Are you ready to begin your journey into the incredibly profitable world of WordPress blogging?
Even if you’ve never done it before, building dyanmic, profitable websites using blog software like WordPress or Blogger has changed the face of web development, making it VERY easy for anyone to create and maintain and online presence, even if they are inexperienced with designing, or website creation.
In other words – NO more technical nonsense! No lengthy learning curve, and no road blocks!
With just a few clicks, you can instantly install a blog and begin to add in high quality content, to attract subscribers and prospects from various niche markets, and because of the fact that WordPress is a free open source platform, your overall costs are limited to only needing a domain name and a hosting account.
This means, that you can easily venture into numerous markets and test the waters without having to invest money in creating websites, hiring designers or search engine specialists.
All you need is a copy of www.Wordpress.org, a domain, hosting account and a copy of this guide that will teach you the fundamental basics of developing well constructed, profitable blogs in as many industry’s as you wish!
Let’s begin!
Choosing A Profitable Market
The very first step before setting up your blog is to decide WHAT your blog will be about. What niche market – what scope – what angle?
When it comes to building profitable WordPress blogs, you want to go after the MONSTER niches! These are markets that have insane levels of traffic, are always in demand and have been PROVEN to yield results.
If you really want to make the most money possible from your niche blogs, you absolutely need to research markets, verify the viability of niches and know, with certainty, what people are interested in, searching for and willing to buy.
Without proper research, you have little idea as to what products or services you should include within your website, but more importantly, you aren’t sure WHAT people are entering into the search engines when searching for these products.
This is where niche and keyword research comes into play. By defining the most popular keywords used by your target audience, you can incorporate them into your blogs optimization strategy and content to attract organic traffic from the search engines.
Your blog will be thoroughly optimized and VERY targeted towards hungry buyers.
(Plus, you can swipe commissions by piggy backing off of successful marketing campaigns that others have created!)
For example, you decide you are going to include the ClickBank product “Acne Free In 3 Days” on your niche blog, as a way of generating commissions from referrals, so you set to work implementing affiliate campaigns into your blogs content..
You know that people who are likely to purchase this product are suffering from acne and want a quick and pain free solution so you’ve already finished half your research: You’re able to define WHO your market is.
And don’t be afraid of competition – because the more competiition, the more profitable the market!
While there are literally hundreds of profitable topics and markets that you can build your WordPress blog around, here is a quick list of evergreen markets that are proven to be profitable:
• Weight Loss (Muscle Building, etc)
• Pets (Dog training, cat lovers, etc)
• Entertainment & Celebrity Gossip ( specific reality shows, etc)
• Finance (Debt Management, Credit Repair, Saving Money, etc)
• Technology (Latest gadgets, computer systems, etc)
• Business *(including IM, work at home, make money)
• Travel & Vacations
• Food (recipe sites, etc)
• Gaming (Warcraft, Starcraft, Sims, etc)
The golden rule when just starting out with blogging, is that you want to choose a topic that you’re personally interested (and invested) in.
If you’re passionate about a topic AND it’s a proven winner, you’ll find it a lot easier to maintain the blog and keep it updated with fresh content. But even if you aren’t personally attached to a topic, if you plan to outsource the majority of your content, you can enter into any niche market imaginable!
When it comes to making money with blogs, you need to be able to position your website in the top search engine rankings, and to do this, you need unique, quality and informative content.
Search engines like Google will rank your blog based on its originality, and focus, so you want to always make sure that you’re producing enough content so that the search engine spiders are consistently crawling your blog, AND that the content is relevant.
We’ll explore the top ways of optimizing your blogs in a later chapter, as well as how you can begin to generate premium, targeted traffic to your website VERY quickly (and at no cost), but for now, it’s time to choose the topic or theme for your website.
To start, write down 5-10 potential topics that you are interested in, and believe to be profitable. You will run a test on each topic in just a minute that will help you define the ones that are bound to be most profitable.
Then, you will break down each topic into sub-topics (or segments) so that you can drill down into a specific niche market, and target your content around attracting specific customers. The more targeted your blog is, the easier it will be to monetize AND the easier it will be to create highly targeted traffic campaigns that will flood your blog with hungry buyers!
As we begin our journey into finding profitable niche markets, stop to ask yourself. ‘What are people desperate for?’ or ‘What do people REALLY need?’
By answering that question, you’ll be able to tap into countless profitable niche markets, because when it comes to what people NEED rather than what they WANT, you’ve got yourself some hungry, desperate buyers who will anxiously purchase instant solutions or remedies to their questions and concerns.
You’ve probably heard of just how profitable ‘desperate markets’ is and there’s good reason for this. Markets that are considered desperate are not only easier to target but easier to sell to.
- That person desperate to get rid of her acne quickly!*
- That mother frustrated by not being able to potty train her toddler.
- * That guy who will do anything to win his ex back.
One of the most important things you can do is first evaluate and identify niche markets that encompass 3 important components:
1) You can easily identify exactly who your audience is.
2) There are motivated, active buyers in the niche market.
3) You are able to get your marketing message across to your audience.
There’s no sense in trying to find an untapped niche market. In truth, there are few of them out there and those that exist and you’ll end up wasting valuable time testing out markets, conditioning buyers and analzying what sells and what doesn’t.
It’s always easier to make money in niches that are already proven to be profitable, and it will take far less time.
You always want to conduct as much research about your markets as possible however, so that you can really understand what your target audience is interested in and create compelling campaigns that ‘speak their language’.
Keep in mind that the best markets consist of buyers who are looking to relieve their pain whether emotional, physical or mental.
Remember: People pay for solutions to their problems. It’s really just as simple as finding out what your target market wants and giving it to them.
Again, here’s the 3 step process:
1) Identify your target market’s problems
2) Find solutions for their problems
3) Give them your solutions to their problems.
So, the first thing we need to do is to go out into your niche and do a little research.
You should look for:
- What kind of people they mostly are?
- What are they most passionate about and why?
- What do they spend most of their time talking about (and probably thinking about) in regards to this topic?
- What are their main concerns/problems?
- What are they currently doing to solve their problems?
- What can you do to offer a solution to these problems?
The best places to go to find this information out is the places where your niche/target market hang out; forums, popular websites, social sites etc.
Find Forums In Your Niche
Run a quick search on Google for “(your niche here) forum) and if your niche is popular there will be sure to be plenty of results. Sign yourself up for these forums and start interacting with your target market. Look through and study the most popular threads and find out what everyone is mostly talking about. You are sure to come across popular sub-topics.
Find out what are the most burning issues and problems in your niche that people are talking about. Find out what they are most passionate about. This is where the money is. If you’re still unsure, or want to cut to the chase, you could simply just straight out ask these questions on the forum and you’ll be sure to get some good ideas.
Also, another great thing about forums is just by looking thought and reading people’s posts you can find out where else people in that niche hang out and what websites and resources are popular to them. You can also find out what kind of products they use and enjoy and what kind of material they read/watch.
Social Media/Web 2.0 Sites
Social sites and community sites are also popular places for groups of people passionate about the same thing to hang out and share ideas.
Websites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon all have plenty of people constantly discussing and sharing ideas and info on their interests, passions and problems.
Google Zeitgeist
Offers access to Google Trends, Trends for Websites, Hot trends and more: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html
Get Ideas From Yahoo Answers
One of the best places to find the hottest questions and answers in your niche is Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com).
Here you will find people asking all sorts of interesting (and shameless) questions on every topic you can imagine. It’s extremely popular and is a great source for finding out what people are having trouble with and what they really want and need.
Not only will you find ideas on what sub-niche you should choose, you’ll also have plenty of questions and answers you can base your blog posts around!
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great tool that’s designed to automatically alert you to information you’re interested via your Gmail account. You can request to receive alerts of the latest news and information on your niche and choose how frequently you want to receive them. It’s so handy!
First, I’d recommend you set up a new Gmail account specifically for receiving alerts on your topic. So go to http://www.googlemail.com and create a new Gmail account.
Next, go to http://www.google.com/alerts to set up your alerts.
For example, if I was setting up a blog on ‘raw food diets’ I’d enter it into Google Alerts as the ‘search terms’:
Next, select the type of search you want. Select ‘Everything’ because then every time your search term is mentioned in news, blogs, groups, and videos, you will receive alerts.
Now select how often you want these alerts and how many results you want. I suggest selecting to receive alerts daily, but it’s up to you.
Lastly, enter your email address you want the alerts sent to.
Don’t overlook other resources for finding hot niche markets including popular magazines through www.Magazines.com , books via www.Amazon.com, hot searches through www.pulse.eBay.com and through digital marketplaces including www.Clickbank.com