White Hat Blogging Techniques
Introduction: So, what is ‘White Hat’? This is a general term used for everything that is legally allowed on the Internet, which by the way, is almost completely controlled by Google.
So let’s get started.
Step 1 – Research A Profitable Niche Market: The first thing you should always do when creating a blog or launching any website is look into the market and find out if money can be made. The main idea of creating niche blogs is to earn money from affiliate programs and AdSense while giving quality content to your visitors. With this is mind you need to first find a well converting affiliate program to promote through your blogs. To do this, just head on over to www.clickbank.com and click on the bottom link.
Then go into the different categories of products. In these you will see various products and the higher they are ranked the more income that product is getting. You can see from the stats below each program and the amount you will earn per sale in both percentage and dollar amount. You’ll also see the percentage of sales generated by affiliates and the number of affiliates that have made a sale in the last 8 weeks.
From these stats you will be able to see if the program will be profitable. You need to aim for affiliate programs paying over 50%. I’d even go after the ones that pay 75% first and work your way down. You’ll also want to select a product that has at least 50% of its sales generated by affiliates.
The gravity isn’t as important, so when starting I recommend selecting products in smaller markets. Then once you have the hang of the system go after the larger markets with high gravities.
Once you’ve selected 3 to 5 suitable products that you would be interested in promoting you need to find out whether or not you’ll be able to drive traffic to those sites for free. To do this you’ll need to find out the number of people that are searching for the key phrases in your market. This is easily done by using a free piece of software called Good Keywords, which can be downloaded from www.goodkeywords.com.
Once Installed search for your primary keyword; e.g. if the product is about improving your golf swing then search just for the word GOLF. Then you are looking for suitable phrases of two to four words that have over 1,000 searches per month. You should create a blog on each of these phrases.
Now from doing just these two stages, you have a product that can sell and in a market whereby you can attract visitors to your blog.
Step 2 – Creating & Tuning Your Blogs: So, you have a profitable market. Now you need to create your blogs. I recommend creating 5 to 10 blogs in your network. Now before you go thinking you’re creating useless blogs that offer no content think again. All of these blogs will have quality content on them. You’ll see where you can get this good content for free in step 3.
So let’s create some blogs. To create your blogs you can use WordPress or blogger, and both work well, but I like blogger as it’s free and I’ve found that MSN and Yahoo will rank these blogs higher than the WordPress ones.
First you need to go to www.blogger.com and create an account. Then you need to create your blog by following the simple steps.
Now that you’ve created your blog, you’ll need to do some fine tuning in order to increase your search engine rankings. To do this, you just need to go to the settings section and replicate the following screens.
Now you need to create your other blogs in your network following the same steps. I recommend having no more than 5 blogs per account, as when you have ten or even a hundred, ‘Blogger’ may think that you are misusing there service.
Step 3 – Posting Free Valuable Content Your Readers Will Love: So to make real blogs that add value to the web you need quality content that the readers in your market will love and even come back to your blog for. There are a few different options when you need content. The first one is that if the blog is in a market which you are passionate about then you can write a few articles yourself without too much concern. This way is quick, free and the content is unique, but it does take a little work.
Another way is to use private label right articles, which you are free to change and make into your own. The other way is to get ‘on topic articles’, for free using article directories like; www.goarticles.com and www.ezinearticles.com to name two, but there are hundreds of directories to chose from.
All you need to do, is go to www.goarticles.com and browse through the category related to your market. Then you can copy and paste these articles to your blog, as long as you keep the links in them. This is OK to give the author a link as you are getting free content for your blog.
So, now you can go to several directories, or look through your article collection and select a few articles you can post to your blog over the coming days or weeks. After every post you should go over to www.pingoat.com and ping your blog. This lets the search engines know you have updated your blog. Just place your ‘URL’ and atom feed and select all the English speaking readers at pingoat.
Step 4 – Interlinking Your Blogs: Now you need to take your individual blogs and make them into a network. Let’s say you have 5 blogs. 1 may be the main two key word blog and the other 4 may be 2 or 3 key word sub blogs e.g.;
· Main blog -- Puppy Training
· Sub Blogs – Puppy Training Tips
· Potty Puppy Training
· Puppy house training
· Crate training puppy
Here you need to link all the blogs to the main blog and then the sub blogs in a circle.
To do this, the easiest way is to link using posting articles. So, in the title field place the keyword you are using, and then in the link field you’ll just link it to the appropriate blog.
Step 5 – Monetizing Your Blogs: So now you’ve set up a few blogs around a niche and have some quality content on there, but isn’t it about time to set your blogs up to make money?
On your blog the easiest way to make money is by promoting affiliate programs and displaying Google AdSense. From having these on your blog you will be able to make money by sending your traffic to other sites.
Placing a Banner Ad: One of the first things you’ll want to do, is to find out if the affiliate program you are promoting has a readymade banner. If not, you can create one in ‘Photoshop’ or ‘paint’. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just text like a headline, e.g.;
You need to then upload this banner to some web space that you own. If you don’t have any you can get some free space from www.geocities.com. Once uploaded, you then need to implement the following code into your blog;
· <a href=”TARGET URL”>
· <img src=”IMAGE URL”
· width=”” height=”” border=”0”></a>
This needs to be placed below the description.
Placing AdSense on Your Blog: Now that you have your affiliate banner, you’ll need to fill the remaining spare space on your blog with AdSense ads.
I recommend having AdSense down the side of your blog and a bar along the top as well. So the code you’ll need is for a skyscraper ad and either a 468 banner or a 720 leader board. Once you have the code the horizontal AdSense bar goes just under your affiliate banner.
And the vertical bar goes under your profile.
Once you have made these changes to your blog template you need to republish your entire blog. This will then display the affiliate banner and AdSense ads on your blog for visitors to see.
Step 6 – Search Engine Optimization: Now you have your blog set up and you are ready for a flood of visitors, it’s time to optimize your blog for the search engines. You’ll need to do this in two ways. Here we can use both ‘on page’ optimization and ‘off page’ optimization. The on page optimization is already done if you have posted your key phrase specific to the content of your blogs, and added the keyword to the title and description of your blog in the settings field.
This leaves you with the off page optimization, which is basically the incoming links to your blog. These need to be key phrase specific, e.g.;
Your link should be like below;
Puppy training
As this is a link to your blog for the phrase you are trying to rank well for in the search engines. Most people make the mistake of linking to their blogs like below;
http://puppytraining1.blogspot.com
Now this link could be on the exact same page as the key phrase specific one, but it has far less quality, and it would do you very little good to rank number 1 for your URL since you are trying to promote your blog.
Now that you know how to link to your blog, you need to go and get literally hundreds of backlinks. This will ensure that your blog will be ranked high by the search engines.
Now regarding your sub blogs, it will take less links, but in large markets I have seen that it can take thousands of incoming links before ranking on the first page, which is why the research phase is so important.
So how do you get hundreds or even thousands of links without using any black hat techniques or risky software? There are a few white hat ways to get incoming links which are;
1 – Links on your other blogs: By following this system you will already have links on your blogs to your main blog by posting articles with the keyword in the title field and the blog URL in the link field.
Now if you want to add links to the other blogs you can either use this method, or you can place anchor text code in the template code.
Here’s the code you need to use;
<a href=”Blog URL” title=”Keyword”>Keyword</a>
And you can place this either in the side bar or at the bottom of the blog.
2 – Links from submitting articles: The best way to get outside links from hundreds of different websites is by submitting articles.
Now this can be done manually or semi automatically using software such as;
Using this software allows you to submit your article to over 150 directories in approximately an hour, which is excellent considering that it would take you at least 5 hours to do it manually. Keep in mind that there are dozens and dozens of article submitting programs.
Once your article is in the directory people like yourself can place these articles on their blogs or websites for free, so long as they keep the links to the author’s site or blog.
This means that within a few weeks you can have hundreds of extra links coming into your blog from people who are displaying your content on their sites. Now writing an article is really easy and it only has to be approximately 350 to 400 words long. You can simply research and read a couple of articles in about 30 minutes and just re-word that information into a unique article in another 30 minutes.
Remember to make sure the links in your author box are keyword specific using anchor text like when linking from blog to blog.
3 – Links from link exchanges: Another excellent way to get links from hundreds of on topic websites is by joining link exchange websites. The one I recommend and use is;
www.linkmetro.com
This has over 20,000 members wanting to exchange links, and they make it really easy to exchange links. You just find a site you want to link to. Place some code they give you on your blog, and then that site is notified and asked to link back to you.
Link metro even has videos showing you step-by-step instructions on how to use their free service. That way, even a total newbie can do this with ease.
Now you have a blog which is optimized for the search engines, you are starting to get incoming links, which in turn is moving you up in the search engine rankings.
Step 7 – Update and move into other markets: Now you have one blog network set up. You can keep posting articles and news to those blogs giving regular content to your readers. This will keep your visitors coming back to your blog. You can also set up another blog network in a different market. You could go for a totally new market with nothing in common with the one just created, or you could go for one linked closely to your existing network.
Doing the second blog, it will mean that you can interlink your blogs and share traffic between the networks. By using these white hat steps you will be able to create real blogs that add value to the internet, and keep readers coming back while monetizing your blogs to make profit from AdSense and your related affiliate products.