If you’re reading this site, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with blogs. Blogs are online journals used either for personal, professional, or journalistic purposes. Whatever you decide to do with your blog, there are a few tips you should keep in mind if you want it to be profitable.

First thing’s first – pick a topic for you blog. Figure out exactly what sort of content you want to put on your new blog, and think about your audience, and their wants and needs. A blog won’t be profitable if no one reads it, so your content needs to be high quality, and it needs to appeal to a broad audience.

Now that you know what topic you’re going to be blogging about, it’s time to decide where to host your blog. You can use any number of free blogging sites, like Wordpress, or Blogger, but it’s usually a better idea to host your blog yourself. Using a blogging service makes things easy – just sign up and start blogging. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow for a lot of customization. Hosting your own blog leaves room for a great deal of customization, but it’s a little harder to set up. You’ll need to register your domain name, get a hosting package, and then set up some blogging software, like Wordpress, on your new site. It’s a little harder, but the customization options make it easy to build an attractive and engaging site.

Now that you have a blog up and running, it’s time to put some ads on it. Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, and Clickbank are easy to deal with for new comers to internet marketing and web design. All you have to do with each of those services is sign up, and paste the ad code into your blog posts. With a little effort, you can get some ads in your posts that are directly relevant to the topic of the post, which makes those ads more likely to get clicked on.

If you’re already familiar with internet marketing, consider looking for some more profitable affiliate programs to put on your site. Look for products and services that would be of interest to your target audience, and be sure to put your ads in noticeable places.

Building a profitable blog isn’t easy, but it is possible. Once you have your ads in place, remember, they won’t do you any good if no one reads your site. Put yourself out there, and do everything you can to drive traffic to your blog. If you can get it some traffic, you’ll have a profitable blog before you know it.

A great way to make money with a website is to purchase an established website that you know you can add value to the website and flip it at a later date for a profit.

To give you an example of what i mean i will give you an example of how i once made money buying a website from flippa.com for $1800 and then 3 months later sold it for $15,000 making a tidy profit.  The website i bought was a 6 months old blog that was rarely updated by its owner.  It was in the internet marketing niche which i know alot about so i knew i could add value to the blog.

The blog at the time was receiving 3,000 unique views a month and was a PR2 and was making $500 a month from affiliate sales via clickbank.com and a little on google adsense.

When i took over the blog this is what i did to improve the value of the blog:

1.) Made sure i added at least 2 very informal posts everyday to keep my readers and attract new readers.

2.) I offered a fee ebook download with an optin emails form. (i managed to capture 5,000 email addresses) to which i later emailed offers to bringing in $2,000 in commission, mainly clickbank products.

3.) I changed the theme of the blog to a premium wordpress theme.

4.) I installed a forum which help build a community around the blog.

5.) I submitted alot of articles to article websites and built up some good backlinks

6.) I did alot of blog commenting on other similar blogs helping bringing in more backlinks

7.) I sponsored wordpress themes digital point marketplace also helped bring in more backlinks.

After the first month my traffic had reached 6,700 uniques a month and my revenue went upto $1600 a month from commission from various networks i was using.  Most of my income came from my email list because within the free ebook i was given away had links to affiliate products and was earning money from my readers clicking on links within the ebook and purchasing a product.

By the end of month 3 i was adding 3 new articles a day and my email list had reached 5,000 email readers and was making on average $3,000 a month from affiliate commission mainly from Clickbank.com, Cj.com and Google adsense.

Now i knew i could resell the blog as i had added some very good value to the blog and sold it back on flippa.com for $15,000

So the key to buying and selling websites for profit is to look for a website you know you can add value to it.  Pick a niche you know about and would enjoy working on.

Website flipping was very popular a year ago but recently it is not as popular mainly because the market got saturated with simple sites being sold for $50 when a year ago you could sell them for $200.  I still believe you can make money from flipping websites and ive created this plan to help you make a living flipping websites

Step 1 – Find A Niche

I’ve personally found selling clickbank products to be very successful as alot of people like to buy digital products online.  Have a search on clickbank for a product you would like to sell that is popular within the market place.  Look to see their gravity rating, the percentage in refunds they have had, this is a good indicator to see if the product has been successful.  Also check to see how good their sales page is also.

Step 2 Keyword Research

I like to use the free tool from Google – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to look for keywords related to my niche that i want to promote.  Say for example you want to target the keyword ”loose weight fast” put that into the Google keyword tool and see what the competition is like.  You may wish to use another keyword similar that has less competition.

Once you have found the keyword you would like to use, pick 10 -15 long tail keywords and start writing some articles with these keywords you have chosen.

Step 3 – Choosing a domain

When picking your domain its a good idea to have your main keyword within your domain as this will greatly improve your chances of being on page 1 of Google (e.g looseweightfast.com)  if .com is taken the next best choices are either .net or .org anything else is no good.

Step 4 – Create your website

I would highly recommend setting your website using wordpress as these websites rank very very well in Google.  Google seems to love wordpress because of its structure and how well they are optimised for search engines.

Add some keyword rich articles to your website with some reviews on the clickbank product you are promoting.  If you can also make a video and upload it to youtube and embed this into your website.  Google likes websites with videos on and also readers also like videos about the product they are buying so this will also help your conversions.

Also add a contact page, about me page, privacy page as these also improve your rankings, this is something that Google looks for.

Step 5 – Promote your website

Once you have finished your website you now need to start promoting your website.  Submit around 10 articles to article directories like Ezinearticles with rich keyword content articles with anchor text links pointing back to your website.  Submit your website to all the major social networking websites.  You can use socialmarker.com for this.

You can also join forums related to your niche and write a number of posts with your anchor text link in your signature, this is a great way to drive traffic to your website and increases your serps.  Also blog commenting on blogs similar to your niche is another good method.

Create a squido lens, hubpage and wiki page to provide more backlinks for your website.

Step 6 – Site maintenance

For the next few days monitor the site everyday, checking traffic, sales, average time a user stays on your site, which pages they are exiting from.  Then you can make any adjustments changes or additions to improve.  If its still slow after a couple of weeks i would start submitting more articles to ezine, more blog commenting on other blogs and forum posting to build up your backlinks.

Step 7 – Sell your website

After 3 – 6 months you are now ready to sell your website if it has steady traffic going to it, steady flow of sales every month.  Great websites to sell your website are Digital Point or Flippa.  Generally you can sell your website for 6-10 times your monthly income. So for example if your website is making on average $200 a month from clickbank and adsense you could sell for $2,000.  Not bad for a weeks work.  You can create a new site every week and leave it on autopilot just monitoring its stats and making adjustments here and there.

If you keep your website for longer say for over a year and kept working on building up the backlinks and adding content which increased your monthly sales then you will be able to sell it for even more money.  It all depends how quickly you want to flip your website.