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Due to the ease of setting up a WordPress blog, one growing method of generating income online has been the method of building niche blogs using WordPress.

What is a Niche Blog?

Niche blogs (also known as keyword sniping blogs) are mini blogs/websites that are designed specifically to appeal to a very specific niche. Due to the size of the internet and the amount of content out there, niche blogs tend to be VERY specific (customized Nike golf balls, Chicago lasik surgery, Iowa prenuptial agreements, Baltimore debt consolidation, etc.).

One of the huge benefits on niche blogging is that they are very low maintenance. Once you’ve built your blog and written 10-20 posts, there should be little to no maintenance going forward, with the exception of keyword adjustments or upgrading your WordPress installation every once in a while.

Niche Blogging Strategy

Some may find niche blogs a little deceptive, but truthfully, they are incredible ways to fill “search gaps” in search engines. Have you ever searched for something and found inadequate information available? The goal of a niche blogger is to fill these gaps and profit at the same time.

Here are a few techniques you should know when building niche blogs:

1. Include an About and Contact Page – According to Aaron Wall and several other prominent SEO’s, Google in particular has started removing sites from their index that don’t include both. I would expect this trend to continue in the future. You’ll also want to avoid “spammy” things like using the WordPress default template (I have seen reports of niche blogs getting banned for something as simple as this default theme).
2. Avoid duplicate content – This may seem obvious, but duplicate content is an easy way for search engines to identify your blog as spam.
3. Link to your homepage – If your blog’s name (and especially the URL) uses your niche blogs keywords, then you will get natural links using your desired keywords from other sources. In the meantime, you want to pick 3-5 keywords you would like to rank in and work them into each post on your webpage, linking to your homepage.

How to Locate a Niche?

There is no guarantee that any niche will work, but the very small cost of building a niche website (WordPress is free so you just need under $10.00 for a domain name and your time) allows niche bloggers to create a large number of websites for minimal costs, and then work on expanding the ones that appear to be working. The first thing you need is to find an under-utilized keyword that receives traffic, then go out and try to find a keyword-rich domain to use.

If you don’t want to purchase software like Micro Niche Finder (which is what I use), then you can use one of the free tools online, such as Aaron Wall’s SEO keyword tool. Though the numbers aren’t 100% accurate, you can use this tool to try similar keywords that receive daily traffic. Then you need to do a Google search and compare how many results are available for that search term and how relevant the top displaying sites are.

How to find a Niche Domain?

In order to find a good keyword-rich domain, you’re next going to want to go to Google’s free AdWords tool and search for the keyword you found above during your niche research. This tool was designed to show you how much AdWords competition there is over your keyword and similar keywords, but for this purpose you will want to export the results into Microsoft Excel (or whichever spreadsheet software you use). Now make a copy and go to GoDaddy’s bulk search feature. Even if you don’t want to register with GoDaddy, you can still use their bulk search tool to figure out which keyword domains are available to register. Here you’ll want to paste all of your keywords into this box, check .com, and do your search. This tool will go out and provide you with any available .com keyword domains. If you aren’t finding much, you can try searching for .net as well, as the search engines see them equally.

Finding a WordPress Niche Theme?

Once you’ve got your domain name, you’ll want to install WordPress on the domain (or use Fantastico to install WordPress) and go pick out your theme/plugins you want to use. With your first niche website, this step will probably take awhile as you take an existing theme and customize it to fit your specific needs. Some things I look for when picking out a niche theme:

1. 3-column centered theme – For some reason, for niche themes, I’ve always loved having two sidebars with the content in the middle. This gives you a lot of opportunities to integrate Google AdSense ads as well as affiliate links and make them look more natural.
2. No Banner Required – There are a number of themes that insert the blog’s title and description for you, negating the need for a custom made banner. This doesn’t mean you can’t add one, but at least it isn’t required.
3. No Dates – If your theme displays the post date, you’ll want to remove this. This is because niche blogs generally don’t get updated after 10-20 posts and you don’t want your search engine traffic to know that your most recent posts may be months or even years old.

Probably my favorite theme that I’ve found so far is the Maggo Mag theme, which we covered on Hack WordPress. You’ll have to remove the date, but it provides a professional look and allows you to easily integrate your banners/advertisements and affiliate links.

Completing Your WordPress Niche Blog

Though you can certainly use portions of commonly referred to articles found in search engines at places like Wikipedia, you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve written 10-20 quality and original articles that fit within your niche. If you find your posts are short, feel free to quote other articles as a small part of your post to help lengthen them a bit, but make sure that a majority of the post is completely original and of course you’ll want to link to the original post. Otherwise, keep external links to a minimum, as you want to filter your search engine traffic to your advertisements/affiliate links (avoid overdoing it with AdSense). You’ll want to make sure you link to your homepage using slightly different desired keyword anchor text in each post. This helps you build a good internal linking structure that emphasizes your homepage to search engines.

Once you’ve completed your niche blog, think of it as a seed you’ve planted. It may take a week or two before it gets indexed by Google, and it will likely be in Google’s Search Engine Sandbox for 3-6 months, so simply work on building links and in time your seed will sprout into a money maker!

When Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s search engine team (and probably the most powerful/important guy in the world when it comes to search engine optimization), spoke at WordCamp 2007, he gave plenty of good SEO tips specifically targeted towards WordPress users. Here are some of the key points/recommendations that he made during his presentation:

• Don’t include the post date in your URL.
• In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.
• Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it is good SEO.
• Include keywords naturally in your posts.
• Make your post dates easy to find.
• Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www).

As you can see from these tips, some are very basic, while others are very important because you see a lot of people doing otherwise. In this section of the eBook we are going to cover a number of SEO techniques your WordPress blog(s) can use to maximize your search engine rankings.

WordPress Permalink Structure

“Don’t include the post date in your URL.”
“In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.”

WordPress, by default, gives you a number of permalink options to choose from. Unfortunately, the most ideal solution (based upon both Matt Cutts and several prominent SEO suggestions) is not available. Here is what you should do when setting up your WordPress blog:

1. In your dashboard, go to Settings.
2. Click on the Permalinks tab.
3. Select the Custom Structure field and type the following: /%postname%/

Once done, your permalinks will display using the words in your blog posts title and use hyphens to separate them. Some people say they prefer the permalink structure that includes the date, but this structure has two flaws. The first is that it pushes your keywords further to the right, which makes them less likely to be indexed (for people that use long blog titles/URLs). The second problem is that using the date shows readers the date of the post. If a web surfer sees a post is 2-3 years or older (or months old if its news related stuff) then they are less likely to click over to your website.

For people with existing WordPress blogs and want to switch their permalink structure, you can do so using the Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. (more information here: How To Switch Your WordPress Blog’s Permalink Structure). It will create 301 redirects for all existing posts to the equivalent in the new permalink structure. I did this on one of my blogs without any problems.

WordPress Post Slug

This creates a little extra work when writing your posts, but have you ever considered editing the post slug that appears just underneath the post title? By default, the post slug will strip all characters and simply display the words and numbers in your post titles with hyphens between them.

What I’ve gotten in the habit of doing on posts whenever possible is to edit the post slug and remove any non-keywords. This ensures that search engines are giving attention to your posts keywords. An example would be if you wrote a post titled “What are the 300 Best WordPress Plugins?” By default, the post slug will look like /what-are-the-300-best-wordpress-plugins/. Removing the non-keywords and you’ve got: /300-best-wordpress-plugins/.

If you are lazy, you may also want to check out this SEO Slugs WordPress plugin.

Using the Post Meta Title

This is a method used by most top bloggers, but you rarely see anyone mention it. If you use either the free All-in-One SEO Pack WordPress plugin, or the more advanced SEO Sniper premium WordPress plugin to manage your blog’s SEO, you’ll notice that you have a section to enter another title on the “Write panel”. This is the meta title that search engines see. One common SEO technique is to write two titles for your post. One for your readers, and one for the search engines.

Ideally, you’ll want to come up with a clever title for your readers that will be displayed on your blog and grab the attention of your feed readers. Keywords do not matter for your blog title as the search engines will not even see it if you assign a custom meta title. Enter your blog title in the post title field at the top of the screen. Your search engine title is the keyword-rich title you’ll want to place in the plugins title field down below where you enter the tags. This is what the search engines will see, as well as what people surfing search engines will see. Surfers aren’t looking for catchy titles, so this title should contain your keywords, as well as be convincing that your post will provide what the surfer is looking for.

Using Images + Alt Tags

“Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it is good SEO.”

You may have heard people say that it is great to add pictures to your posts. This is because it is usually noticed prior to seeing the post title, meaning it alone can grab a feed readers attention or the attention of someone visiting your blog post. It will also often leave a good first impression. What people don’t usually realize is doing so is also good SEO.

Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, you’ll want to enter your “alt” text in the Caption field. I usually recommend people think of the caption field as the anchor text of your picture, as search engines can’t read the picture. Without this, search engines won’t know what the picture is of and won’t include it in their photo index. Within this field, you are also able to add a description of the picture in the picture field.

Doing this should get your photos included in the Photo section of most major search engines, which has the potential to generate additional traffic to your blog.

Emphasize Keywords

“Include keywords naturally in your posts.”

No matter how small or quick the post you are making is, take a moment before publishing to figure out what keywords might be used within a search engine to find this post. Then make sure you have properly emphasized those keywords within your post, either by bolding the keyword or by making sure they have been worked into your post several times over. Something as simple as this can really go a long way towards getting higher post rankings, but you’ll want to make sure you aren’t overdoing it, so it looks natural. When I’m doing consulting, I advise people to write the post naturally, then replace words like they, them, those, he/she, and other similar words with the full keyword.

Using Anchor Text

Ahh, good old anchor text. For those unfamiliar with the term, anchor text is the text used when you are linking somewhere. Search engines use this text to determine what the link is about. If people always link to your websites homepage using something like “Internet Marketing”, then search engines know that your blog is probably about internet marketing. The more unique links you get pointing to your website, the higher your ranking will go for that term. The people that get the most inbound links will often have a higher ranking. It is of course much more complex than that, but that is a good way to learn the basic technique of using anchor text.

This is probably one of the most talked about SEO techniques, and you’ll often find people trying to do link building, link swapping, etc. Because these are basic techniques and are covered all over the internet, I instead want to advise people to spend some of their time focusing on something they have much more control over, and that is internal anchor text.

Most blogs have a few posts or pages that they want to stand out to search engines. Through the use of internal anchor text, you can actually tell search engines what your most important posts are by linking to them using the anchor text you want to emphasize. In my example above of Internet Marketing, if you have a page dedicated to internet marketing, you’ll want to link to that page each time (or most of the time) whenever you mention internet marketing in your posts. This is something many of the top bloggers do, but I rarely see this happening among upstart or inexperienced bloggers.

Making Your Post Dates Stand Out

“Make your post dates easy to find.”

As you can see from the above quote, Google loves dates. Though you shouldn’t be placing them in your blog’s URLs, you will want to have dates displayed on your posts. Most WordPress themes that I’ve run across come with the date displayed by default, but if yours for some reason doesn’t, you can place the following code into your theme:

<?php the_time(‘F jS, Y’) ?>

This way when search engines crawl your blog, they will be able to find the post date. The only time I do not recommend adding a date to your blog is when you are building a small niche blog. In these situations, you do not want readers to know the date of the post because it may have been months or even years since your last post. More on this later!

Standardizing your Backlinks

“Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www)”

If you’ve been around the internet for awhile, you’ve probably noticed that with the internet is gradually moving towards life without the www prefix. I don’t believe I have a single website or blog that uses www and I do not recommend people launching a website to use it. With that said, I also don’t think that existing sites that already use www should change anything.

The main thing search engines like is consistency, so stay with whatever you currently have and launch all new websites without the www. When most people link to you, they typically just copy the link from the web browser, so whichever method you use should naturally be used in inbound links pointing to your website.

Using Breadcrumbs on Your Blog

One trend that you are starting to see more of around the blogosphere is breadcrumbs. For those unaware, these are the navigation links that appear at the top of your pages, giving your users another way to easily navigate your website. What many people don’t know is that adding breadcrumbs to your WordPress blog(s) also helps search engines determine the structure of your website. Ideally you’ll want your breadcrumbs linking to your homepage, one category page (if you select more than one category, it should still only display one), and of course the blog post or blog page itself.

In order to add something like this, your best bet is to use a breadcrumbs WordPress plugin. There are a number of good breadcrumb plugins available, but my favorite is probably Breadcrumb Navigation XT.

Controlling Link Juice

When setting up your blog, once you’ve got your layout done, I usually recommend people go through and make sure you aren’t leaking link juice (aka Google Juice, leaking PageRank) anywhere. Place a rel=”nofollow” tag anywhere that doesn’t need to be followed by search engines. This often includes (but isn’t limited to) placing a no follow tag on all your feeds (Entries, Comments, and Email RSS), pages that don’t need indexed (advertise, about, contact, etc.), and stuff in your sidebar that are external links such as affiliate links, badges/buttons, and widgets. You don’t need to worry about internal widgets, such as Recent Comments, Popular Posts, or Top Commentators. Using these distributes the link juice within your site, which not only fine, but actually encouraged.

If you maintain something like a blogroll, you’ll want to either rel=nofollow these links as well, or move them on to a single page. This is because in the past year, search engines have started to place more value on natural post-level links than site wide links, so you are doing your friends a favor by moving their link to a single post or page.

If you’d like to add forums to your WordPress blog, you have a number of options available to you. Here are the three I have experience with and recommend as viable options:

1. BBPress – This is a free and lightweight open source forum software that was designed specifically for WordPress users. It is also currently owned and supported by the WordPress team (Automattic). In order to use this software, you simply need to download the software, place it on your server where you want your new forums to be, then go to that website and use the installer to finish getting setup. It comes with an admin panel so you can customize your forums to look and work the way you want them to.
2. PhpBB – PhpBB is another free open source forum software that is known for its customizability. The newest version, version 3.0, offers a great forum look for your website. PhpBB also has a skins folder (themes) and many premium WordPress theme authors offer free forum skins if you buy their themes, including Brian of Revolution themes. If you go this route, you can simply upload the skin and activate it within your forums control panel to make your PhpBB forums match the look of your premium theme!
3. VBulletin – This is by far your best option, and probably the forum software you see being used on most of the popular forums you visit regularly. Unfortunately, though, you will have to purchase a license to use this software. At last check, you can either lease your license or own a license. Leasing is roughly $100.00 a year, but you can own the software for $180.00. They also offer support for an additional fee.

If you aren’t comfortable doing things like running an installer and setting up your own MySQL database, there are also a few WordPress plugins that claim to add forums to your blog. I haven’t used them personally, but figured they deserve a mention here so you know all of your options:

• RS Discuss
• XDForum

Though WordPress is by far the leader when it comes to blogging software, it has made significant strides in the last two years towards becoming a quality Content Management System as well. This means that those who love WordPress can now easily bridge the gap between blogging and a website designed for news by setting up their blog as a CMS.

What is a CMS? I would define a CMS using WordPress to create a website that does not display your posts in reverse chronological order. In other words, a CMS is using WordPress for something other than blogging.

Some examples of WordPress as a CMS:

• News or Magazine-Style WordPress Site/Theme
• Building a Portfolio Site
• eCommerce Site
• Picture Gallery
• Photoblog
• Video Blog
• Directory

Even in looking at the early days of WordPress, you could see the potential there for using it as a Content Management System. In the years since, that potential continued to grow until it eventually became a reality, and now a significant portion of WordPress users are using it as a CMS.

By far the most common WordPress CMS method is using a news or magazine style WordPress theme to create a more dynamic and informational homepage. Usually all other pages hold to a traditional blog setup with a header, sidebar, and footer, while the homepage will display the most recent post in several different categories. The true advantage of this method is that you can easily integrate other forms of media, most commonly by adding podcasts or doing video blogging.

How do I build my CMS?

If you are uncomfortable with coding, there are a number of WordPress themes you can get that are setup as content management systems. You can find a collection of free themes here, or dig through the premium WordPress themes available here (these themes require you to purchase them in order to use).

There are also a number of WordPress plugins you can use to help give you the CMS functionality that you are looking for. Here are a few that I either use or have come to me highly recommended for CMS blogs:

• CForms II – It was mentioned above in the WordPress plugins section, but I felt it needs repeated here. CForms II is much more than a contact form. You can pretty much build any type of form you’d like with this form.
• WP eCommerce – Gives you an easy to manage storefront and shopping cart! Great for an eCommerce WordPress CMS. Integrates with PayPal and allows you to sell digital downloads.
• Subscribe 2 – Most Content Management Systems include a newsletter. This plugin allows you to easily integrate a newsletter into your website and manage it from the WordPress dashboard.
• Page Links To – The menu at the top of the website plays a HUGE role in a CMS. This plugin lets you control your WordPress menu without messing with the WordPress code. Want to link externally? What about linking to a portion of a post instead of the entire post?
• Search Everything – By default WordPress only searches blog posts. With a CMS, you’ll probably have a number of static pages that you use, making this plugin essential.
• Capability Manager – Many CMS’s include multiple authors. This plugin allows you to go above and beyond the normal 5 roles that WordPress comes with by default, so authors have the permissions you want them to have.

Should I use a Content Management System?

This is probably a question most of us have asked ourselves at one point or another. When should you use a CMS? Unfortunately, that is not something I can answer as there are too many variables. Here are some questions that you may want to ask yourself if you are considering a CMS for your website/blog:

• Do I have several categories I want to prominently feature?
• Do I plan to have multiple authors?
• Do I use a lot of pictures with my posts?
• Do I plan to have more than just blogging? (Video blogging, podcasting, photos, etc.)

Obviously if the answer is yes to each of the above questions, your website is probably a good candidate for a CMS. You’ll also want to keep in mind that many CMS-Style blogs create a different type of expectation than standard blogs. Often people expect more news and less opinion from these types of websites.

Most of us start out blogging for fun, but it’s inevitable that eventually it will be time to take a shot atm making money online. After all, we WordPress users have web hosting costs to cover, as well as other costs such as advertising. Even if you aren’t wanting to pocket any money, why not at least try to offset these costs?

There are a number of ways to monetize your WordPress blog, so I have broken this section down into a couple different categories.

Making Money with Google AdSense

When I’m consulting with clients, I usually recommend most bloggers start out with offering PPC advertising. It requires very little work and will provide some nice supplemental income. In order to get the most out of Google AdSense, here are some guidelines:

What is Google AdSense? Google AdSense is Google’s advertising service that uses JavaScript code and Google’s search technology to match up appropriate advertising with the publisher’s content. This, in theory, will make your advertisements more relevant and in turn appealing to your readers. Revenue is then generated on a “Cost-per-Click” basis, with you getting paid each time a reader clicks on your advertisements.

How do I boost my Click-Through-Rate (CTR)? There are two good ways to boost your CTR. The first way is to increase traffic; however, for many blogs starting out this is something that will take a lot of time. You need to gain a loyal readership and get a lot of content indexed with the major search engines before this goal can become realistic. The second and easier method is to work on your ad position to maximize the number of clicks you will receive. In the next few sections this will be covered in greater detail.

Where should I place my AdSense ads? There are a few schools of thought on this, but I’ve found two methods to generating a higher click-through-rate that have worked well for me. The first is to make sure your advertisements are placed “above the fold.” This means that they will be seen by the reader without any scrolling involved. This helps to ensure that they will at least be viewed before a web surfer hits the back button and gives you more chances for a click. The second and most important tip is to place advertisements is within your posts. This can be done in a variety of ways, but being WordPress users, we of course have the advantage of WordPress plugins! You can easily add AdSense ads inside your blogs posts using the Shylock AdSense plugin. With this plugin you can store a number of different ad blocks and have full control over placement within the post. You can also designate a starting date, so posts that are only X days old will not yet display an advertisement. This way your readers will typically not even see your advertisements. Instead only your search engine traffic will be exposed to them.

Should I blend my ads or make them stand out? I’ve been debating this for awhile now. Some claim to have success both ways, but my testing has shown that blending advertisements works better (use the same colors as the links on your blog). Making them stand out with a border, different color background, or whatever else will cause them to get noticed, but web surfers are more likely to know they are advertisements this way and not click them.

What are the best ad formats? According to Google, the most effective ad formats are the 336×280 large rectangle and the 300×250 medium rectangle. Depending on the layout of your website, using 160×600 advertisements can be very effective as well. As far as my personal experience, I’ve found that the 300×250 medium rectangle has given me the most success. This could be because it’s integrated into my post, but more than likely the real reason is because you will often get Google Video advertisements in place of link advertisements, which readers seem to love to click. You won’t see videos in your advertisements if you use non-rectangle ad blocks.

How can I get rid of those annoying AdSense ads that don’t have anything to do with my content? If you’re trying to maximize your AdSense income, targeting high paying keywords and getting rid of advertisements that have nothing to do with your content is a must. The first thing you should do is tell AdSense where to get their keywords. If this isn’t done, they can use information from your sidebar, header, footer, and other places to determine which advertisements to place on your site, which makes it more likely you will have non-relevant advertisements.

To do this, place the following start code at the beginning and the end code at the end of where you want Google to look for keywords:

<- google_ad_section_start -> <- google_ad_section_end ->

Next, go to your sidebar, header, footer, and wherever else you want Google to avoid and enter the following at the beginning of the content:

<- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ->

Then add this at the end of the content:

<- google_ad_section_end ->

This tells Google AdSense to ignore anything between these tags. This stuff has been talked about a lot and will do a lot to help get valid advertisements, but there is more you can do. The next step is to monitor your blog for advertisements still showing up that aren’t relevant to your content. Next, write down the URL listed below the advertisement (DO NOT CLICK THE AD!).

Now, once you’ve gotten your list of URL’s together, go to your Google AdSense account and do the following:

1. Click on AdSense Setup
2. Click Competitive Ad Filter
3. Enter the URL of any advertisements you don’t want to show up on your website. To addmultiple URL’s, type the URL and hit enter, then type the next, etc.

Once you have submitted it, any URL’s you have entered should disappear from your site completely and permanently within a few hours. I check through a few pages every week at random and try to find any ads that I deem irrelevant to my sites content, then filter them out with this method. This will help you receive more relevant advertising on your site and hopefully improve your Click Through Rate (CTR). Also, many of these generic ads that you will want to filter don’t pay much when clicked (some are a penny per click), so your clicks should pay better if you get rid of them.

In order to target keywords, you will want to stick to a particular niche on your site. If you want to branch out more, set up a second blog to cover other topics. This will help Google avoid being confused as to which advertisements to place on your site. You’ll also need to experiment with which keywords pay the most, and then target these keywords.

How do I know which Ad formats are working the best? When you create Google AdSense ad blocks, make sure to use their channels system and name each ad block something unique like “MySiteName 330×250 Rectangle”, etc. This way you can monitor which ads are performing the best and which aren’t. Don’t be afraid to try new setups or new ad blocks to figure out what works for your blog’s niche.

What are AdSense Link Units? AdSense link units are also targeted advertisements that work similar to normal AdSense ads in that they are Cost-Per-Click (CPC), however they actually require two clicks in order for you to get paid. When someone clicks on this on your link unit, it will then take them to a bunch of related links. When those are clicked, that is when you get paid. The nice thing about these link units is they are easy to integrate into your website and they are relatively unobtrusive.

How to Avoid Google’s Smart Pricing? This is a term that most people have probably heard, but it is something that is very difficult to define, due to the secrecy surrounding Google and their Google AdSense program. What we do know is that when your Google AdSense ads are clicked, Google keeps a percentage of each sale. At one point the New York Times reported that Google pays out 78.5% of what the advertiser pays, and then keeps the difference. Unfortunately this cannot be confirmed. What has also been determined through extensive testing, however, is that Google has a system which was designed to penalize low performing campaigns that get a lot of worthless AdSense clicks. This program is called “smart pricing,” and it was created as a way to protect advertisers from having to pay out large amounts on worthless clicks.

Because there is no way for you to know what the clicked advertisement pays and no way to know what percentage Google actually keeps, there is very limited information about smart pricing. It will probably stay this way unless Google decides to release some information about it. One thing I can tell you is that if you ever notice a significant drop in your AdSense income and you haven’t made any major changes to your campaigns, it is fairly likely that your account has been smart priced by Google. This of course means you will now get about 10% of the income you would have gotten across all of your campaigns.

One thing I can tell you from experience is that if you run blogs that are traditionally read by bloggers, webmasters, techies, and other “ad blind” people, these are the sites that are more likely to be causing you to be smart priced. For these types of sites, I recommend people at least consider either going with Yahoo Publisher’s Network (which currently doesn’t have a smart pricing feature), Chitika, or attempt to monetize these sites with affiliate marketing, which we’ll cover below. Also, I recommend that you hold off on using AdSense on your sites that are just getting started until they start getting a good amount of search engine traffic. Search engine visitors are the people that click advertisements, not your readers, so placing AdSense on these sites is risky.

So, how can you fix being smart priced? This is actually pretty easy IF you have a good campaign setup going which shows the performance of each ad placement. You’ll want to make sure each advertisement has a channel, such as “Site Name 468×60 Header Ad” and “Site Name 300×250 In-Post Ad”, etc. Once you’ve got this setup and got a few days data, start reviewing CTR. If you’ve already had this setup, the more data you have the better. I would recommend doing the last two months if possible.

Now, this is probably going to sound extreme, but you’ll want to remove any ad blocks with a Click-Through-Rate of 2% or less. If your AdSense blocks are between 2% and 3% range, keep an eye on these to make sure they stay above that mark. Google is penalizing you because you are wasting their time with these ad blocks, so remove under-performing ads and you should see a jump in your click payouts within a few days!

Overall, having success with Google AdSense requires a lot of individual work, with a focus on ad placement and using proper keywords. It also helps to get a lot of pages out there and indexed with Google. What works for one site, may not work for another website in another niche. Some niches (such as technology) are known for having readers that are “ad blind”, which can make generating AdSense income even more challenging.

Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

As mentioned above, Google AdSense has a pesky smart pricing feature that has been making life difficult for some people trying to earn with income primarily with AdSense. The good news is that some of these niches that don’t perform well with AdSense will often do well with affiliate marketing!

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketers are people that bring together buyers and sellers, then receive a commission each time a sale is made (a select few will actually pay out for each “lead” you refer to them). Depending on the affiliate program, you may get paid a fixed amount, or you may get paid a percentage of the sale. I like to think of affiliate marketers as professional middlemen.

How do I get started with affiliate marketing? The problem many people run into when they get start is that they get overwhelmed with all of the affiliate opportunities out there. When I’m doing consulting, I always recommend people that are new to affiliate marketing start with one of the popular affiliate companies. This way you can search and find a number of different choices within your blogs niche.

These three companies are:

• Commission Junction – CJ deals specifically with managing companies affiliate programs. They are currently the industry leader and manage the affiliate programs of most of the top online corporations. Starting here is a good way to get started by promoting already proven companies.
• Clickbank – Clickbank deals more with individuals and small businesses that sell products online. Here you’ll find a lot of digital product opportunities, including a large number of eBooks, software, and other digital goods.
• Amazon Associates – This is the Amazon.com affiliate program. If your blog talks about books, movies, or pretty much any product that is sold on Amazon, this is a great way to start making some extra money. It is really easy to build links and integrate them into your blog posts, or you can use product images to try to encourage sales.

Once you feel that you’ve gotten the basics of affiliate marketing, you’ll then want to spend some time focusing on affiliate programs that are more specifically targeted to your blog. This can be done by going to Google and searching for your blog’s keywords plus the word affiliate. An example would be if you run a travel blog, you might search for “hotel affiliates”, “airline affiliates”, etc. You’ll probably end up with a large number of affiliate accounts, but this way you’ll get the best targeted affiliations.

Some other companies that offer affiliate marketing programs:

• Market Leverage
• Pepperjam Network
• NeverBlue Ads
• Epic Direct Network

You can join these networks for free, so it never hurts to sign up and see what options you have available to you.

What are some good affiliate marketing strategies? Affiliate marketing is obviously a form of marketing, so I’ve found that the marketing strategies I’ve used all of my life offline seem to translate well to internet marketing.

Here are a few things to focus on:

• Find Trusted Companies - I think with each passing day, people are becoming more and more trusting of buying on the internet, but I’ve found that backing trusted companies often helps you to get more conversions. There are a large number of companies that have commercials or have built up a strong trust with customers, so they are a great place to start. Sign up to promote companies like Amazon, Ticketmaster, Priceline, Sears, Buy.com, or any others that are closely related to a topic your blog covers.
• Develop Reader Trust - Everyone has their own style, but if your blog has developed a decent following, you will need to be careful and only promote products you either do use or would use. If you wouldn’t buy it, don’t try to get your readers to buy it.
• Sell the Product - If you want to find success with affiliate marketing, don’t just slap a banner up on your blog and except to get a bunch of sales. Write a very personal review (avoid sounding like a press release) and let people know what you personally like about the product. If your readers know you use it and/or see you are passionate about it, then they will likely at least consider purchasing it.

Another thing I rarely see many top affiliate marketers talk about is the number of free affiliates out there. Every day hundreds of thousands of people writing blog posts and linking directly to a company’s homepage rather than with an affiliate link. These people are what I have termed free affiliates. Whenever you make an outgoing link to somewhere, take a second to check and see if they have an affiliate program. If so, sign up and use your affiliate link!

So, what do you do about adding affiliate links to your older content? Bloggers that don’t use WordPress are either screwed or are in for a long weekend of editing old posts if they want to add affiliate links to posts they’ve already written, but we as WordPress users have a unique plugin available that affiliate marketers have come to rely heavily on. This premium WordPress plugin is called WP Affiliate Pro, and what it does is allow you to simply enter your affiliate links into it once and it adds them to every post on your website! That includes both old posts and any new posts you write, automatically. Though this plugin has a cost associated with it, once you’ve purchased it, you can then use it on unlimited WordPress blogs. I personally use it on a number of websites and it has truly been a lifesaver.

Hiding Your Affiliate Links

Generally speaking, people tend to fall on one side of the fence or the other when it comes to hiding affiliate links. Those against hiding affiliate links often feel it is dishonest and that affiliate links should always be disclosed, or at a minimum at least be visible in your web browser’s status bar. The rest disagree and will argue that most times they would endorse the product even if it was free, so why not get paid for it?

I’m not here to tell you how to think, but if you decide you want to promote a product on your blog that has an affiliate program and want to hide your affiliate links, you’ll need to learn to create PHP redirects. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow in order to create a redirect:

1. Create a folder somewhere on your hard drive called “Recommends” or whatever sounds good to you.
2. Open Notepad (or similar program for Mac users) and go to Save As.
3. Name it whatever you want to name your affiliate link and add a .php at the end.
4. Now paste the following code into the document and replace the URL with your affiliate link:
5. Save it into the folder created above on your hard drive.
6. Repeat these steps until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
7. Go to your FTP and upload your “Recommends” folder directly to your blogs root directory, which is usually the public_html folder.
8. Now test your new affiliate link by going to http://yourdomain.com/recommends/name.php.

It should then redirect you to wherever the affiliate link is designed to send you to. Once you’ve confirmed that your new affiliate link works, you’ll want to start using your redirect link instead of the affiliate URL.

One major advantage of using this method is that when a company changes their affiliate links, you can easily just insert your new affiliate link in this file instead of changing it throughout all your old posts or anywhere else where you’ve used the affiliate link.

Probably my favorite feature and one of the things that originally attracted me to WordPress was the WordPress plugins that you can get, most of which are completely free. Other than a few exceptions, most WordPress plugins can simply be uploaded to your website and activated to begin working properly.

Top WordPress Plugins

This is a very tough thing to judge, as everyone has different tastes and some plugins are very situational and only fit on certain types of weblogs. For the purpose of this eBook, I have examined the most downloaded plugins, combined them with a few that I really enjoy, and created a list of plugins that are going to useful for pretty much any type of WordPress blog.

1. Google Sitemaps Generator – A sitemap is an xml file that provides a map of your blog to search engines, including showing them what posts have recently been updated and which posts are priority.
2. WP-Super Cache – This plugin creates a cache of your posts to reduce stress on your server. Also includes a few other useful features.
3. Subscribe to Comments – Though many people today are relying on things like CoComment and Co.mments to track the comments they leave on weblogs, there are still a number of people that prefer managing things through their email. After all, why are so many people subscribing to your email feed? This plugin places a box below each post that your readers can get updates whenever a comment is left.
4. Show Top Commentators – This plugin helps encourage comments because commentators are rewarded with a link to their website.
5. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – This feature will eventually be built into WordPress, but for now, Keith has done a great job of making a plugin that you can quickly upgrade your WordPress installation from the dashboard.
6. Popularity Contest – This plugin calculates your most popular posts for you and has a variety of options on how to display them (all time, per month, etc.). This is also a great way to highlight your popular posts to your readers and send more SEO juice towards them (more on this later).
7. All-in-One SEO Pack – This plugin allows you to control several aspects of your blog to improve your search engine rankings.
8. WordPress Related Posts – WordPress 2.3+. This plugin uses your blogs tags to display related posts, both on your blog and in your blog’s feed.
9. CForms II – This is probably the best and most powerful form plugin available. Most people use it as a contact form, which is its primary purpose, but it really can be used for any type of form.
10. WordPress Stats – This plugin was made by Matt Mullenweg and offers a good number of statistics for your blog. You can also link up all your blogs and examine statistics from a single dashboard. For me, one analytics plugin is not enough, so I also use FireStats, as I like some of the figures they provide.
11. WP-PageNavi – If you look at Google’s search results, this is how they display additional pages. It is also widely accepted as the best and most SEO friendly way to display your archives.
12. WP-DB Manager – This is the ultimate database backup plugin. You can schedule backups, restore backups, delete databases, and more from your WordPress dashboard using this plugin.
13. Get Recent Comments – I really like this plugin because in addition to having full control over your recent comments, you can also control and display recent trackbacks.

As mentioned above, these should have a home on pretty much every WordPress blog out there. But what about those situational plugins? You’ll find further down in the eBook while talking about various strategies that I have included mentions and often links some great situational plugins.

Whether you are building a blog that supports multiple authors, or you simply want to have guest posts on your blog, there is a good chance most bloggers will at some point need to learn about the Users tab in the WordPress dashboard. I’m going to go ahead and break this section into two parts. The first section will be how to use the Users tab and the second section will be how to hack your theme to be more multi-author friendly.

Setting Up Author Permissions

Once you’ve created a User account for each author, you will need to set that author’s role. Here is a brief breakdown of each author permission:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features.
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts.
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive newsletters, etc.

Adding Author Information to Your WordPress Blog

In order to get people to write for your blog or submit guest posts for your blog, you will need to either pay writers, or you will need to build a significant amount of traffic to create a lot of exposure for your writers. A good multi-author blog will provide something to reward the author. Obviously paying authors speaks for itself, but if you choose to go the other route, here are a few tips to help attract authors.

First, you’ll want to display the author’s name. There are two code snippets that will accomplish this:

Clicking on author will take you to the Author’s page within your blog:
Clicking on author will take you to the Author’s personal blog:

It is really a preference thing. In my opinion, if you are paying authors, it is probably best to send traffic internally to their author’s page on your site. If you publish a lot of guest posts, offering a postlevel link within the post is a great way to both encourage and reward authors. This way they get credit for a post-level link with search engines (which is preferred over site-wide links) and people reading the blog post can click over and subscribe to their blog’s feed.

Some multi-author WordPress blogs go as far as to build an author profile section into the bottom of each post. I think this is a great idea if you regularly receive contributions from a number of authors, rather than just occasionally. Here is some code you will find useful if you decide to build something like this:

Number of Posts by the Author:
Display Description in Author Profile:

That information is actually pulled from the author’s profile page, so each author can set how they want it to look. You can also use the above code with the following to pull information directly from the users profile:

$curauth->aim;
$curauth->description;
$curauth->display_name;
$curauth->first_name;
$curauth->ID;
$curauth->jabber;
$curauth->last_name;
$curauth->nickname;
$curauth->user_email;
$curauth->user_login;
$curauth->user_nicename;
$curauth->user_registered;
$curauth->user_url;
$curauth->yim;

Another thing that I think adds a nice touch to a multi-author blog is to display your blog authors in the sidebar or footer of your blog. Simply add this code where you want it to display:

If you’d like to customize how this is displayed, you’ll want to check this page on the WordPress Codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_authors. There are a number of different things you can do to get it to look how you want, including display the number of posts by each author, display nicknames, remove the admin from the list, etc.

Building an Author Page

Unfortunately it is difficult to provide you with an author page to use because each theme is different. What I can do it provide an example of how an author page should be setup. I usually recommend people make a copy of their page.php template and rename it author.php. Then paste this code found inside the content loop into your theme, then adjust as necessary:

In other words, use your themes Header, Sidebar, Footer, and just use the code in the middle.

In order to truly get the most benefit from your WordPress install, you will want to use the self-hosted version of WordPress, which can be downloaded for free at WordPress.org.

In order to setup a new self-hosted WordPress blog, you have a couple of choices. You can take the downloaded files from WordPress.org and upload them via FTP to your desired location, or if your web hosting uses CPanel, you can use Fantastico to complete your WordPress install.

Installing WordPress via Fantastico

There are multiple ways to install WordPress, so your choice will come down to personal preference. The most obvious way is to upload your WordPress software via FTP, then run the WordPress install script to manually setup your database and blog information. The easier way (though you lose control over the installation) is to do a one-click WordPress install via Fantastico, which is available with any web hosts that use CPanel. If this method interests you, we’ll list some web hosts that offer CPanel in the next section.

Here is the information you will need to install WordPress via Fantastico:

1. Go to your primary domain name’s CPanel directory.
2. Login to your account (usually same login info as your FTP).
3. Click the link for Fantastico De Luxe. This will bring up a screen that displays your Fantastico installations and give you the option to do a one-click upgrade of your existing WordPress installations (if an update is available).
4. Click the WordPress link in the left menu.
5. Click New Installation. Fantastico should display a drop-down menu with your domain names in your account. This will include any Add-on domains or sub-domains you may have created.
6. Select your domain in the “Install on Domain” field.
7. Enter the directory in the “Install on Directory” field if you are placing your WordPress blog in a directory. Otherwise, leave this field blank.
8. You will then be asked to enter the Admin username and password you’d like to use and some information about your WordPress blog (name, email address, blog description, etc.).
9. Click Install WordPress and you should be done!

Finding a WordPress Friendly Webhost

I mentioned above that many web hosts allow a one-click WordPress install/upgrade via Fantastico. I’ve spent some time doing a lot of research on web hosts and tracking down which ones offer CPanel and the instant WordPress installation. If you haven’t yet found a web host, or aren’t happy with your current webhost, here are quite a few that I consider to be WordPress friendly:

• Hostgator
• DreamHost
• BlueHost
• HostMonster
• A Small Orange
• Lunarpages
• PowWeb
• StartLogic
• SiteGround
• SurpassHosting
• Ace Net
• MySiteSpace
• Site5 (this is who I use)
• Total Choice Hosting
• LinkSky
• AnHosting

The top four are web hosts I’ve had some personal experiences with and recommend. The others below I’ve found also support CPanel/Fantastico, so you may find success with them as well.

Another thing you’ll probably want to look for when picking a web host is the ability to support Add-on domains. Many web hosts allow up to 999 Add-on domains, which means you could essentially have 1000 websites hosted for $7.99 a month. This will be important if you later decide to launch additional WordPress blogs because you can control everything without needing a Reseller account or additional FTP accounts, and you won’t have to deal with all those different passwords!

WordPress Post-Install Checklist

Once you’ve completed installing WordPress, there are a number of things you want to do before you begin posting on your new blog. Due to the number of websites I’ve built over the years using WordPress, I eventually decided to create a checklist that I follow.

Here is what I’ve dubbed my WordPress Post-Install Checklist:

1. Update the Settings (Set a date and time format, Modify Reading and Writing settings, Edit Discussion settings, Modify Permalinks structure, etc.)
2. Edit Links/Blogroll
3. Edit the “Hello World” post to something that fits your new site.
4. Edit the About page (Add your info)
5. Create additional pages (Advertise, Contact, etc.)
6. Create Categories
7. Upload and Activate Plugins
8. Edit Plugin Settings
9. Upload Your Theme
10. Add any Plugin calls to your theme
11. Create a blog logo and add to your theme
12. Create a favicon.ico
13. Add additional users?
14. Add Domain to Google Webmaster Tools
15. Build Custom Email Address (Admin@DomainName.com)

Though you can do them in pretty much any order, I do them in the above order, which I’ve found to be the most optimal.

Creating a WordPress Sitemap

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is a XML file that was originally created by Google for webmasters to use to create a “map” of their website. Due to the success Google found with it, as well as the popularity of it with webmasters, sitemaps were later adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com, making it an important tool for webmasters to provide to search engines.

A good sitemap is dynamic, keeping the freshest content at the top. This way search engines know to index any new posts or updated posts, and it also helps them to determine priority. Search engine spiders then use your Sitemap.xml file when they index your website to ensure they get everything new or that has changed. A sitemap also helps ensure pages get indexed that use JavaScript or Flash, but do not contain HTML links (without a sitemap, these normally would not be discovered by a search engine).

As WordPress users, we have the benefit of a great open source community that has created a variety of sitemap plugins available for you to use for free! The most popular and widely accepted is the Google sitemap plugin. Once activated, this plugin will create your sitemap at http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. You’ll just need to place a link to it from somewhere on your site so search engines can find it (or add it to Google Webmaster Tools). Most people usually place it in their blog’s footer so it is out of the way for your readers, but easy to find for search engine spiders. This plugin is updated regularly and does a great job of everything we mentioned above, so you really shouldn’t need anything else.

Creating a Robots.txt File

For those of you unfamiliar with Robots.txt, it is a text file that webmasters place in the root directory of their website to help control what aspects of their websites are indexed by search engines and what parts should not to be indexed. This is a great way for you to have full control of how search engines view your website and also doubles as an easy way to help avoid duplicate content penalties. With that said, a Robots.txt file is not required, so you will need to decide if your site would greatly benefit from having one.

If you are new to building Robots.txt files, you will want to initially proceed with caution. Unfortunately a poorly written Robots.txt file can create a number of problems including accidentally preventing your website from being indexed all together! Therefore, if you decide to create a Robots.txt file for your website, you will want to start with a basic Robots.txt file that is designed for a standard WordPress installation and then make any adjustments as necessary. Here is a great standard Robots.txt file for a WordPress user:

Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-login/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /adlogger/
Disallow: /banner/
Disallow: /dreamdiary/
Disallow: /projects/
Disallow: /statistics/
Disallow: /theme_backup/
Allow: /wp-skins/

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: /*.php*
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*

Of course you may want to make adjustments based upon your blogs setup. If you’ve added subdomains or directories, you will probably want to allow them, etc. Once you’ve got it setup how you want (or just go with the example above), you’ll want to have Google analyze your Robots.txt file before uploaded it to your website. This can be done within the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard for your blog.

Here are the steps you will want to follow:

1. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools
2. Select the domain you want to examine
3. Click on Tools in the menu on the left
4. Click on Analyze Robots.txt
5. Click Check! at the bottom of the page.

Once you are happy with your Robots.txt file, upload it to the root of your website’s directory and then keep an eye on your blog’s analytics for about a week to ensure nothing major changes (in a negative way).

Using Google Webmaster Tools

Obviously there are quite a few search engines that can send your blog traffic, but a majority of all search traffic goes through Google.com. As a result, you will want to always place your primary focus on Google when optimizing your websites. Google offers an extremely useful tool called Google Webmaster Tools, which pretty much describes exactly what it is. You can enter your developed domain names here, verify you control them, and then you are able to control some aspects of your domains.

Here are some of the things included in Google Webmaster Tools:

• Add Sitemap – See our Sitemap section for additional information.
• Analyze Robots.txt – See our Robots.txt section for additional information.
• Set Preferred Domain – Would you rather Google use www or non-www? Enter your preference here.
• Remove URLs – Over time, many websites get invalid URL’s for one reason or anyother. Maybe you changed a post slug after it was indexed or something. If Google finds a 404 error message, it will show it here and you can investigate it on your own to fix the problem or remove the URL from within the dashboard.
• Examine Links – You can examine your external and internal links on your website. This is useful to see what anchor text you are seeing a lot of, and which ones you need to work on. You can also examine your internal linking structure with this tool.
• Site Statistics – Want to see how your site ranks? Google will display your Index Stats, Top Search Queries, Crawl Stats, etc.

Overall, Google Webmaster Tools is a very useful tool that I think every webmaster should use. Each time I build a new website or WordPress blog, I always add my site, verify it, and make sure I things are in good shape.

Other uses for Google Webmaster Tools (found in the Dashboard) that most people probably don’t know about:

• Ability to download your data from all of your websites.
• Report Spam You’ve Found in Google’s Index
• Report Discovered Paid Links – This is useful for when you see someone buying links to pass you in the SERP’s.
• Request Reconsideration – If you’ve sold paid links, purchased a domain that was previously banned, or for whatever reason your domain is in Google’s doghouse, you’ll want to submit a request for reconsideration here.

Are you looking to find success with WordPress? Over the past year, WordPress has become the top blogging platform in the world, and many major internet companies (such as CNN, Yahoo, Sony, The New York Times, People Magazine, and eBay) have taken notice. A quick browse around many of these companies websites show WordPress installations being used to manage portions of their websites. At the same time, many bloggers are using a number of techniques to make significant income with their WordPress blogs. Are you getting the most out of your WordPress installation?

Whether your blogging goal is to simply write a personal blog, transition to making a full time income online, or anywhere in between, the open source WordPress software has you covered free of charge.

With the Success with WordPress series blog, you’ll learn a number of blogging techniques, advanced strategies for optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines, and of course how to properly market your WordPress blog for the most exposure.

A list of the topics covered in this series blog include:

• Installing WordPress

• Setting Up a Multi-Author Blog

• WordPress Plugins Section

• Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and WordPress

• Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)

• Build Forums in WordPress

• SEO for WordPress

• Building a Niche Blog with WordPress

Here, free release.