Gr1Innovations

Teaching you how to make money online since 1999

How to Become a Profitable Blogger

Blogging has become a popular and highly effective way to make money online, and/or provide information to people on a subject that you are passionate about discussing. Starting a blog is a fairly easy process; however, making money from your blog takes some planning, patience, and hard work. There are a lot of broke bloggers out there and I assume you don’t want to be one of them. Making money with a blog is not nearly as easy as most people think.

So, what does it take to actually build a profitable blog?

The first thing needed to become a profitable blogger is a good subject matter, also known as a good niche. Blogs that do not have a single theme of topics tend to fail because they do not often attract a loyal following of like-minded individuals or high search engine rankings for various keywords within a niche. The best subject matter to start a blog with is something you are experienced with and have some knowledge about. Everyone has a talent so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a blog topic. The blog subject can be a hobby you have, you could start a local blog, write about something you love to do, share your expertise on a popular topic, or even blog about something you are learning about currently. For example, a new mom could write about her experiences learning how to be a parent (although this particular subject has already been done to death, it’s still a good example of a blogging niche).

Once you have your subject then you need to find a good domain and blog host. Get your domain from NameCheap. It’s far better than GoDaddy and pretty much every other registrar I’ve ever come across, and I’ve use a LOT of them. As for hosts, there are a lot of them out there but I normally use either HostGator or Bluehost. They are very popular, relatively cheap, reliable, and give you everything you will need to get your blog going.

For beginners, a free blog may be tempting, but I do NOT recommend them as your main site. There are many reasons for this and one of them is because you don’t actually own the site/blog so it can be taken away from you at any time, and it limits your options for what you can do with it. However, if you insist on taking the free route then three popular options that are easy to use and start with are blogger.com, wordpress.com and tumblr.com – although I personally prefer blogger because it’s run by Google, super easy to use, can be easily dropped if your niche doesn’t work out, and many internet marketers like to use it.

Once you are set up with a domain and host, and you have your niche picked, it is time to start writing. For a popular blog, it is recommend that you post a minimum of at least once a week, but that isn’t set in stone. You can do more or less. Quality is far more important than quantity! Also, the most important thing you can do is build up your social networks and promote your blog in various ways to get lots of inbound links to it. This will increase rankings, traffic, followers, and eventually earnings.

Now, as soon as the content is flowing and you are starting to get a good following, it is time to monetize your blog. Making money blogging entails a variety of things. The three most popular revenue streams are Adsense, affiliate marketing, and selling advertising.

Affiliate links are a form of advertising within your blog. This is typically done in two ways, through a banner ad or direct links from words in the text of your blog. Adsense is a Google advertising product that is code inserted into your blog allowing Google to link websites into your blog based upon the content and theme of the blog. Clickbank and Commission Junction are two of the most popular affiliate companies on the web today. Their client lists include many popular retailers. Selling advertising spots is pretty self-explanatory. Basically you just allow other website owners and businesses in related niches to pay you for ads on your blog.

Making money blogging is easy in terms of the technology used and income streams available. Anyone who feels comfortable in front of a computer writing about a certain topic should have no problem developing a good blog. The keys to making money blogging are picking a profitable niche, providing high quality content, building a following, and getting enough backlinks to attain high search engine rankings.

Put it all together an you will have yourself a profitable blog. You can then collect the money monthly or flip your blog for a large one time profit.

3 Unusual Ways to Earn Money at Home

Are you searching for some ways to earn money at home but have already looked into most of the typical advice for how to make money online and decided it’s just not for you? Well, then maybe you would be interested in one or more of the following three unusual methods for earning money from home…

1) Doggie Sitter – We’ve all either been to or at least heard about babysitters or home day cares for kids, but something you don’t hear much about are dog day cares. They basically work in the same way except you will be taking care of different people’s dogs each day rather than their children. And yes there are plenty of people willing to pay you to “babysit” their dogs rather than leaving them home alone all day, so this can be a great way to earn money from home.

Of course, a few things will be required of you if you plan to become a dog sitter. At the very minimum you will need to love dogs and know how to take care of them properly. You will need a lot of patience to be able to handle all the chaos of multiple dogs running around your house. You will also need to have a decent sized yard that is fully fenced in. And obviously you will need to be home every day when most other people are at work, so you can run your doggy day care.

2) Home Tutor – If you are very knowledgeable about math, science, history, geography or any other subject then you can tutor students at home. There are kids of all ages and levels of school struggling with certain subjects and their parents are often more than willing to pay for someone to help them.

You could also teach older adults and other less tech savvy individuals how to use the internet or computers in general. There are a lot of people willing to pay for that education, especially now that the internet is an integral part of life and work for almost everyone. You can really home tutor on any subject that people struggle with and are willing to pay for help as long as you know enough about it to teach them.

There isn’t much you will need in your home to do this. It could be done from your kitchen table if nothing else. Although, you should ideally have a home office or somewhere else that is quiet and free of distractions for you to tutor people.

3) Crafts Business – For the more creative among you there is always the opportunity to turn your hobbies into a home business. If you enjoy doing crafts or another hobby that creates something other people would be willing to buy, then you can earn money selling them. And almost anything that is handmade and high quality has someone out there that would like to buy it.

You can utilize sites such as ebay, etsy, craigslist, and several others to sell your items on. You could also have your own website built for your crafts business to sell them from. This is a great way to combine the power of internet marketing with a good old fashioned traditional offline home based business.

So, there you go, you now have three unusual ways to earn money at home both online and offline. They aren’t the typical methods you come across when searching for how to make money but they are still great nonetheless. Now, all that’s left is for you to set up shop in your home and get started!

How to Make Money Online with a Minimal Budget

Almost every day on internet marketing forums, blog comments, social networking sites, and other places all over the internet, I see people saying something similar to this…

“I need to learn how to make money online but I don’t have any budget to spend. What should I do?”

While it definitely can’t hurt to have some extra money lying around that you can invest in your online business, it’s not something that you must have. There are several things you can do to earn money online without spending any money, or at least very little. In this post, I will give you a few ideas to get you started.

* One of the most popular ways is freelancing. If you have a certain skill that other people are willing to pay for such as writing, web design, SEO, programming, graphic design, etc… You can make big bucks hiring yourself out to others. Many people will pay a lot of money for a skill you may take for granted. Therefore, what you need to do is write down all the skills you posses then do a little research to see if there is a demand for any of them. Chances are there is.

The best places to visit in order to see if your skills are in demand are freelance websites such as elance, odesk, and other similar sites where most of the freelancers and contractors are at. These sites are where many businesses and individual entrepreneurs go to look for people to do work for them. Freelancing won’t cost you anything and you can earn some pretty darn good money from it.

* You can also make money blogging. This is something that is best to have a little amount of money to invest so you can at least get your own domain name and web hosting. However, you can use free blogging platforms such as blogger, wordpress, tumblr, and others if you absolutely have no money at all. Then, you will use free internet marketing strategies such as article marketing, guest blogging, social networking, and several others to drive traffic to your blog. You can monetize it with affiliate links, Adsense, paid advertising, CPA ads, or whatever else fits well with your particular niche.

* Affiliate marketing is another thing you can do to make money online for free. Yes, I know this is contrary to popular belief, but it’s true. You don’t need to spend money in order to become a successful affiliate marketer. As a matter of fact, you really don’t even need your own domain or webhost. Of course, it does help, but there are plenty of free blogging platforms and other free web hosting companies and site builders you can use. And just about every affiliate program is free to join.

All you really need to do is go to the Clickbank.com marketplace and find a product to sell in your niche. There’s a very high chance you will find at least one related to your niche. Ask the product creator for a review copy so you can check it out before promoting it. Tell them you are an internet marketer and are considering promoting it but you want to make sure it’s high quality first. Most of them will send it to you. Although you will have much more success outside of the make money online niche. After reading the product, write a review to put up on your blog. Then, simply drive traffic to it via various free online marketing methods.

* Another thing you can do is participate in online focus groups and paid surveys. The high paying ones are a tough to find and you can only do so many in a day, so you aren’t going to get rich using this method, but you can certainly earn some extra money without spending a cent. Just Google online focus groups, paid surveys, get paid to programs, and other related searches to find them. You can also ask around on work at home forums. Usually there will be members who know of some good ones and are willing to share.

Those are just a few of the ways to make money online for free or on a very limited budget. This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are plenty of other ways as well. The point is — you can do it. You don’t need to spend money in order to earn money online. Yes, it does help, but it’s certainly not required.

Is There Any Number 1 Way to Make Money Online?

In my opinion, there is no number 1 way to make money online. I am saying that because there are so many different ways to make money online and everyone has their own preferences. They include affiliate marketing, selling products, flipping sites, paid plugs, blogging, business opportunities, adsense, CPA, online payday loans, and many more. Some of these ways work better for some people, while the same way would not produce much money for other people. This is because not every one has the same amount of resources. For instance if you want to make money with CPC programs such as Adsense, you need to have a blog that has good search engine ranking. A site ranking number one for a keyword would make more money than a site ranking number 10 for the same keyword.

To me, the number 1 way to make money online is doing paid posting. This is the easiest to me because you just have to write a post, normally 100 words about a website or a service. If you want to get more opportunity, you need to have a high page rank (read how to improve your page rank). The higher your page rank the more opportunity you would receive and better the offer. This method is not reliable because if you lose your page rank, it would be hard to find any opportunity, unless you have traffic.

I come recommend anyone new to internet marketing to do paid post because it is easy to make a blog to have a page rank. Then as the person’s site matures, the person can do either affiliate marketing or use adsense on their site.

If you are not sure or still looking for other resources to learn how to make money online, you can try The Number 1 Way To Make Money Online. This a new make money online guide. This guide teaches you how to make money online. It is divided into 9 parts. This 9 parts contains everything about internet marketing. It starts from how to choose a niche (Part 1) to treating it as a business (Part 9). This guide is for people that want to learn how to make money online without them spending tons of hours reading other articles and blogs. The number 1 way to make money online seems easy to follow, because you are given one week to read and practice what you have learned.

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Gr1innovations.com launched way back in 1999 and was one of the first sites of its kind. Then, when the internet really became mainstream a few years later, it gained fame as the #1 ranked make money online blog in the world.