I’m glad everyone enjoyed my first article on how to be intuitive with your wordpress. Many people say that it’s crappy or not as powerful as joomla/drupal, I disagree with them because I know with a little bit of elbow grease and plugin power it’s a full blown cms. Anyway I digress from my point.

I’ve seen a few trends on some fancy shmancy blogs about how to make money but the one thing they never do is really get down and dirty into giving you real details not just the regular , oh put up good content and people will come like crazy. Or other stories like I just opened my website and got 500k hits in 6 hours , a few words for you my friend S-T-F-U & stop fraudin’.

Forget the money aspect of running a website for a second , just trying to market your website to the entire internet is hard word as well as getting loyal readers to come back and give you positive feedback.

In this rant I’m gonna explain how to setup your blog to earn you money.

Let’s begin shall we :

To start with , Your site has to have unique content. By this I mean give me (the reader) a reason to keep on coming back for more. If you just copied some other source or blog then there is no incentive for your reader to come back to you. You can do this by being controversial for instance. If your talking about Obama for example I don’t suggest writing extreme controversial things about him that would be considered a hate crime or racist instead perhaps something a bit off-beat.

Asides from staying unique and interesting you have to continue to post daily fresh posts. I would recommend getting a close knowledgeable friend or family member who can help you out. This is much beneficial as it will help you lighten the load , running a big site by yourself is sometimes scary to downright crazy at times. Think of this as the “buddy-system” for when you go to the gym , that other person that is there to motivate you to go through that last rep. Trust me on this it’ll pay off in dividends.

Before you get all trigger happy with your mouse putting ads galore all over your website you might have to do a few things such as assessing if your site has the constant traffic to support such ads as possible revenue streams.

I found a few awesome tools and sites you will want to use to asses your site’s traffic value.

Site Rankings

The first website you will want to go to is google webmaster tools , basically this gives you in pure detail if google is indexing your site correctly and if there is any errors in while doing it. I strongly recommend this. After you do this , there are a few popular sites that can show you the popularity of your site.

Here are a few of them ->

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a great tool , it tells you Page View hits , Unique hits as well as which countries your users are coming from and who refers them. I use to use Mint & Peppers but then my friend introduced me to this and I haven’t looked back once since. If you want to directly hookup google analytics into your Wordpress Core then check this plugin out (Google Analytics for Wordpress), I use it and love it !

Alexa – This is a well known site that gathers traffic data on websites based on a few criteria as well as depending on it’s users using the Alexa Toolbar

Compete – This is another site like Alexa that can give you statistics on your page traffic.

Google PageRank – I saved the most important (In my Opinion) for last. Basically the higher page rank your site has , the stronger the traffic to it. From what I have read and personal usages it is more accurate than either Alexa or Compete. The site I linked lets you check the popularity of your website and if you would like you can post a script that updates it on your site.

This Picture borrowed from Einfach explains about Google Page rank and how it works visually

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After you have contacted and signed up for Google Adsense you might be eager to place lots of ads on your site. But after some research and personal experience the more google ads you put on your site the less you will likely make , I say this because as you have noticed or heard of each click will get you different rates some $2.00 + while another gets you .002 cents. If you put more ads let’s say 3 different banners , then the chances are most of the links will be worth low amounts while the high value clickable ad that will be randomly placed. So I would suggest to use only 1-2 ads at most this increases your chances of receiving a high value ad.

If your traffic ranks are high and you get 600-1000+ uniques a day I recommend the alternatives to google adsense as a means to diversify and earn more.

1) Buysellads – I have seen them all over the Net , Their commission rates are quite high though at 25% cut but they also have one of the best market networks. So finding a customer to buy your ad-space should not take you long or be difficult.

2) Adbrite – Is another popular advertisement network used by many bloggers. They even post a guide as to where you should post the advertisement according to most effectiveness only take this with a grain of salt as you do not want to offend viewers by posting obnoxious ads on top of every content post , then again this is my own views and you do not have to follow them. “AdBrite gives its publishers 70% of the revenues generated from their ad spaces and keeps 30%.” In addition to this fact , unlike google adsense where you have to generate $100.00 you can specify the bare minimum you would like to accrue in order to receive your check. So you can specify $5.00 as the bare minimum target to start receiving checks.

3) Bidvertisers – This marketing network is very unique from many marketing sites I have seen in the past as this site has users bidding to place their advertisement on your website. This forumla and way of thinking is meant to leave the owner of the website with advertisements that are worth more money when clicked. Basically the price-per-click you get is based on the quality and popularity of your website. The more popular your site is the higher the price-per-click will be.

4) The FINAL Alternative is yourself ! – If you have a high amount of traffic flowing into your website just setup and create a simple “Advertise Here” box. Then have it linked to a custom made form asking the person interested in advertising on your site such as , Name , Email , Phone contact if you wish , as well as length planning on wishing to pay you for placing ads on your site such as Monthly ,Weekly or Yearly. You can make your own custom form using an easy to use plugin such as Cforms II , You can also download it from wordpress’s depository. You may also want to setup your own “Advertise with us” Page if you plan on goin this route as well as including rankings from Alexa , Technorati , Google Page Rank etc. The more proven stats you post the more assured your potential customers will be.

Well it’s late & time to nap.

Hope this helped everyone while you all enjoyed this !

If you have any suggestions or would like to see more or other specific topics hit up the forums @ VadexFX