Blogging: Starting Your Very Own Web Business!

Choosing a good niche is the one of the most important things you can do to ensure success with blogging. Your niche will determine your ideal traffic generation methods as well as monetization methods that we'll talk about later on, so do not skip over this lecture!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to generate a list of niches that you are actually interested in.
• How to determine which of those niches are profitable.
• Choose the best possible niche for your blog!

Still struggling with choosing a niche? Here is a list of over 250 profitable niche ideas that you can choose from if you're having a hard time finding one of your own. You can't go wrong with one of these!

You can't easily change your domain name later, so choosing the right one is extremely important. In this lecture, you'll learn how to:

• Choose a domain name that let's people know what your website is about.
• Choose a name that's easy to remember.
• Avoid common mistakes people make when choosing domain names.

There are plenty of web hosts available, but which one should you choose? Learn what I personally recommend in this lecture!

This is the most technical lecture of all. WordPress is the content management system we'll be using to manage virtually everything on your blog. Fortunately, once it's installed, everything else from here on out is smooth sailing!

You'll also learn how to get your own custom domain email (yourname@yourdomain.com, for example.)

This lecture will teach you:

• How to manually install WordPress.
• How to use your control panel's file manager.
• How to create a MySQL database.
• How to get your own custom email.

There are a few pages every blog need to succeed. In this lecture, you'll learn exactly what these pages are, and how they benefit your site!

Google has provided us with some awesome tools that allow us to track the visitors that visit our blog. These two tools are called Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to install Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools on your site.
• Why tracking your blog visitors is beneficial.
• How you can use data to improve your site!

Many people start blogging aimlessly without thinking about their content from a business perspective. Unfortunately, if you want to make money, you have to write content that satisfies your visitors needs.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• What types of content make money.
• How each unique type of content is useful.
• How you can combine different types of content for incredible results!

At one point or another, we all have problems coming up with blog post ideas. Fortunately, this lecture will make sure that is never an issue for you ever again.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• Methods experts use to come up with limitless blog post ideas.
• How to keep ideas after you think of them.
• How to repurpose and update old content to keep things fresh!

In today's world, people don't just expect content that's fun to read - they want content that's fun to look at is well.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to use images and media to help deliver your message.
• How to make your pages look more visually engaging and exciting.
• How to reinforce ideas with media.

It's understandable that you're excited to publish your first pieces of content, but remember this - people are going to read it, and they are going to expect perfection. Before publishing, be sure to make sure that your content passes the criteria I am about to share with you!

Plugins are one of the most powerful features of WordPress. With only a few clicks of a button, you can do everything from add new features to your site to tweaking things at the backend. Here are 7 WordPress plugins that everybody should check out!

Many people make the mistake of focusing on the quantity of traffic they get, rather than the quality of the traffic they're receiving. If you are able to attract the right type of people, you actually do not need a whole lot of traffic to make a great amount of money online. Rather than wasting effort to get as many people as possible, let's talk about how you can attract the right people.

Search engines use something called spiders to crawl every single page of your site. This lecture will focus on making your website as clean as possible, making it easier for search engine spiders to do their job. You'll also learn how to create a sitemap, allowing search engine spiders to find all of your content very quickly!

There is a lot of misconcepts regarding backlinks. Backlinks are links back to your site from another site, but not all backlinks are equal. In fact, the wrong backlinks can actually hurt your search engine rankings, or even get you blacklisted from Google forever!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• The difference between nofollow and dofollow backlinks
• What makes some backlinks more powerful than others
• How you can get high quality, natural backlinks that Google loves!

Many people feel that search engines are the end-all-be-all. That if you rank highly in search engines, you are guaranted success. In other cases, people make the mistake of thinking that the only way to succeed is to rank high in search engines. As you're about to find out, this isn't true at all!

YouTube is an incredibly powerful platform for bringing free, long-term traffic to your website. As you're about to find out, YouTube videos aren't all that challenging to create, and each video you produce acts as its very own entrance door to your website, which is open 24 hours a day.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• Why YouTube is so powerful for bloggers.
• What goes into a great YouTube video.
• How you can make awesome videos, even if you're a complete newbie.

Social media isn't as simple as posting links to your articles and expecting people to flood in. It just doesn't work like that! But don't worry, this lecture will help you make the most out of social media.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to grow your following using your existing blog traffic.
• How to use your current following to grow your following further.
• How to engage with your followers on a personal level.

Similar to YouTube, forum posting is a great way to build free, long-term traffic as well.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to select the best forums for you to join.
• How to get the community to love you.
• And finally, how to use forums to advertise your website without spamming or angering people.

Blog commenting is one of my favorite traffic generation methods, but it's largely underappreciated. This is becuse most people don't understand the power blog commenting actually has!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to craft comments that get clicks.
• How to select blogs worth commenting on.
• How to use blog commenting as a networking tool, to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche!

Networking is one of the greatest ways to grow your audience quickly. When you make friends with other bloggers in your niche, you can leverage the work they've put into their own marketing efforts, and bring some of their visitors back with you to your website. In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to make friends with bloggers in your niche.
• How to get them to feature you on their site.
• How to pitch guest post proposals.

This is the single most important lecture in this section. If you are not doing something to retain the visitors that arrive on your site, you will not grow your audience very quickly. While most people will bounce, if you are able to retain a percentage of your visitors by capturing their email, you will begin to grow an asset that can literally send you a surge of traffic on demand.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to build an email list.
• How to setup and use an autoresponder to automate email marketing.
• How to get your subscribers to know, like, and trust you.

You may have heard the term 'content is king' before. This is absolutely true. Everything in blogging stems from your content. If your content doesn't satisfy your visitors needs, than they won't return, and you won't make any money.

One of the most popular ways to monetize a blog is through Google Adsense. This lecture will explain to you what Google Adsense is, and how you can use it to make money from your website.

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How Google Adsense works.
• How to make money from Google Adsense.
• Requirements you must meet before applying for Adsense.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful monetization methods bloggers can utilize. With affiliate marketing, you market another company's product. Whenever you make a sale, you earn a commission ranging anywhere from 4% to 75% of the product's price. Some people are making over a million dollars a year from affilitate marketing alone!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How to select affiliate programs best suited to your audience.
• How to market your products for maximum conversions!

Selling ad space and / or sponsored posts on your site is a great way to earn recurring, consistent income. You'll often know exactly how much you're getting paid each month, providing you a bit of security!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• How you can find advertisers willing to purchase ad space on your site.
• When it makes sense to accept sponsored post opportunities.

This is probably my favorite monetization method of all, because it's so powerful. Creating a product can launch your business to new levels, make you an incredible amount of passive income, and even allow you to recruit your own affiliates to market your product for you!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• Why creating a product is so powerful.
• Several product ideas you can create without spending money.

If you don't want to create a product to sell, you can also sell your sevices. Because your audience knows, likes, and trusts you, you can get away with charging very high rates. You're your own boss, so you get to set the value of your time!

In this lecture, you will learn:

• What types of services you can sell on your blog.
• How to price your services.
• How to outsource services, allowing you to pay somebody else less than what you get paid to do the work for you!

You can't enter into this blindly. It takes a well thought out strategy to maximize the earnings you make from your blog. Think like your visitor and tailor your monetization methods to fit their needs, and you'll do far better than the vast majority of bloggers. This lecture will teach you how!

I appreciate you taking the time to go through this course, and I hope you have gained a lot of value from it. In this lecture, I'll help you decide the best course of action to take next and continue improving.

I can't wait to hear your success story!