How To Make Money Online Blogging in Nigeria

The 10 step blogging guide I’m about to share with you is both tested and trusted. I use this guide to set up and start all of my blogs.

At the end of this blog post, I will also give you an awesome list of my top 10 resources to use if you’re serious about making lots of money online. The thing is that one of the most vital detail people miss when they first start a blog is that their blog must contain information that people need if it will make any money at all.

Many blogs out there on the making money online niche don’t give enough info on what it really takes to make money online. Instead, all they tell you is which country they went to on vacation, how many cars they have or just how rosy their life is in comparison to yours and finally, they sell you some crappy info that does nothing for you!

Once again, making money with blogging is a lot of hard and smart work.

So are you really ready to learn how to make money blogging?

If your answer is YES then I’ll advice you to stick around and read this article to the end. The information I’m about to share for free will show you how to start to make money with your blog here in Nigeria and any other part of the world.

I’m not here to tell you how to write your blog or what you should write about, that’s up to you. However, what I’m about to show you 10 strategies I and other top bloggers in the world use to make money on the internet. You can choose to use these techniques or not, that’s your call.

If you’ve read through this long boring introduction, it means you’re pretty serious about making money via blogging so let’s delve in! 😉

Step 1 – Find a Blog Topic/Niche

The first step in this guide is turning off your computer. Yes, after reading this guide, turn off your computer, grab a pen and paper, sit somewhere that you can focus.

Now, think of areas you are interested in blogging about and write it down. Although some expert advice you to just find a profitable niche and blog about, that can backfire in a few weeks.  Finding a niche you’re interested in will help you be more committed to working on your blog instead of giving up in a day or two.

While thinking about your blog niche, you have to make sure it’s also something other people are interested in. If you’re finding it hard to come up with a topic, a couple of ways to find one is by using MetaSpy to find out exactly what people are searching for. You can use Ask IQ to find what’s popular and also VRE Toolbar to find out how many people search for the topic.

Use Google Keyword planner to find out the top keywords for your niche. Be sure to write down the top five keywords with the most views, you’ll need them for optimizing your blog content. These tools will be very useful for getting traffic to your blog.

Step 2 – Create Your Blog

The next step is to actually create your blog online. If you don’t have enough money to go all out for your blog, you can start out with a free blogging platform. I like many other top bloggers in Nigeria, like to use Blogger but there are other popular blog platforms like WordPress.

Virtually all these blogging platforms are free and you don’t need any knowledge of coding to be able to manage these platforms effectively.

After creating your blog, the next thing is to fill it with content. There will be no traffic on your blog if you don’t have good content on it. You have to work at creating content that is both original and  informative.

Creating valuable and original is one of the main pillars of making money online with blogs. While creating your content, you need to use the keywords you wrote down in Step 1 in the title, headings and body of your blog post.

Make sure you don’t overuse the keywords or you might sends out bad signals to the search engines like Google. This action can earn you a backlash from Google.

Step 3 – Sign up for Google Adsense

This next step is vital that will guarantee that you make money with your blog is signing up for Google Adsense. You have to sign up or an adsense account with Google and insert the adsense code into the margin or header of your blog. You can customize your ads in several ways. This can include text links or image links.

However, I prefer the text links because they are easier to blend in with your blog content and don’t take the reader’s attention away from the information on your blog. You should know that although Google Adsense might not probably make you a millionaire, it is an instant way of generating money online and it builds over time.

If you want understand exactly where the visitors to your blog are coming from, then you have to consult Google analytics. Google analytics will show you the direct hits from search engine results and this will help you understand exactly the traffic to your blog behaves.

You’ll also want to add your URL to Google’s index.

Step 4 – Find Something to Sell on Your Blog

If you want to maximize the earning power of your blog, then you have to explore other means of making money with your blog. This step is all about selling something on your blog.

If you’re not much of a sales person or don’t want to sell anything and are happy with the income Google Adsense is bringing in then you can skip this step. However, if you really want to maximize your blog income and truly learn how to make money with blogs, then you’ll sell on your blog.

Selling on your blog isn’t just about offering readers your products to purchase. You’ll also want to find an affiliate program to register with. Some of the most profitable affiliate programs I would suggest are ClickBank and Commission Junction also known as CJ affiliate. With these affiliate programs, you can sell anything from home furniture, office supplies, movies and vitamins, eBooks, PC games, Dieting tips and even Audio software.

Like Google adsense, whatever affiliate program you join will give you a code to insert in your blog. If you have to, get help inserting these code because if you don’t do so correctly, you definitely WILL NOT earn money from your visitors. If you’re not very familiar with editing HTMLs, W3Schools HTML tutorial is a good place to start.

Step 5 – Submit your Blog to Social Bookmarking

There is no better advertise than using the word of mouth. However, the next best thing to word of mouth advertising is social bookmarking. A lot of computer software that make it very easy for you to do social bookmarking are available.

Social bookmarking sites I use and recommend include OnlyWire and SocialMarker. These website are often used by people to share bookmarks or websites that they’ve liked with other people in their online circle.

I would not advise you personally add your own links to these services. However, you can provide visitors to your website the ability to do so.

Step 6 – Write Great, Optimized Content for Submission

Supposing your blog is about a particular product, for instance a certain android phone you are promoting, or your blog is just all about giving people information, I suggest that you to write an article or a review of of what you offer. A lot of article directories require articles of at least 500 words so I you should use this as a rule of thumb when writing. This will ensure that your article is published.

Submit your article to any of the 100’s of article directories which are out there. Personally I use some Top Article directories including Amazines.com, Article Dashboard, EzineArticles, isnare and SearchWarp. I also use a very hand and time saving piece of software known as Article Submitter. Article submitter will submit your articles to 600 plus article directories; this will definitely save you lots of resources and give you the time to work on writing your blogs.

Step 7 – Ping Like Crazy

Each time you add new information to your blog, you’d want to let the blog directories know about it; this process is known as pinging. It’s possible that some blog platform providers automatically send out pings whenever you update your blog. However, just to be on the safe side, you will want to go through this process manually too. Be sure to ping only when you update.

There are a couple of Ping sites I use and which I recommend. These Ping site will send pings to multiple blog directories at the same time whenever you update your blog. PingMyBlog is usually my first port of call for ping services. However, Ping-o-matic is also a very popular choice among bloggers. DON’T FORGET; ping only when you update or you blog could get blacklisted and that is pretty bad.

Step 8 – Maximize Yahoo! Answers and Forums

One of the simplest ways to get targeted traffic to your blog is by making use of the people you want to target. I suggest you sign up to at least one forum in the niche you are blogging about. Make sure you don’t just go straight in to forums and start posting comments that are unrelated to the topic at hand just to get people to look at your blog, they certainly won’t.

The secret to getting people to go to your blog from forums without actually pissing them off is by adding your blog URL to your signature and then actively becoming a member of a forum in your niche. posting relevant topics and starting debates within them. The more active you are on forums, the more your the link to your blog will show. The fact is that if you provide someone with good info, the chances of the checking out your blog becomes very high.

Yahoo! Answers very similar to active forums and the beauty of this is it is viewed by thousands of visitors every single day. If you don’t have a Yahoo! account yet, get one, login and search for questions relating to the niche of your blog and answer them well. You can then insert a link to your blog after giving valuable information. Just as with forums, if you answer well you will not only earn yourself a point or two on Yahoo!, you’ll also earn visitors to your blog.

Step 9 – Update Your Blog Always

Content is the greatest pillar of traffic and making money online in general. Without content, you can’t attract people; it’s that simple. You can update your content in several ways and this will include adding new reviews or content to your blog; I suggest updating every couple of days. This helps to keep the search engines like Google happy as they love to see new and original content.

Another way of updating your blog and keeping the content fresh is by adding RSS feeds to it. Be sure that these feeds are relevant to your blog and will provide visitors with helpful information. Visitors to a blog on World of Warcraft blog don’t want to read feeds about cute cats, or do they?

Step 10 – Be Consistent

Consistency is key to making money online. Repeat steps 1 – 10, this is the only way you can see how to How to Make Money Blogging in practice.

Because we always go the extra mile…

Step 11 – A Bonus Step

If you have your own product or a newsletter, give visitors to your blog an easy way to sign up to receive updates or information about your blog or your services. You can use sign up forms plugins and Mailchimp to get this done. This will help you contact the visitor again with more in-depth info on products you wish to sell.

How to Make Money Online is easy if you follow the above steps.

Some vital things to remember so you don’t get discouraged in your quest of making money online with your blog is the fact that you will not become a millionaire overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to get your blog to the level that it makes you cool $$$$. If you are really serious about learning How to Make Money with Blogs then don’t give up and eventually you will have your Ah-Ha moment. That moment could be sooner than you think.

Finally, here are My Top 10 resources I use and recommend are:

1. WordPress Goldmine

2. Rob Benwell’s Blogging to The Bank

3. Rob Atherton’s Building A Blog Empire For Profit

4. Hinge Marketing Magic

5. The Blog Challenge

6. Social Bookmarking Demon

7. Blogging For Riches – Complete Video Tutorial

8. Adsense Inbox

9. RSS, Blogs and Syndication

10. WordPress SEO Sniper