It seems that in the last year people have really been discovering the enormous power of a good blog. Blog marketing is simply a term used to describe a blog that’s sole purpose is to market a product, website, company,etc.

Blog marketing is one of those great FREE methods we can all use and that is one of the reasons for it’s popularity. Another big reason is that a popular blog, even though it is not selling anything can be used to push other sites up in search engine ranks by building backlinks.

In this post I want to accomplish 3 things. Explain how and where to setup a blog using only free resources, how to setup a blog on your own domain with your own hosting plan and then finally I want to give you some pointers on how to use these blogs to make money.

Part I – Using FREE Resources To Setup A Blog

If you want to setup a free blog it’s best to use blogger.com – this site is owned by google and therefor it gets indexed very quickly and will rank rather well. It’s very simple to set it up as you are taken through very easy steps and guided through the process. Just make sure that you already have a gmail to use for the sign up.

I often create a small blog to support something I’m doing, even though I know it has very little chance of selling anything. I know it will still will help. Let me give you an example of a super simle blog I created to support one of my product reviews:http://themassarticlecontrolreview.blogspot.com/

I don’t think I need to explain anything about the setup of these free blogs as they are very simple and easy to use and the instructions provided by blogspot are very good.

Just make sure you take a look at the layout section and play with that a bit. You can add gadgets there that contain your very own ads, pictures, text and it can easily be used to sell.

There is also the monetize option. Thanks to google they have made it very easy to put it google ads that you get paid for if clicked. Just make sure that you setup the ads so they are relevant to what you are blogging about.

If you have any questins d0n’t hesitate to comment on this post

Part II- Using Paid Resources To Setup A Blog

The best and safest way to make money on a blog is to set it up on your own domain on your hosting account. There is always a risk factor when you put all your content on a website that someone else ownes (like blogger.com) You can buy cheap domains at GoDaddy (.info for $1) and I would strongly recommend that you host at HostGator. Using their services makes everything so easy! From the cPanel at Hostgator you can use the Fantastico tool to install and setup your wordpress  blog within seconds! For the $7 or $8 you pay pr. month you can setup unlimited domains so you can have as many blogs as you want, all making you money!

I’m not going to spend my time explaing how to finetune your wordpress blog as you can find very good instuctions at wordpress.com

I’d rather spend my time giving you tips that will help you make money on your blog.

Part III – Tips For A Successful Blog

Choosing a domain name
Don’t be to to quick here. Take your time as the domain name plays a very big role in google ranking. Preferably you want your domain name to be your strongest keyword. For example if you were promoting a cook book for people with diebetes your strongest domain name would be diebetesdiet.com – google keyword tool tells us that the “diebetes diet” keyword gets over 200.000 searches every month so you would easily get some of that traffic with that domain name. The same rule apply if you are using a blogger.com for you blog. It would just be: yourbestkeyword.blogspot.com

I often get questions regarding .us .info .org  versus  .com – the simple answer is this, always try to go for the .com domain and don’t use hyphens or underscore or anything like that. A .com domain will always rank higher in search engines vs. .info because a lot of spamming has been done on the cheaper domain names. The .com names are also stronger in the minds of consumers. Note that consumers don’t try to remember the ending of your domain name. If you have a domain called FindTheBestDeals.info and you put out ads.. I can promise that a very high percentage of the people looking for your domain will type .com first and if that is your competitor you are simply giving your customers away!

Blog name
As with the domain name you should also use your main keyword in the name. This will help you rank higher in google and other search engines. It’s also a good idea to have a subtitle where you could even push in another keyword. For example: Diabetes Diet – Get Your Diabetes Diet Plan Here

Tightly focused niche.
Now regarding the content, make sure that your blog is very focused. If  you are promoting clickbank products make sure you are only promoting one or two products and that they both are dealing with the same problem. You don’t want to confuse your reader so keep it simple for him. In addittion to your product recommendation you should put in some google ads. If your reader doesn’t fall for your product there is always a good change he will notice an exciting ad and then he leaves making you a couple of cents or even up to two dollars! You can also sign up with eBay and/or Amazon and promote some of their products.

I’ll use the diabetes to explain what I mean further. On such a page I would find one or two products on clickbank that deal with curing diabetes. I would have a product review page on each of those products but all may main post would be informatino on the diet of diabetes. In those posts I would put an Amazon widget promoting Diabetes diet books and finally I would use some google ads.

Make sure you offer RSS
Many people don’t understand RSS and how it is used and I’m not going to go into deteils here What I want to tell is that it is important to offer it and to make sure that you give submit your RSS feed to places like FeedCat, Feedage, Feedfury and more. Here is a list of good RSS Directories to submit to.

Why? You see, many people and companies are looking for free content to put publish on their website and they get that from these feed directories. That means that if your blog is listed in all these directories there is a good chance your content is being posted all over the place giving you even more backlinks and pushing your search engine rank even higher. There is also another reason to do this. Putting your feed there means that google (and others) will find your posts faster.

Keyword optimize every post
Make sure that all your post are focusing on a keyword that will drive the right traffic to you. Make sure that your keyword is in your post title, the first paragrap and preferably every 100 words. You should also hyperlink you keyword somewhere in the post.

Market your blog
Make sure that you do all you can to market your blog. Write articles and post them with Ezine articles. Make sure you clipmark every post you make. Use social bookmarking and twitter.

Learn from the best
If you really want to learn how to earn money using blogs then check out Wordpress Goldmine. I have been using it and the program is just awsome. Easy to follow, great for newbies and Mark just keeps adding more and more great stuff to the members forum. I promise that you will not be dissapointed.

How to get even more content for you blog
There are ways for you to get more content for your blog. One good way is to post Ezine articles from others in your blog. Just be careful how you choose the articles and inspect what is behind the links each article is promoting. If the links are not competing with your products then you should have no problem posting them.

If you are working with a niche you don’t know much about you might have to spend a lot of time researching before writing much. There are three ways to deal with that. One is using the Instant Article Wizard Pro to help you write and research. You can get increadibly much content from Unique Article Wizard, you can get free articles without buying access to the program. The third option is simply to buy articles. You can get great articles from GetArticlesDone.com

Questions and more info
If you have any questions or feel that there is something missing (and I’m sure there is) then just post a comment and I will do my best to answer and add more tips to this post. I will also be adding some more content here in the coming weeks.