Make Money With Blogs? Yes, You Can

Used correctly, blogs can be a very powerful tool for an Internet marketer. Strangely, though, many don't take full advantage of the opportunities that are out there. And most who do don't do it correctly and end up wasting their time.

To make money with blogs, you must have three things:

* A Profitable Niche

* Content

* Traffic

Let's look at each of these, one at a time.

Niches

When speaking in marketing terms, a niche is a section of the whole market. For instance, "dog training" is a niche.

Some niches are more profitable than others. What do I mean by that? Well, if you live in an arctic region, it's not going to be very profitable to sell ice, is it? (But you may do pretty well selling coats.)

So, before heading off into any market, you should do the research and see what is profitable. The best way to do this is to ASK your market what they want. How do you do that?

Well, before the Internet came into being, companies would go door-to-door or send survey forms through the mail. While this is still a great way to discover a profitable niche, there is a much easier way - at least online. What is it?

Ask the search engines.

You see, the search engines keep track of what people look for. Using that information, you can find what is most profitable. (Of course, just because people are searching for it, doesn't mean the niche is profitable.)

Okay, so let's say you've found a profitable niche. Now let's talk about content.

Content can come from three different sources:

* Your brain - Writing your own content is time-consuming, but at least you know it will be original

* Pre-written articles - This may not help your search engine ranking, but it's easier than writing it yourself

* User-created - The BEST way to get content, provided you have users to provide the content

So, if you want user-created content, where are you going to get it? From users of course! But where are you going to get the users?

Traffic.

Traffic is what webmasters call people visiting their websites. It's the whole reason you put a website up in the first place! And, for an Internet marketer, it's the lifeblood of your business. Without traffic, you're wasting money.

So where does this traffic come from? Many places, though most come from search engines.

Here's how it works:

* A user searches for "dog training."

* A website pertaining to dog training appears.

* The user visits that site.

* The user performs the desired action.

Now, the big question. What action do we want the user to perform?

While you might think "spend money" or "buy something" is the logical answer to that, there is another answer. You can find out more at http://www.timarview.com.

Tim Arview is the author of "The Blog Master's Guide To Niche Blogging," a 22-page, step-by-step instructional guide that will teach you how to get started in this very lucrative business.

To find out more, visit [http://www.timarview.com]