Now that you’ve carefully chosen your topic or “niche” it’s time to choose a home for your blog.

There are many hundreds of places on the web where you can set up a blog. Some are free, while others cost money. By learning about some of the different options and considering your personal technical skills and support needs, you should be able to settle on an option for your blog home that suits both you and your budget.

Generally, there are two ways to host your blog. They are known as remote hosting and self hosting. Hosting in this instance means housing, as in housing your blog. The computer server with your blog data on it is your host. Remote hosting means that to access your blog, you go to a website that houses your blog. Self hosting is for those with their own servers and domain names, or their own domain names and a paid web host.

Many beginning users opt for remotely hosted solutions. In some ways this path is much easier for a beginning blogger. The remote hosting company will often provide you with a template for your blog so you don’t need to do any web design. The host will handle all of the html code needed to make your site run smoothly. Often, your remote host company will provide you with tools and tutorials with step-by-step instructions to complete many basic blog tasks.

Some remote hosting solutions charge bloggers a monthly or yearly fee for their web hosting services, but some of the most popular hosting solutions are free. The big names you should be aware of are Blogger and WordPress. With each one you can get yourself set up rather easily and start blogging through one of their templates in a matter of minutes.

Let’s use Blogger as an example. Blogger has several advantages because it is simple, and it is a great site to get set up on so that you can practice your blogging skills if you are a new blogger. If nothing else you can easily put a quick site out and try a few sample blog entries to get a feel for blogging.

To get signed up, simply go to www.Blogger.com. It’s part of the Google family, so if you already use Gmail as your email provider, you will just need to log in to the members area in the upper right corner to get started.

If you do not use Gmail, don’t worry. A large orange button just below the sign in area is “Create A Blog” and it really only does take a minute! In fact, the hardest part of the whole process will probably be deciding on a name for your blog and choosing the template for your website. Even if you are use Gmail on a regular basis, you will still have to select a blog name when you log in to the Blogger application.

Once you are signed up, you can go through the process of selecting a template (colors, shapes, etc) for your blog. Automatically applied, you can modify the look of your blog several times by just clicking around. Posting is equally simple.

However, if you have been online for some time, you may not want to use these free sites or any of their pre-fabricated templates. Additionally, you may not like some of the features or feature restrictions, or perhaps you would just like to have more complete control over your blog. You may want to carefully customize every nook and cranny of your blog. If this is the case, and you have some web savvy, then you may want to pursue self-hosting for your blog.

Self-hosting tools that are available to bloggers are many and varied, but one of the best, and the software that this ebook will focus on for the rest of the text is the WordPress blog software suite. While the remote hosting side of WordPress (www.wordpress.com) is free, to use the self-hosting WordPress software you will need a domain name (less than $10) and some kind of web hosting arrangement, which will cost you around $7 – $12 per month. We will cover domain names and web hosting options more completely in a later post “Resources for Bloggers”. For now, just consider that while the free versions are convenient, when you use the self-hosting software you will be able to customize your site more completely and you will be free to run all kinds of advertisements, which can be a good money maker for you. 

To get the WordPress software for self-hosting, go to www.wordpress.org. You can download the software for free directly from the website. Once you have downloaded the software, you will need to install it. Do not worry about this being hard or overly complicated—WordPress brags about their “famous 5 minutes installation” and you will be up and running in practically no time.

Should you need additional help for only $17 you can download Blogging Made Easy With Wordpress® it’s a package of 10 Videos of step by step Tutorial, this package of Video Tutorials will help you build your own brand (Domain Name) recognition.

Till next time, happy Easter everyone. 

As you look over your potential niches, it may be smart to consider the competition. Go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and search for other blogs covering the topics that are candidates for being your chosen niche. Does it look like there are a lot of other blogs available on this topic? What kind of blogs are they? Is there one that really stands out as the “industry leader” for that niche?

This last piece of research is critical for letting you know if your idea is viable. Researching the viability of your idea can let your know whether putting the time and effort into a blog in this topic area will be worth your time. Also, it can give you ideas for what is or isn’t on a blog in your niche.

For example, if you were interested in celebrity blogging, you would quickly notice that www.perezhilton.com seems to be the current industry leader. His content leads the ranks on the search engine. He seems like he is everywhere!

Thinking that he is the dominating leader in this niche, you might give up on your idea. However, by researching his content posts and history, you would quickly realize that while Perez Hilton’s blog gets millions of hits a day, the topics of his posts are all younger stars in Hollywood and the UK.

Therefore, if your passion is for older celebrities now retired in Mexico, Perez Hilton is actually not competition for you. You fill a gap that he misses with what he is posting in his blog. Also, if the other blogs in this area seem to be of low quality or don’t address an element of your topic that you are very interested in discussing, then you will know that your idea has potential.

Now, if it looks like there is already a very popular blog in your topic area that pulls in a lot of traffic, and deeper research does not reveal any big gaps you could exploit, you may want to reconsider your approach or choose a different area of focus. You want to enjoy your part-time blog career, not spend your days beating your head against the computer screen trying to figure out how to steal traffic from an established industry leader.

Now that you have at least three niche ideas that you are excited for and passionate about, we can consider whether or not your niche idea is popular enough to get traffic flowing to your blog.

Your web traffic turns into your revenue stream people visit your site, read your content, and click on your advertising. So, you need to be sure you have a topic that other people are interested in reading about often. It can be anything that gets people interested, anything that gets them excited.

As you can see from the example website featured in my last post, your topic doesn’t have to be universally popular. You just need a topic popular enough that some people would like to read about it. So how can you tell which of your three topic ideas is the most popular? Well, like everything these days, you can just look it up on the internet. There are many tools for getting a number to put around the popularity of your topic. Some of the better tools for getting traffic numbers are:

The Google Keyword tool: You can just type in your topic, and this tool will let you know how many people are searching for that topic on Google and the words they are using to search for it. These search words are known as keywords, and the numbers shown are from the previous month.

This free tool is available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal The SEO Book Keyword tool: While the Google Keyword tool is more straightforward, this tool (also free) will give you an idea of how many searches for your topic are being conducted all over the web. You can try it by simply entering a word in the box and clicking the submit button.The website is here:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

As you check out your niche topics in the tools listed above, write down the number of searches that took place last month for information on that topic. When it comes to deciding what you would like to feature as your blog topic, you don’t have to necessarily pick the topic that has the most searches. What this kind of keyword volume research really does is give you a good reality check to ensure that there are other people interested in your niche. You want a topic that has a regular trickle of search volume, as that will translate into potential future traffic (and revenue) for your niche blog.

For example, consider the keyword phrase “US presidential election”. In an election year, and probably even the year before an election, this keyword would seem very popular. A niche blog dedicated to the neckties worn during the US presidential election would probably get a lot of traffic during those two years. However, once the elections are over, the traffic would dry up. So while this keyword looks viable for a while, it ultimately fails the steady traffic test.

Thinking of this steady traffic test, look over your list. Which topic have you selected that may meet the steady traffic rule today, but might not meet that test tomorrow?

Your site visitors will stay longer when you employ these tactics!

Read on to find some top tips for keeping your site visitors longer and therefor increasing your chance at the all important sale!

The more time people spend at your web site, the more time you’ll have to persuade them to buy your
product or service. Below are ten powerful ways to keep visitors at your web site longer.

1. Offer your web site visitors a freebie if they take the time to fill out your online survey. They’ll be at the site longer and might buy something afterwards.

2. Provide your web site visitors with content they can’t read anywhere else. People will stay longer at your web site to read the original content.

3. Make sure all your web pages load fast or your visitors will leave fast. Time is precious; they won’t
waste it waiting for your site to load.

4. Use headlines and sub headlines all over your your web site that will grab visitors attention. It will
attract them to explore your web site longer.

5. Remind your web site visitors they can print out your content. They may browse around your online
store while it’s printing.

6. Offer your visitors free software that they can download right from your web site. While they are
waiting they might read your ad.

7. Provide a huge online directory of information that your visitors could search. The directory must
contain information your visitors would want.

8. Tell your visitors what’s offered at your web site at the very beginning. If people are confused about what’s being offered they may leave too early.

9. Publish your web site professionally. People will get turned off and leave if they see a lot of spelling
and grammar mistakes.

10. Make your site text easy to read. Most people won’t strain their eyes trying to read text that is too small, light or bright.

These are just a few reasons, if employed that your site visitors will stay longer!
If you have any more suggestions add them via the comments!

We Make Money Online blog has really come a long way!

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This is so exciting!

Check out the link for the 6 O’Clock News!

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Hope that made you laugh!
Have a great day!