As you probably know every blogger out there (or at least a vast majority of bloggers) are looking to make some type of income with their blogs.

There is nothing wrong with this but the typical technique used is to put up a blog throw some advertising on it and expect instant income.  Isn’t that what all the over-hyped products tell you?

The average results for this type of attempt is usually the blogger makes nothing, nada, zip and quite often it ends up costing money.

Now, don’t get me wrong I do believe you need to spend some money to make money.  If you aren’t spending money then you are spending your time doing the work, either way it costs you.

But that is getting off the point.  There are basically two different types of blog formats that can create a good income for you:

1. Authority type blog – this is a blog that usually ends up being a very large blog with lots of content on one subject.  Make that good content on one subject.  The goal here is to dominate the subject, build a loyal following and monetize buy either selling directly to your followers or through affiliate programs.
   • This type of blog brands you as an expert of that subject.  With the authority type of blog you need to pay close attention to your content.  It can’t be a PLR article that provides bad information (yes, a lot of them do).  It needs to be content that provides reliable information or you will find that you end up with a bad reputation in the subject which makes it hard for you to sell or even refer people to products.
   • This leaves you with advertising to monetize your blog.  If you have a bad reputation your traffic will drop and your advertisers will go away which leaves you with only the advertising systems that pay you pennies per click and since your traffic is dropping they won’t pay that well.
   • Good content in the key to keeping people coming back to your blog.  People reading and liking your content is the key to getting traffic from social bookmarking services.  If they don’t like your content they are not going to bookmark it, are they?
   • To summarize the authority type blog needs good content to succeed (preferably a lot of it) so make sure you KNOW the content is good before it is published on your blog.
2. Mass production blogs – This is where you put up a lot of blogs usually targeted at a few long tail keywords.  The goal here is to rank for the keywords you selected and drive traffic to these blogs to create an income from them. 
   • This income from mass products blogs usually isn’t very good on a per blog basis but once you get enough of them going you can make a decent income.  For example:  if you are making $20 per month from a blog that isn’t much money but what if you have 100 of them? Or 200 of them? Or 1000 of them?  You can see the income quickly increases.
   • The main problem with this type blog is that there are a lot of people trying to do this with private label content they purchase.  Which is actually a good way to do it BUT most of them don’t change the content, they just publish it the way it is and a lot of them buy content that is pure garbage and don’t check it or change it.
   • Eventually what happens is the search engines get wise to this technique and the blogs stop turning up in the top results of the search engines.  No search engine results means no traffic. No traffic means no income.
   • So again, you can see we are brought back to your content.  Private label content is fine to use but you MUST edit it or hire some one to edit it for you.  Yes, you can get software programs that will change your article but most of the time the results are a terrible article.

Your articles should be edited by some one that has at least a little knowledge of the subject you are working in.  This will ensure that you don’t publish garbage on your site and this can make the difference between success and failure for your blog.

If you actually read this article you will know that the success of your blog doesn’t rely on content but on quality content.  If you are using private label content change it, make sure it is good information.  If you are allowing other people to post on your blog read their posts before you approve them.  Content may be king but that king could have a very poor or debt ridden kingdom. With quality content you can be the king of a thriving kingdom.

Blog Content Prison

Everybody is always saying that they don’t know what to write about for their blog hopefully this will change that and improve your search engine rankings at the same time.

When you created your blog you should have done some keyword research to find the keywords that you want your blog to rank for. If you didn’t do any keyword research then now is the time to do it.

Now I am going to assume you have done your keyword research and have a list of keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. Hopefully you have a list of at least 10 keyword phrases if not go back to your keyword research and dig up some more.

List your ten best keyword phrases and this will be the first part of the title of your post.

For example, some of my keywords are:

Blogging Instructions
How To Blog
Blog Site
Blog Themes
Blog Hosting
Blog Content
WordPress

Now look at my posts. You will see that I have a post with a title that starts with almost all of these keyword phrases. (The How To Blog and Blog site are actually taken care of by the domain name and an html insert I have at the beginning of the page.)

What does this do?

Simple it gets my keywords in a prominent position on the website and I since I have all my post titles set to H1 this gives them as much weight as you can for on site optimization.

Now go to one of the pages, here is a link to the blog theme page Blog Themes it will open in a new window.

By the way the post above is a post on the theme that let’s me easily change my post titles to H1 without editing the CSS files, just a couple of clicks of the mouse.

Look at the URL in the address bar of your browser you will see that the URL contains the term Blog Theme twice.

Now look at title for the page again I have my main keywords first in the title to give them more weight.

This is what you want to do with your keyword phrases. Now take those ten keyword phrases you have and you have ideas for ten posts to write or to have written for you.

Once you have these ten articles done that doesn’t mean you have to stop using that keyword phrase at the beginning of your post titles. You can write as many post as you can think of on that topic, in fact I recommend you write numerous post on the topic to get more coverage in your longtail keyword phrases.

If you have been setting the correct way you should now have a place to start when it comes to writing an article. Keywords are the soul of your blog, use them, use them often and try to get them in positions that will help you with your search engine optimization (SEO).

As far as the rest of the blog configuration goes that is way too much to put in one post, you can get complete instructions at Blogging Beginners with the benefit of being able to ask the questions you want the answer to. Or you can search through the post here because sooner or later almost everything will be addressed.