Earning Online Blogging | Your First Real Post

Hopefully you’ve been following along with our other Earning Online lessons and you have your first blog set up with your first introductory post. If this is not the case, I recommend that you begin by first reading the following posts:

Keyword Research Basics

Keyword Research for Adsense Blogging

Earning Online for Free | Blogger Blogging – if you have no money to invest

Earning Online Cheap | Your Own Domain – if you have some money to invest

Now that you have read the above posts, you should either have a free blogger blog set up, or a self hosted WordPress blog. You should have also written your first introductory post. It is time to start growing your internet business. In this article I will explain what to do with your main keyword and your cousin keywords, as well as how to go about adding content to your site, and getting that content indexed by Google. These methods will work whether you have chosen the free or cheap method of starting your internet business.

It is now time for your first real post. This post should be at least 500 words long, and target your main keyword. The title of this post should contain your main keyword or keyword phrase in its exact form. For instance, if your keyword is “make money with adwords”, your title should be “How to Make Money with AdWords for Dummies ”, or something similar. As you can see, “make money with adwords” is in the title in its exact form.

You also want your exact keyword to be within the first 160 characters of your article, preferably in the first sentence. An example of that could be “Information about how to make money with adwords can be found all over the internet.” In that example my main keyword phrase is within the first 49 characters of my article. It is important to have your keyword in the first 160 characters, because that is precisely how many characters Google uses in its descriptions in the search engine results.

Now go ahead and write your article. Don’t worry too much about your cousin keywords at this point. It’s not a bad idea to include one or two of your cousin keywords in the article, but I would use them no more than one time each. Your main keyword should show up prominently in your article. Try not to spam your article however. Keep it natural. When all else fails, make sure that you do not have your keyword in your article more than once for every 100 words. That means that if you have a 500 word article, you should not have your keyword in that article more than five times.

As a general rule, I like to have my main keyword in the first sentence, within the last paragraph, and a couple of other times in the article. That is usually enough to make sure that the article is properly targeting the keyword, without being spammy. Balance is the key when dealing with search engine optimization.

The next thing you’re going to want to do is create some tags. If you’re using blogger, they are called labels. I covered assigning labels/tags in the other Earning Online articles, but I will go through it again briefly here. Basically, you are going to want to make sure that you assign your main keyword as a tag, as well as the cousin keywords that you used in this article, if you used any. You should also look through your article for words or phrases that you think people may search for, or that add relevance to your article, and add those as tags as well. I recommend assigning five or six tags to your article. Each of these tags will become a separate page on your website, which helps to make your website look bigger than it actually is.

If you are using a self hosted WordPress blog, you should create a category for your new post. From now on, all your posts are going to be going into categories that will help to organize your site. Category names should be short, descriptive, and relevant to your content.

The final step is to go back to the first occurrence of your main keyword, highlight it, and assign it as a hyperlink to your homepage. Later, you’ll be coming back to this article and linking cousin keywords to future posts, but we will get into that little bit more later.

Now that this post is done, it is time to get your site indexed. I don’t recommend adding Adsense or any affiliate links until Google has indexed your webpage. I do, however, recommend that you sign up for Google Webmaster tools. It is a free service from Google that will allow you to keep tabs on how Google sees your website, as well as any problems they found when it.

Google will index your site at some point. As a matter of fact, every time you make a change to your website, pings go out to let the world know that your site is updated. This does help you get indexed. I prefer to speed up the process a little bit though. Two services that I use are Ping.fm and onlywire.com. The service is both take a while to set up, and require that you sign up for different social bookmarking services, but the effort setting them up is well worth the payout. Once they are set up, you simply submit your new post to the services, and your site will get bookmarked at places like Digg, del.ico.us, stumbleupon, twitter, facebook, etc.  Just make sure that you do not choose the same accounts for both services. I would recommend going to onlywire first, signing up for the services that they offer, then going to Ping.fm and signing up for the ones not offered by onlywire.

Great job! Your first real post is up and bookmarked. Now we have to start getting your site some authority. The way we do that is by getting back links, and that is the topic of our next article. Until then, be well, and stay tuned for our next installment of Earning Online with Your Own Internet Business.

Related posts:

1. Earning Online for Free | Blogger Blogging
2. Earning Online | Growing Your Site
3. Earning Online Cheap | Your Own Domain
4. Earning Online | Link Building Strategies
5. Earning Online | Getting Your First Links