TheBitBot Organic SEO & SEM Blog

Making money with blogs is not difficult but at the same time, it is very difficult. What does that mean you ask? Simply put, there are two different methodologies that you can follow if you are going to launch a website or blog and use it as a source of income. One of these methods is quick and can earn you a small amount of supplemental income and the other one is very slow and has the potential to turn into an online business.

The first method, the simple one, entails signing up at at one of the following outfits or something similar:

1) https://www.blogger.com/start 2) http://www.weebly.com/ 3) http://www.sosblog.com/ 4) http://www.thoughts.com/ 5) http://wordpress.com/ 6) http://weblog.com/ 7) http://wordpress.org/

Please note that number seven does not include hosting. You will need to acquire free hosting if you are going to use the WordPress.org PHP blogging script. Additionally, your host will have to allow PHP and FTP. There are some free hosts that do allow these. Some will install it for free in the CPanel.

In the last chapter of this series, we discussed the answer to the question: “Does this niche have enough interest to pursue?”. Accordingly, if we have indeed found a niche in which there is sufficient interest to pursue, we now move to the next logical phase of our marketing plan and that is to determine if there is actually money being spent in this particular niche. If there is, then we can start thinking about creating or sourcing products to market to the individuals making up this niche.

So how do we determine if there is money being spent in this niche?

One of the simplest ways and probably the one most commonly used is that of paid listings. In short, paid listings follow the money because there is an inherent ROI or Return On Investment. This means that for every dollar spent on advertising, some multiple of that number is being made back. Hopefully, the return is greater than the investment. Keep in mind that there are no guarantees, but generally, paid listings are a good starting gauge.

As a webmaster, I am interested in monetizing any content that I publish on my websites. I must admit, this road has been one of the longest I have traveled and really seems to be the last leg of any webmasters journey.

So far, I have learned a great deal about: competitive domain name selection, reliable hosting, file transfer protocols, html page design, content managers, html and php modification, ready-made php scripts, MySQL databases and a host of other items that webmasters must understand in-order-to successfully manage a website.

Of course, there are many ready-made services that will cover all of these bases for you if you do not want to spend the time learning all of the above such as blogging sites affiliate stores and so on. However, none of these platforms give you the freedom you need to customize your site to fit your style. Additionally, they can be shut down without notice. For that reason, I became my own webmaster.

However, this post is not about being a webmaster, it is about ‘how to sell digital products online’, and this is the first of an undetermined number of chapters. That lengthy introduction was simply to make one point and that point is this: all of the items mention above in their sum is easier that ‘selling online’ or ‘internet marketing’ as it is so commonly referred to as.