Blogging For Fries or Blogging For Money?

 

 

Picture yourself as a pimply teenager working for minimum wage at the nearby fast food joint.  You stand at the counter, with your feet aching, and take orders during your 4 hour shift.  The only thing you’re thinking about is getting out of there and hopefully snagging a bag of fries on the way out.  You do just what you’re asked to do and nothing more. 

After all, you’re only working for minimum wage, why should you put out more than you have to?

If you’re smart, you’ll start stocking up the condiments, wiping down the counter, and suggesting desserts to the customers.  You’ll become someone people can count on to do a little extra, with consistency.  Why?  Because that’s what gets you a raise and a promotion!
 

 

So let’s apply that minimum wage job experience to your blogging experience…

Are you only doing what’s expected of you?  Are you blogging for fries or blogging for money?  You post every now and then with no consistency.  You give others the bare minimum and nothing else.  You don’t go the extra mile and make your blog as interesting and helpful as it could be.  You’ve got the working for minimum wage attitude. 

But it’s a funny thing, you have to step out and do more… before you get rewarded or compensated, so it’s going to feel like you’re doing all this extra work for no return.  That’s a little short-sighted though, because if you do more than what is necessary now, you’ll surely reap the rewards before too long, even if you can’t see it now.
 

Here are some qualities that someone looking for a promotion, i.e., a blogger who’s blogging for money needs to have:

1.  A plan for your blog that incorporates elements of getting new traffic and retaining old traffic, that encourages commenting, allows you to show off your expertise, promotes only high quality products that convert well, increases your rank in the search engines, and makes your blog… well… the best darn blog in town that everyone wants to visit.
 

2.  The ability to focus on your plan and work it constantly.  There’s no doubt it’s going to take some hard work and you have to be willing to commit.  Turn down the dial on the all-day/all-night online radio station, 102.overwhelm, and focus on what you want to accomplish each day and why.
 

3.  The willingness to blog often, consistently, with valuable content that helps people.  Take the extra time to write each post as if it’s going to be the next popular post gone viral.  Instead of looking at it like it’s a chore, have fun with it.  Remember, you’re ultimately blogging for money, even if you don’t see much of it quite yet.

 

4.  The determination to try something you haven’t done before.  Yes, it can be scary to write a guest blog post for someone else, toot your own horn on Twitter, offer a strong opinion post, or blog about something you’re not exactly an expert on.  It will also make you uncomfortable trying different mediums – podcasts, videos, screencasting, interviews, etc.  But that’s how you find out what people like and want, and what gets others talking and linking to you from their blogs.

 

5.  The nerve to ask questions.  If you hit a snag, it might be is a lot quicker to swallow your pride and ask for help.  Maybe you want to know what theme or plugin someone else is using.  Ask!  People will help, they’re hardwired that way.

The choice is yours, you can do the bare minimum and get what you’ve always got – a backache, minimum wage, and a bag of fries or you can take your blog up a notch and do what’s necessary to be successfully blogging for real money.

Testing The New Warrior Forum Articles Forum

The last post I put up here, Several Reasons To Use PLR Articles was a test.  You see the Warrior Forum just added a new sub-forum for Articles.  Now there are some reasons why you might want to post there:

1. To strut your stuff – be seen as an expert in your niche. [BTW, all articles have to do with online or offline marketing.]
2. Get the people on the Warrior forum to click on your links and join your list or buy your stuff.
3. Get your article indexed quickly and ranked high in the Google search engine so everyone else can find you too.  Traffic is the game-changer.

 

So I’m testing #3 above.  I quickly wrote an article and posted it on the WF Articles Forum and this is what I see:

It was indexed by Google in less than 11 minutes.

The article ranked #4 for my primary keyword phrase (no quotes) out of 542,000.

It ranked #22 for another keyword phrase I only stuck in the article once – not in the title or opening or closing paragraphs – just to see how it would do.  That was out of 842,000.  Wow!  Just think if I’d used it more in the article.

 

Now to compare that, I also posted the article, Several Reasons To Use PLR Articles, here.  It’s my post previous to this one.  These are the results:

It, too, was indexed quickly.  I forgot to check right away, but it was there when I checked at 17 minutes.

The article/post from this blog was ranked #190 for my primary keywords (as opposed to #4 via the Warrior Forum Articles Forum). 

As for the secondary keyword mentioned once in the article, I searched through 30 pages of Google search and did not find it.  Pffft.

 I think these results speak volumes!  I know it’s better to show up in the search engines with the link pointing to your own site, but if it’s a competitive keyword you’ve tried to get on page 1 to no avail, then having them find you via the WF link is the next best thing, IMHO.

The article has my author’s bio with links to my site, plus readers will see my WF signature which includes a nice clickable banner now. 

As far as traffic stats on this experiment, I’ll let you know.

* Oh, and another added bonus to this whole thing… I can write articles about PLR, which is HUGE for me since EzineArticles won’t accept any articles that even have the word PLR in them.

Several Reasons To Use PLR Articles

So what is the big deal about PLR articles anyway? Can they really help you or are they just a lot of nonsense? Actually, PLR can be a huge time-saver, especially when you are wearing all the hats in your online business. Read on for several ways PLR articles might come to your rescue.

• You don’t have any idea what to blog about next. Just look in your handy PLR folder and take out a bundle on your topic at hand. Bingo! Now you can use one of them directly, rewrite it, or let it trigger an idea for you to write about.
• You’re spending your time working on another project, but you want to keep adding content to your blog(s) so the search engines will remain happy.
• You want to post to all your blogs as often as possible and using PLR is like having more than one of you. It’s kind of like outsourcing without the back and forth interaction.

   

• The PLR articles you just bought will make a perfect autoresponder series working up to your product launch. For example, feed your list the wedding PLR you have about wedding problems to lead up to your new ebook about carefree destination weddings.
• Woo hoo! Now you have articles you can monetize and email to your list. That parenting PLR article pack will work nicely to promote those Clickbank parenting products you’d like to earn affiliate commission on.
• You want to create a report you can give away for free in exchange for email addresses. Put a whole PLR bundle together, add some tips, screenshots and stock photos and you’ve got an opt-in worthy report.

Going a little deeper on the reports idea and what you can do with the report you created from PLR:

Sell it.
Offer in a Giveaway to build your list.
Send it, no strings attached, to your list to foster list love.
Offer for free in order to go viral (your affiliate links are inside and along for the ride.)
Brand it and let everyone give it away with their affiliate links inside.
You’re itching to do a YouTube video – not about your embarrassing fall down the stairs – but about something that will show you as an expert in your field and drive traffic to your site. Take some of those private label rights and do screencasting videos or powerpoint presentations.

• Podcast, baby. It’s easy to read an article and create an audio. Now you can put it on your blog, add it as a bonus to your big product, offer it in a Giveaway, and more.
• You’re setting up a membership site in your niche and you’ve GOT to have new material for it every single week or month. Take each PLR article and add to it – explain in further detail, give concrete examples/stories/case studies, add tips, include links to resources, make video instructions or examples, etc. Wow, you’ve created quite the membership site using little ole PLR!

This is not a complete list of all the ways you can use PLR articles, but now that you know how to use them, you can definitely see why you would want to.

What are you waiting for? Grab some high quality PLR articles and put them to work for you. Peggy Baron at www.mynicheplr.com has got you covered.

Tiffany Dow’s PLR ATM

What is Tiffany Dow’s PLR ATM?  Let me set the stage first…

There are many people online who suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS) – meaning they go from one business idea that looks verrrry promising to the next one that pops up that looks even better.  They’re like the ADD squirrel zigzagging across my backyard looking for the perfect treasure… 

He’s thinking,
“Should I grab that nut?” 
“Ooooh, never mind, look at that pretty berry!”
“Wow, forget the berry, that is quite the apple over there!”

And so it goes until he ends up with nothing to bring home and my old dog on his tail.

Are you like that?  Never giving any true business idea your full efforts and building the business to make you real, ongoing income instead of short-term, flash-in-the-pan money?

I’m not perfect either.  I still feel the lure of Shiny Object Syndrome, but the more success I have with my online PLR business, the less attractive SOS is.  What a relief.

I’d love for you to find your path too, which brings me to introduce Tiffany Dow’s PLR ATM.  Plus I’ll explain what I’m doing to help people following PLR ATM, but more on that later.

Tiffany Dow is one of the top sellers of PLR articles and now she’s showing you how to open up your own PLR articles store.

• Do you like to write?
• Do you like passive income?  You know… do the work once and sell the product over and over?
• Do you like research?
• Do you like to sell the shovel?  Meaning do you like to create and sell products that will help make online marketers’ lives easier and help them to have success?

Then you might want to consider opening your own PLR store.  Tiff’s PLR ATM shows you how to do that by using a WordPress blog format.  She walks you through all the steps to getting up and running and selling your first PLR article pack.  She even explains how to outsource if you don’t want to do the writing yourself.

I think this is a valuable product for two reasons:

1.  It’s a REAL business model and it’s handed to you on a platter.

2.  My business is PLR so I can say firsthand that running a PLR store is a viable business that makes money.  I’m not claiming to be making millions but it’s income that helps feed my family.

So check it out if it interests you:  PLR ATM

And if you do decide to open a PLR store, I’ve whipped up a little something to help you…

I rememer how hard it was to start a store - I was madly writing and writing to create the PLR bundles that were to be my products.  I wanted to have some varied bundles on hand so when I drove traffic to my site, there was more of a selection (and more opportunities to make sales).

So to help YOU get started, I’ve written 6 packs that you can purchase and resell.  That way you can start with a bang!  This reseller PLR is my usual high quality articles, in popular niches, and they are packs of 5 so you could add a few of your own articles to the packs to make them bigger if you wanted.

Whew!  Thanks for reading to the end. I wanted to show you a business model I believe in, even though that means more competition for me.  Am I daft?