Creating your blog under $100 investment
Want to create your blog in an investment of less than $100 a year? Why not? If you calculate, that comes up to an investment of less than 30 cents a day*! It really isn’t that expensive if you see. Only a small investment of $100 a year and the return could be rewarding. You need 3 basic things to get started with your professional blog: Domain, Web Hosting and a Design.
1) Grab a domain name for less than $10!
The 1st thing you need is a domain name to give your blog a professional look. Those long-and-boring blogspot/wordpress.com names really don’t look good. I recommend getting your domains from Name.com
Price: $8.99 a year!
2) Get a cheap web hosting plan
You don’t need much for the start. Just a simple web hosting plan with 100 MB space and 10 GB Bandwidth is enough for your blog to grow. I recommend getting your web hosting package from Limespace.net
Price: $35 a year or $2.95 per month!
3) Get a professional design
Be apart from the crowd. Get a professional WordPress theme for less than $30 (Oh yeah!). This may sound impossible but it is true. A highly professional wordpress theme for less than $30 (one time)! I recommend ThemesForest.Net
Price: $30 (One time)
Alright, let’s add all this up: $8.99 + $35 + $30 = $73.99. About $74. However, also note that the Theme investment is only one time. So that means you can run your blog in a professional way for less than $45 a year ($44 to be precise)!!! You still have $26 left. That’s exactly how much you need to advertise your blog on Sensonize.com for 30 days to get kick started! 😉
The Ultimate Blogging Theme!
Sensonize dot com has got a new theme! This is like the 5th theme in the past one year lol! Alright, but this time, it’s a bit different. I’ve actually gone ahead and spent some money on it 😛
I always wanted a theme which is simple and neat, but yet offers many features. Many of you might think that this is just a plain old simple theme. No my friend, this theme has got features which many pro themes don’t have!
Some features I like:
- Highly editable in WordPress Widgets
- I don’t need to touch a single code
- Comes in three colors for the price of one
- Extremely SEO friendly
- Light, yet crisp
- Makes pages load 50% faster
- More monetization options
and more.. The list never ends!
This theme is not the like the ones that cost a fortune… This theme is the one that makes fortunes! It’s extremely simple and very cost effective! — Only $67 for 3 colors! That’s like $22.33 for each color set — for LIFE! No additional cost, no subcribtions – Just one time payment.
Dude! This theme is the BOMB! If you are into the make money online niche and don’t use this theme, you’re blog isn’t worth it! Spend some bucks and get this them for $67 only!
5 steps to monetize your blog
Having a blog doesn’t mean you can make money out of it. There are several steps that need to be followed to convert your blog from a source of information to a source of income. If you already have a blog, read through the following steps below top learn how to make money out of it.
1) Posting regular updates
Your blog must have at least one blog post every week. Whether you get feedback or you don’t, it is the best to write a blog post on weekly or even daily basis. Your readers would lose interest in your blog if they do not see any updates.
2) Pinging your blog
Pinging your blog is important because it ensures that blog directories as well as search engines will be alerted each time you update your blog. This will help you get the attention of more blog readers. Pingomatic and Pingoat are some of the available sites that supply this kind of service at no cost.
3) Promoting your blog
Apart from pinging your blog, you should let your target audience know that you exist on the internet and are a valuable source of information. As you get a steady growth and targeted traffic to your blog, you have the potential to make money out of it.
4) Space for Advertisements
As your blog grows you will need space for advertisements to make money out of it. As long as you have a good number of loyal followers and you maintain a steady flow of traffic, you have much to gain from publishing pay-per-click advertisements or even directly selling some space to advertisers.
5) Promote Affiliate Marketing Programs
This can be a very valuable means to leverage on your readership. Join affiliate marketing programs with products that your target market may be interested in. You can then use your blog to promote those products and earn commissions.
By following the steps listed above, you can be more effective making money online out of your blog.
Why Bloggers Fail To Make Money By Blogging
Lets face it, 98% of the blogs are a failure. If your blog makes $100 per month, your doing better than 98% of 120 million blogs. Pretty sad, huh? One thing is for sure, it is not because of the lack of information on the internet. But still, a vast majority of bloggers don’t make anything. Why?
They don’t take it seriously
Most of the bloggers start their blogs for fun and not for making money online. Thats how Sensonize dot com started. I created this blog to ramble about other blogs, social media, whats going on the internet and reviews. Basically, just for fun. As a matter of fact, I did not make any money from Sensonize dot com for the first 6 months. Well, I don’t make much money out of Sensonize dot com as yet.
Many bloggers don’t take their blogs seriously and blog just for fun. Many just give it a try. If its successful, great! If its not, oh well. With that kind of attitude it is not hard to understand which 98% of the bloggers don’t make anything from their blogs.
No Investment
This is the number one reason not to take your blog seriously. With services like Blogspot, you literally start with zero dollars. If you want a professional look, a domain cost $8.95 a year and hosting can be a low few dollars a month.
The low investment also means that you don’t have much, or anything, to lose. If it doesn’t make you any money, just curse me and move on. It cost you nothing to start so you don’t take it seriously.
If blogging costs $10,000 or more to start, would you be running your blog the same way your running it now? I highly doubt that! Knowing that commitment increases with money, the solution is simple. Put some money into your blog. Buy that domain name, get that professional web hosting account, invest in a custom design, spend some money on promotion, etc. Once you have some money tied into it, you’ll take things a lot more seriously.
Why don’t you make any money out of it
Most of the bloggers treat blogging as a hobby and never get out of the hobby stage. If you really want to make money by blogging, you need to get serious about it and treat your blog like a real business. Blogging is a not a fly by night or get rich quick scheme. Like any business, it take time, money and commitment to build. For the first six months of this blogs life, it made zero and barely got more than 500 page views per day. But I kept at it. I treated the blog like I treated my other businesses. I invested in it, I spent hundreds of dollars improving it and promoting it.
Success is never by accident. All the big money making bloggers didn’t get there by luck or taking the attitude of easy in, easy out. They got there by taking their blogging seriously and treating their blogs like a business. You should too.
Evil way to make commentators subscribe to your blog
Not exactly subscribe to your blog, but subscribe to your blog comments. I was just browsing the WordPress plugins directory to checkout some new plugins which could be useful for my blog. I found the plugin Subscribe to Comments 2.1 which is an amazing plugin if you are running a blog which gets alot of comments on your articles or a blog which gets a few (like Sensonize.com).
Using this plugin the good way
You can use this plugin in 2 ways. 1 is the good way which would be simply installing the plugin and allowing your commentators to choose if they would like to subscribe or do it yourself for them 👿 This good way will make readers subscribe and stay, the evil way might make them unsubscribe and never visit your blog again.
Using this plugin the evil way
The people who have been following me on Twitter, know exactly how evil am I lol. Lets get started –
1) Install the plugin
Installing the plugin is really simple, if your using WordPress 2.7.1 just search for “Subscribe Comments” and install it. If your doing it the manual way: download the plugin, upload it in wp-content/plugins and extract it, then activate it from your WordPress Admin Panel.
2) Tweaking some codes
This is really simple. Once your done installing the plugin, login to your Cpanel or any other panel you use File Manager and open the wordpress directory you have installed your wordpress blog in. Then open: domain.com/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments After you have done the above you will see a 50.41 KB file named subscribe-to-comments.php. Right click on it (in Cpanel 11) and click “Edit”. Once your there, Press Control + F(find) in Firefox and it will open a search box. In the search box search for: This is the text that is displayed for users who are NOT subscribed. You will see that line highlighted on that long page full of codes.
Just few lines below that you will see a code like this:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscribe” id=”subscribe” value=”subscribe” checked=”no” style=”width: auto;” <?php if ( $checked_status ) echo ‘checked=”checked” ‘; ?>/>
Replace it with:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscribe” id=”subscribe” value=”subscribe” checked=”yes” style=”width: auto;” <?php if ( $checked_status ) echo ‘checked=”checked” ‘; ?>/>
All I did in the above code was, changed checked="no" to checked="yes"
Now the visitors that leave comments to your blog will automatically get subscribed to the blog post they have commented on. This is a good way to make them subscribe to blog posts without letting them come to know 😉 But yes, a visitor can uncheck the subscription option in the comment box if he/she wants.
Benefits
- It subscribes the commentator to a single blog post and informs him/her about the new comments.
- The commentator will visit your blog again to see what has been posted and will also reply to the comments.
- The commentator will also subscribe to your blog if you have quality posts.
- You can also add text in the email – Eg: There are new comments on so-and-so post, please check back and give your feedback and also add a line below that: “If you like reading my blog, do subscribe to my RSS feeds”
- Your blog becomes more active and gets feedback from the visitors that like your blog and would leave comments back again and again.
Loss
- That commentator might not come back if he is bombarded with alot of emails for a single post.
- The good way can gain you readers but the evil way will just make you lose readers.
My suggestion would be to use the good way if you get 5+ comments on your blog posts. If you get less than 5 comments on your blog posts, use the evil way! 👿
