Blogging for Dollars Blog

PC World has created an excellent chart of blogging platforms. If you’re new to blogging you’ll find it useful.

As someone who’s used all the listed platforms, WordPress gets my vote for all-round excellence and usefulness.

I also love Blogger for its sheer speed in setting up a blog.

Typepad gets my vote for the best customer service.

In short, they’re all great, and if you get into blogging, you’ll use each of these platforms at different times.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog software

Whenever I launch a new site, I put a WordPress blog into a “blog” subdirectory.

I like a site AND a blog on the same domain because:

* more bang for your buck – you get blog search results as well as ordinary search results. Having both gives you more visibility;

* flexibility – you can put whatever you like into the main site, and then promote it from the blog and vice versa;

* you attract new readers. Lots of readers are discovering blogs, so when they arrive at your blog you can send them to promotions on your main site.

Finally, as your blog grows, having a site attached to the blog (or a blog attached to the site) gives you more control over your content because you can create content pathways.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, create a blog, pro blogger

One of the easiest ways to monetize a blog is to market others’ products and services as an affiliate.

While affiliate marketing is easy, because you don’t need to create a product, store inventory, or fill orders, it does have its pitfalls.

The major pitfall is to treat affiliate marketing as a form of advertising. It’s not advertising, it’s marketing. There’s a huge difference. I’ve explained that I fell into this trap.

Your first step as an affiliate blogger is to sign up with a couple of the major affiliate networks. ClickBank products are easy to market, as are those of Commission Junction. I first joined Commission Junction to market eBay products. Whatever the topic of your blog, you will usually find eBay products that you can market on it.

Next, I suggest that you put effort into learning as much as you can about affiliate marketing. I’m an enthusiastic member of Wealthy Affiliate, and can’t recommend the site highly enough. It’s a site I visit every day, because the information and affiliate marketing instruction it offers is unequalled.

Technorati Tags: affiliate blogging, affiliate marketing, pro blogging