Marketing No Brainers

Making Money With Blogs Part 2

June 28th, 2006Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, How To Courses

Making Money With Blogs Part 2

In part one of this course, you learned how to select a topic for your affiliate marketing blog and signed up for blogger, and made a test post. Review that post and complete the tasks before going on with this lesson.

Today’s lesson is short. We are going to put our Blogger blog on a real webhost with a real domain name, and get away from the blogspot stigma. Pick a good keyword domain name for your blogger blog. Try for a dotcom name. Use the domain search at Godaddy. Other tools for this are at dotcenter and domainsbot.

You can register a dotcom name at GoDaddy for $8.95.

You’ll need web hosting.

You can use most any host of course. You just need to be able to ftp your blogger blogs into your hosting account. I like HostGator which has the easy install Fantastico Cpanel control panel for when you want to move on with WordPress for your blogs. Hostgator is a great place for Cpanel hosting if, like me, you’ll want more than one blog for your web projects.

Now to the action steps:

1. Register your domain at Godaddy

2. Click on your blogger blog in your blogger dashboard and change the following settings:

Important, do all the following steps before you change your blog to ftp to your webhost.

In the settings: basic tab, change your blog title to have the most important keywords for your clickbank affiliate product. Write a description, using the keywords once or twice. This should make some sense, so use clear sentences because this text will be shown in SE results. Leave all the boxes checked yes.

Still in settings, go to the publishing tab and turn Notify Weblogs to off. We will use Pingomatic to ping weblogs. If you do a lot of editing from within blogger you will be pinging Weblogs constantly. No need to. Once is enough.

Now go to the formatting tab, and change the date header to one showing only days of the week.

In the comments tab, make sure you have enabled word verification and comment moderation. You’ll need to put your email address in too.

In the archiving tab, either pick monthly or none. Make sure the enable post pages is set on yes.

In the site feed tab, make sure site feed is set to yes and enable full descriptions is also yes.

In the template section, look at the templates and see if there is one you like better. Change to this now if so.

Now you have your blog the way you want it. Make sure you save and make sure you publish it. Remember, don’t ftp to your host yet.

3. Make sure your new domain name points to your webspace. Get the nameservers you need to use from your host. You do this by changing the nameservers in your GoDaddy account for your domains. There is generally a few hours wait, sometimes it’s as long as 36 hours, before your domain name propogates across the internet.

4. Go back to blogger and change your basic publishing settings to ftp to your website ftp address. You can find the ftp settings in your web hosting control panel. Save the settings. Publish. Voila, your blogger blog now has its own name and space on the web.

In the next installment we’ll put real content and affiliate links on the blog. Stay tuned.