Designing Your Blog For Beginners

After reading this you will know how to create a flexible super cool wordpress theme designed for those who want to make some money from their blog.

Lets start by collecting some info. It's best that you don,t just jump in. You'll learn as you read. Below is some qeustions that will help you collect the info that we need.

What are your blog's goals?

Today we're gonna focus on increasing your blogs profit. We'll do this by creating a flexible framework that will allow you to experiment with ad placement, by increasing your blog's ability to grab attention so you can capture more first time visitors, and by increasing your blog's stickiness which will give your users more chances to see an ad that they will actually want to click on.

We're gonna use a plugin that will give you control over the color of certain objects on your blog.

Who is your audience? (and where do they come from)

Lets say your audience are hardcore geeks that are deeply involved with the topic of your blog. And people who come via search engines who have come to buy a product that is related to your blog topic.

Whats is your blog's specific needs? (What type of functions does your blog need in order to meet it's goals)

We want major flexibility. We want to be able to move around some ads without messing around with some code. We also want to be able to change the look of the blog to keep it fresh without messing with some code.

We also want to increase your blog's stickiness by making a "favorite posts" list and related link at the bottom of each blog post.

We'll make a category list which is an easy way to allow your readers to explore your site, and a search bar so your readers can search for very specific content. We also want a blogroll so you can share some link love. Finally, we'll add some recent comments so your visitors can know what the main conversation is within your blog.

Draw up some wireframes ( quick sketches to play around with element placement and layout)

In your rough sketches you will be trying to figure out the best placement of the various blocks that make up your blog. You are deciding what's most important, and where you want your readers eye to move.

This is a very big topic to study so I will chop it down to the basics. The first two things visitors will do when they come to your blog is SEARCH and SCAN. Your visitors are attracted to the following from greatest to least.

1. motion
2. size
3. images
4. color
5. text style (font choice, font weight)
6. position

Once your visitors decided where they can start reading, they determine what to reaf by scanning the page.

Knowing this can allow you to make certain decisions in the layout and design of your blog that will produce that certain response you want from your readers. Which is the clicking of an ad on your blog.

Make a mood board (a collection of images, colors, etc. that will give you the feel that your are looking for)

To do this you will create a virtual board with photoshop or any other related software. You will create a document that you will just pate a bunch of stuff into. These images will help out with a color pallete, exploring texture and form, and also act as inspiration.

Visual design

Visual design will be a much easier job now since you have followed the instructions from above. Now you can concentrate on your blog's balance, energy, and style.

A huge mistake that most newbies make is making each individual element too close. You should leave a little bit of empty space between them.

Next time I will show you how to turn static graphic into a wordpress theme.

Stay tuned!

7 Basic Ways To Make Money Blogging

This post will show you the 7 most popular ways to make money blogging.

The Big Blog Route

This route can make you alot of money but it takes the most time. These types of blogs need a huge audience and high daily visitor traffic.

Benefits: You have fame and more options for monetization. Also, your are able to morket or promote yourself once the right level of fame is acheived.

Disadvantages: this takes alot of time and consistency. This is not for those who have no passion for the topic they are blogging about.

Paid To Blog Route

this is just simply the proess of starting a blog and increasing its pagerank so payperpost can pay you to blog about someone else's site, product or service. The higher your pagerank is the more oppertunities you have to get paid. To get even more oppertunities you should start blogs in multiple niches. If this is done well you can make around $1.5k a month.

Benefits: The best thing about this is you don't have to have much readers. You can have zero readers and make about 15 dollars a day.

Disadvantages: There is no passive income involved. You have to keep working to keep the money rolling in. This can be really really boring!

The Lazy Punk Method

Also called automated blogging or splogging. This process involves pulling content from news sites, rss feeds and search engines automatically.

You could break some copyright laws. Adsense is usually used on these type of blogs.

Benefits: Since these type of blogs are automated you don't have to do much work. Maybe some SEO and a little maintanence.

Disadvantages: Very little profit comes from these type of blogs. Maybe around $5 bucks a month. Unless you make 5000 blogs which will make you $5000 bucks a month.

Sell text links

There are people who want a better ranking in google. You can profit from this. Other bloggers want links frrom other blogs with high pagerank so their own pagerank can increase. The amount you earn depends on your page rank and niche.

Benefits: This doesn't require much work unless you find increasing your pagerank hard. Just like the Pay Per Post blog, you dont need any traffic.

Disadvantages: Your money rises and falls when your pagerank rises and falls. Some text link companys only allow you to sell a cetain amount of links. So that means you can only earn so much. But I warn you to not stuff your blog with paid links. Blogs with too many links are considered "link farms". In the eyes of google link farms are evil. So if your site has too many links it might get put out of the search engine and your pagerank will defenitely decrease.

Adsense Only Or Affiliate Program Blog.

In this process you will create a blog based on keywords with a high price. What you will do is create keyword rich blog posts, optimize it for the google search engine then slap on some adsense ads or an affiliate program and just leave it alone.

The main focus is getting links to thos keywords specific blog posts. It is longtail keywords that you want to aaim for. Longtail keywords are variations of popular keywors that you can easily optimize for the search engine.

When you target the long tail someone can easily find your blog and click on an ad or generate a commission for you through an affiliate program.

Benefits: This route won't take up much of your time if you hire the right guy to write the articles for you. You can update the blog evret two weeks or evrey month!

Disadvantages: There is alot of competition. Especially in the niches that are profitable. What you can do is go for volume. Do this by creating a mass amount of blogs across multiple niches.

The Blog Network Or Contractor Path

You join a network and get paid to maintain and update content on other blogs. You get paid according to page views, You can receive a specific set fee in the hundreds, or get a share of the blogs earnings from ads.

Benefits: The income is stable because you get paid evrey month. This could open up doors to other jobs because you have proven yourself. By writing good content for a blog network. Also association with the right blog network can lead to more opportunities as well.

Disadvantages: why give your good content to another blogger when you can publish the articles on your own blog and keep 100% percent of the profits.

There is many ways to make money blogging. Just make sure you pick the path that suites your scheduls and skills.

Drive Traffic To Your Blog With Another Blogger's Content

I'm doing it right now and I will continue to do it.

This method is pretty simple actually. All you do is submit another bloggers content to social media sites.

When you do this, Others will think of you as the guy that promotes useful content.

Another way to do this is by making a blog post about their content. This does not mean copy and paste!

Do not do this to evrey post that you see. You will be viewed as a spammer!

source: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/06/25/how-to-promote-other-peoples-content-and-drive-traffic-to-your-own-blog/