In my previous post I talked about the difference in being a true rock star and being a rock star in the rock star video game.

In this post I am going to show you the difference!

As I mentioned before the main difference is a true rock star learns the chords necessary to become a rock star and the video game rock star just pushed the buttons and pretends.

This is a lot like internet marketing. There are a ton of people out there that have never made a penny on the internet telling you how to make money.

Does that make any sense to you?

Now I have found a couple of videos on YouTube that shows the difference between knowing the chords and trying to be a rock star by pushing buttons.

First watch this video…

Now watch the magic button version.

You should quickly see the difference!

Did you see the difference?

Being a rock star blogger is exactly like this. If you learn the basics and take the time to develop yourself you can be a rock star blogger.

If you run around looking for the magic button that will instantly make you a rock star blogger without doing any work you will end up as a champ in the Rock Star Blogger Video Game!

I don’t consider myself a rock star blogger, I know how to make money with a blog (or two or three or a dozen) but I have never developed the huge blogging site that has tens of thousands of visitors per day, at least not yet. But I am on the road to it. I have a number of blogs that average over 200 visitors per day that were created with little work once I knew the basics.

Anyone that wants to do this can do this! But it does take time and knowledge.

You need to make up your mind! Do you want to be the Rock Star that knows the chords or do you want to be like the ones that think just pushing a button will make them a rock star?

If you are willing to put in the effort a blogging course like the one we offer at Blogging Beginners is a great way for you to get the ball rolling.

Blog marketing is using blogs to create a form of income or sometimes it is used as a term for promoting your blog.

We will start with using blogs as a form of income.

There numerous ways to create a money making blog, you can use any or all of the following methods:

• Sell adverting – this can be placing advertising on your site with a service like Google Adsense or you can sell directly to businesses.
• Promote affiliate products – Affiliate products can cover just about anything. Using services like ClickBank, Chitka, Commission Junction, Amazon, etc. and other independent sites you can find a product that matches almost every niche. These will range from digital information (usually the highest percentage commissions) to physical products to automobiles.
• Lead capture – this is where you get paid for getting someone to sign up somewhere. Good examples are credit card companies and insurance companies that will pay you when ever some one clicks on you affiliate link and fills out a form on their sites. This can vary from a few cents per signup to twenty dollars or more per sign up.
• Selling products directly – this is where you either have your own product that you created or you have a product that you have a license to sell. The largest difference between selling your own product and selling affiliate products is that you get to keep 100% when you sell your own product.
• Traffic collection – this is a form of blog marketing that is similar to all of the above but you don’t make your money directly from your blog. Instead you use it as a targeted traffic source to build a reputation for another site. This site is an example of that. This blog is targeted at people that want to learn how to blog but I don’t sell anything directly from this site. Yes, there are affiliate links but the main purpose of this site is to find people that are interested in creating money making blogs and get them to purchase my product at Blogging Beginners. A side note here, there will still be a lot of good information on this site but Blogging Beginners will have much, much more and go into details. But you have to have good content if you expect any blog marketing method to succeed.

Now to the other way I have seen the term blog marketing used. Some people (not that many but a few) use the term blog marketing to refer to the act of marketing a blog. In other words, this is the method(s) they use to get their blog noticed.

There are a number of ways this is done:

• Search engine Optimization (SEO) – blogs especially WordPress blogs are excellent platforms to create sites that rank high in the search engines. This is due, in a large part, to the plugins you can use to customize your site.
• Web 2.0 – This are socially interactive websites where you can join or create communities, find friends or followers. These are usually used to inform people in your group (your friends and followers) about thing you find interesting and of course you find your own blog interesting.
• Social Bookmarking – These sites were originally designed to let you save your favorite sites on the web so you could access them from any computer with internet access in the world. They evolved into sites that let you share your favorites with other people with the same interests and some even evolved to the point where you can rate the links. By getting your blog listed in social bookmarking site you are promoting your blog. The more people that bookmark your blog the more traffic you will get.
• Back Links – are links from other sites pointing to your blog. By getting a lot of back links not only will you get traffic from the links themselves but you will also boost your search engine results.
• Directory submission – there are thousands of directories that cater to specific niches and directories like Technorati that cater to blogs. By submitting to these directories you are not only marketing your blog but you are creating back links and (depending on the directory) traffic.

These are the most common methods used to market blogs but there are others such as press releases, contests and more. Your best bet is to use as many as you can to get your blog noticed. If you are looking for a course that teaches all of these step by step check out Blogging Beginners

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous blogging or to take arms against a sea of niche bloggers, and by opposing conquer them?

OK, that is enough of my poor paraphrasing of William Shakespeare.

This is as you might have guessed about blogging for profits or just blogging for attention or to get the word out about something special to you or just blogging to vent.

The real question is should you use a free blogging service or spend a little money and set up your own blog on your own domain?

The answer to this question, as with almost all internet marketing questions, is “It Depends”.

If all you are doing is providing your personal opinion about celebrities, politics, your personal life, what your group or organization is doing and not actively seeking to make money with your blog. You will do find with the free blogging services like Blogger.com or WordPress.com

If you are planning on doing blog marketing to create a profitable blog you should really look at this as running your own business and this means you will have to spend a little money.

How many of you actually believe you can run your own business without spending any money?

Seriously, if you try to start a business offline you better have thousands of dollars and a good line of credit.

To start a business online, especially with a blog, is a fraction of the cost of starting an offline business.

For under $50 per month (a high estimate here) you can get your own business up and running online. What offline business can you run for $50 per month?

I told you that $50 per month was a high estimate and what does that include?

• Domain Name= $0.83 per month (based on $10.00 per year)
• Hosting = $10.00 per month. Yes, you can get it cheaper but this is for a reliable hosting account with room to expand and no additional cost.
• Autoresponder = $20.00 per month. This is the best way to stay in contact with you customers and potential customers, without getting your site shut down for spamming.

As you can see that comes up to $30.83 per month and the autoresponder is optional (though highly recommended) when you are first starting out. The $20 that is left over from the $50 estimate can be used for other things like education and advertising.

There are other expenses that you will have but I am guessing you already have those expenses, such as; a computer, internet access and an email account.

Why do you want to set up your blog on its own domain?

The answer to that is because it will make it much easier for you to turn up high in the search engines and get traffic to your site.

With blogs, particularly WordPress blogs, you have these things called plugins that you can easily install that will optimize your blog for the search engines, set up RSS feeds, allow others to bookmark it and many, many other things.

These options are available with most of the free services.

I won’t tell you that you can’t make money with a free blogging service but I will tell you that it will take a lot more work and a lot more time to get where you want to go.

What does this boil down too? Basically, if you are planning to make money blogging you should plan it like a business and budget some money to get your business started.