$100 a Day Blogging! Discover My Top 5 Action Steps

This post has been submitted to ProBlogger’s latest Group Writing Project. It is also a part of a feature article series here on Art of Money, called the make $100 a Day Blogging project, in which I attempt to grow this site’s earnings to the $100 a day level and document all the steps along the way (so you can boost the earnings on your own blog.)

#5 – Perform Great Market Research

The sad fact is that most blogs are doomed to low earnings before they ever begin.

Most bloggers “choose a niche” for their blog, but that is only a small fraction of the legwork needed to tell if a topic is going to be profitable. You’ll need to know:

how many people are searching for your topic?
what kinds of products are changing hands in your topic market?
how does it compare with other niches in terms of traffic and money changing hands. This means devise a metric and use it to measure a few potential niches, that way you begin to have an understanding of the relative value of each niche.

#4 – Carry Out Competitive Analysis

What value to visitors can you provide that your competition are missing? This is your competitive advantage. If you want to succeed and make decent money, you’ll need one.

Don’t be afraid to compete with the big boys, or an already entrenched site, but know that in order to do so, you’ll have to be better than they are at something important (SEO, quantity of posts, quality of posts, breaking news, insider info etc.)

How are the sites you are going to compete with making money? Do you see room for improvement?

Steal (not their content ) from your competition: don’t be afraid to borrow category names, ad positions, title tags etc. The web is an open book, once someone is successful the evidence is there for you to use to your benefit.

#3 – Use Great Tools

Using freebie or low cost tools, like hosting for example, often represents a lack of confidence more than a lack of money. If you knew that you were going to make $100 a day from your blog, wouldn’t you spend $10 a month on hosting and $10 a year for your own domain name.

Other tools that can make a big difference:

off-line blog editors (Ecto, Windows Live Writer etc)
keyword research tools
affiliate link cloaking software
subscriptions to industry only publications
ad servers
educational products related to blogging, online business or your topic area

#2 – Develop a ‘Succeed at All Costs’ Attitude

Most people expect success and money to come to them easily, but the fact is that it doesn’t work like that. 99% of the time, money and any other forms of success go to whoever earns them.

Whoever has done the best preparation and developed an advantage and can best execute a plan will make the most money. Competition is a good thing, when you’re on top you’ll be glad it isn’t easy for others to make it too.

Success if for people who have ruled out failure as an option. Most people hold onto comfort and the status quo and then wonder why their blog doesn’t make any money.

Entertain this ‘what if’ scenario…

Tomorrow you wake up and you’ve been fired from your job, and you HAD TO make enough money from blogging to pay your daily expenses, what would you do differently? How would it change your approach?

I’m guessing you would:

write better content
be more creative
work smarter
network more

Personally I have just increased my expenses dramatically (to purchase a condo in a city where real estate prices are through the roof) and I’ve decided to make money on this blog to make up the difference.

Pressure can bring out the best in us; I’m already enjoying working on this site more than I ever have as I embrace the challenge.

#1 – Monetize Like Your Life Depends on It

A lot of bloggers are shy about putting ads on their site. In my opinion this represents a lack of confidence more than anything else.

Would you be shy about asking for your paycheck at your job?

If you have decided to blog with the intention of making money, then produce valuable content and expect to be compensated for it.

That’s if for my top 5 action steps to make $100 a day blogging. If you want to follow my whole series on blogging towards $100 a day you can grab my feed, or bookmark the project home page.

Post Tags: