you must have a strong series of autoresponder messages in place. A quality autoresponder service is inexpensive yet invaluable to you. Most people who subscribe to your list will be subscribed to numerous other lists at the same time. Every person on your list is just one click away from being … well … not on your list. As I said before: nurture.

I use Aweber and I highly recommend their service. For less than $20 a month I have basically unlimited resources. Once you are signed up, create a list and load it up with messages. Then grab the code to place a subscription form on your site. Once that is completed all you have to do is sit back and wait for the subscribers to roll in.

Back to nurturing. Even if the subscribers are rolling in, they will be rolling right back out if all you are doing is pitching to them. Your messages need to provide quality information that they cannot get elsewhere. Freebies are always good too. However, you need to be careful with how often and what types of free products you offer because you do not want a list full of freebie hounds.

Establishing a large list of targeted, hungry prospects is the primary goal of most internet marketers. In order to maintain a list like that, you need to appreciate your prospects. Treat them well and you will build trust and acceptance. They will know they can count on you for quality information and products.

Regardless of your niche, you need to remember that your list is made up of people. When you are writing content and choosing products (freebies or sales items), put yourself in their shoes. Make sure that whatever you are offering is something you yourself would find valuable. If it is the same freebie e-book that everyone is giving away this month, buy the giveaway rights to something new.

It might cost a bit to begin with, but it will be worth it when you have a happy list. They will know that if you give such high quality items away for free, then whatever you are selling must be truly fantastic. And make sure that it is. You will only ever get away with selling crap once. Sure, you might make a few hundred dollars, but your reputation is shot and your list subscribers have all jumped ship.

When building and maintaining any type of marketing list, you need to offer quality, by ethical and never try to sell something in which you do not honestly believe. If you stick to those three rules of thumb, you should be able to build a list full of members worth their weight in gold.

Just remember that whatever method(s) you choose must be tested and tweaked. Rarely will a monetization tactic work straight out of the box. Each blog has a different set of readers with a different set of triggers, get to know your readers and you will be able to offer them products they need. If you can do this, you can make money online.

When it comes to blog monetization methods, your options are often limited by certain statistics (pagerank, RSS subscribers, etc.). These statistics vary with different methods and they change as fast as technology. Here is a brief overview of some of the most popular ways to make money online.

Google Adsense

The bread and butter of many a pro-blogger, Google Adsense has severely lost its charm in the last six months. Many bloggers make the majority of their online income from this smart advertising script. However, it is quickly becoming less and less viable to do so. The Adsense terms of service are quite strict and, at the same time, vague. By leaving too much room for interpretation, Google makes it difficult for even the whitest-hatted blogger to be sure they won’t be penalized.

Adsense is easy to set up and it is fun to play with different options to achieve the best results. If you are willing to play closely by the rules, you can still make a good income with the program. My advice is to enjoy it, but do not quit your day job because of a good month (or five) with Adsense. In this case, it is especially important to diversify your income streams.

Contextual Advertising
Selling text links that pass Google rank is a quick way - these days - to ensure that you won’t have any rank to pass for very long. You have two choices here: (1)Give up on pagerank and sell all the texts links you want or (2) sell the links, but make sure you put “nofollow” code on them so that you are not selling pagerank. At this point, pagerank still matters and I predict it will for quite some time. For this reason, I would recommend protecting your rank and making sure you follow the rules when it comes to text links. Don’t think Google will give you a pass because you are just starting out. They will find you.

That said, there are some lucrative (if you are in the right niche) text linking options out there. For those of you not familiar with the term, a contextual linking program chooses words within your posts that are related to their advertisers’ sites and creates links. The links are usually double-underlined and a color other than standard blue (Kontera links are green).

Affiliate Marketing

This is arguably the very best way to make the very most money online. There are many ways to go about selling affiliate products. You can write a review on your blog, become active in forums and place affiliate information in your signature or simply place referral ads on your website.

If you are interested in affiliate marketing, I recommend
you learn from The Super Affiliate, Zac Johnson. This guy is the real deal, he has made serious money as an affiliate and he shares his tactics. His writing style is clear and very accessible, even for the newest of newbies.

Selling Ad Space Independently

Once your blog has some good stats going, you can set up some ad spots and sell advertising independently. For an example of an ad page, you can visit Pajama Professional’s Advertising Page. You will want to include the following statistical information for prospective advertisers:

• Alexa ranking
• Technorati authority and ranking
• Google Pagerank
• RSS Subscriber count
• Traffic (daily, monthly, visits, page views)
• Other interesting statistics

The advertising information page should also include details about the ad spots you have available and the rates. You may want to offer specials to new advertisers or advertisers who buy ad blocks over a certain period of time. Many blogs only offer 30 day periods, but I read an article recently challenging this idea (Selling Ads for One Month on your Blog is Stupid) and decided that it was absolutely correct. Your ad terms are entirely up to you, testing is really the only way to know what will work best.

Paid Posting

Another monetization option is to write paid posts for sites like PayPerPost and Smorty. Google is not a fan of paid posts, so there is a bit of a catch 22 here. You see, in order to get high-paying post opportunities you need a decent pagerank. However, if Google sees that you are posting paid reviews, they will smack your pagerank down. So what do you do? Pay-Per-Post is establishing their own system called RealRank in response to Google’s anti-paid linking policy.

If you are just starting your blog, I would recommend laying off on using paid posting for a bit. Blogs younger than three months rarely have very high-paying opportunities anyway, so I suggest biding your time until all the pagerank slapping settles down. Once you have been live for 90 days or so then you might see where the dust has settled.

Making money with your blog is not the overnight magic pill many people will have you believe. Most of the people who try to convince you that it is are just trying to sell you a product or service that promises overnight riches. Do not believe it.

In order to make money from your blog, you need traffic. It takes time to build traffic so you must work hard to create quality content and continue patiently marketing your site. Do not be discouraged if you don’t make even a penny for several months. Establishing your authority and expertise takes time, but it will happen.

This brings to a close my seven step method for choosing a niche. Please use the comments to ask any questions you may have regarding anything I have covered so far on this blog.