 |
make money at college, make money at college blogging, make money online, World of Warcraft
Making money while at college using a blog is fairly simple to start. To create a blog for free, you can simply use Google’s Blogger and get a blogspot sub-domain. What you put onto the blog and what you focus on will greatly determine how successful you are at making money online.
Plan Your Blog First
Before you even set-up your blog, you need to take pen to paper and create a master plan for your blog. What are you going to write about? While you can blog about anything you want, the tighter, the more focused you can be with your subject, or niche, the better chance you’ll have of making money online with your blog.
Once you have your topic, it’s time to determine a set of words, or keywords, that you’ll want to focus on with the majority of your articles. When developing these words, you’ll want to first brainstorm on words related to your topic. For example, say your blog will be about World of Warcraft. Your first task is to think about what keywords someone might use to look for something on the various search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc).
- World of Warcraft
- Blizzard
- Warcraft
- WOW
- Alliance
- Horde
- Paladin
- Warrior
- Priest
- Shaman
- Rogue
- Warlock
- etc
Now that you have your keywords, you need to narrow down to the words that you would think get searched for the most for your topic, in this case the topic itself, World of Warcraft. Go to blogger and create your free blog using those words as the domain. You’ll have to experiment as worldofwarcraft.blogspot.com is already taken. Try an extension of this, such as worldofwarcarftresources.blogspot.com (open at the time of this writing, you’re welcome!). Use the major keyword as the title of the blog and you’re in business!
Writing Articles
Start right off the bat and write an article to introduce yourself. You don’t have to use your real name, but sometimes it helps to establish the man (or woman) behind the avatar. In the case of World of Warcraft, you can mention how long you’ve been playing, what classes you like to play, and even what server and character you run, if you’re willing to get that personal. Again, use your major keyword not only in the article itself, but also in the post’s title (Tridarth Welcomes You to the World of Warcraft!).
Try to write at-least one article per day. If you have a rush of ideas and want to write more than one per day, that’s fine, just save those extra articles as drafts and continue to publish one per day; having a backlog of saved articles will save your butt when you hit a dry spell, get sick, go home from college for fall break, etc.
Search Engine Optimization, huh??
What we’ve been doing in this planning stage is a process known as search engine optimization, or SEO for short. SEO is a process where you are optimizing your blog for the best possible searches and referrals from the various search engines. The more friendly your site and articles are, the search engines will have an easier time in determining what you are writing about and will send readers your way when they search for those keywords you’ve been working on.
There’s a TON more to SEO, but that’s what you really need to know from the start.
Make Money Online Using a Blog
You have your blog in place, articles have been written, blog and articles are both focusing on pre-selected keywords and traffic is, slowly but surely, starting to trickle in. Now is the time to optimize your site to make some money.
Google Adsense
Entire books and blogs have been dedicated to Google’s Adsense program. Adsense takes it’s que from the keywords you use on your site and in your articles to present specific ads that are targeted to your audience. You, as the publisher, get paid per click of the ad, but don’t click them yourself, or Google will boot you right out of the program!
There are two schools of thought when it comes to putting ads on your site. Some say to have ads on the site from day one, that way people are already used to them. Others say to wait till you have traffic to place the ads.
My suggestion is to put the ads up from the start. Repeat visitors will see and already know of them, so no big loss; if you have a dedicated readership base, some could get upset that you’ve suddenly decided to cash in on them. On the other hand, search engine traffic is usually your best source of Adsense revenue.
Optimize Your Search Engine Optimization for Articles
Your blog is setup, you’re starting to see some traffic, or are you? How can you see how many visitors you’re getting? Use Google’s Analytics, a free tracking service from Google, to track your visitors, what they’re looking at and, if they came from a seach engine, what keywords they used to find you.
Installation is easy. Follow the directions to add a new domain, get your code, head to your blog’s dashboard and select template. Next select edit HTML, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and copy and paste the code before the code /body . Then click finish back on the Analytics site. It will take a day or two in order to get traffic information, but once you start seeing data, you’re set.
Now, use this information to check what keywords you’re getting traffic from. If you’re getting alot of traffic from the term “world of warcraft paladin” then input that into Google and see where you’re ranked. Your goal, of course, is to rank on the 1st page, as close to the top as you can get. Write more, and more targeted articles with this specific keyword in mind. Don’t spam the keyword, but do focus on it and see if you can increase your rankings, then rinse and repeat.
Making All that Money While Still in College
In the end, you’ve created a web site (for free) that provides a valuable resource of others interested in your niche. The amount of people, and money, you draw is totally dependant upon how popular the topic is and how heavy the competition is for that topic. After that first reader makes that 1st click on an Adsense ad, guess what?
You just made money online while at college from blogging!
