10 Steps to Putting Your Passion into Money Making Action

Having your own stream of revenue, employing your passion, especially through and online business like a blog is hard work but it’s so worth it. The pay off in the end is that you’ll have something that will transform your life in so many ways, will give you that reason to jump out of bed every morning with excitement for what the day has to offer.

Building an online business doesn’t happen overnight. This could take months but if you’re walking in your purpose and having fun, that’s what’s most important and getting paid for your passion, golden!

So let’s dive in! There are many ways you can turn your passion and purpose into a money making vehicle but here I will focus on setting up a money making blog. Let me start by saying, I’m no pro at this. I encourage you to seek out other resources. A GREAT place to start is with Darren Rowse’ ProBlogger site. Darren is amazing and his site is filled with info to help you in every way.

As a side note, if you’ve discovered photography as your passion, Darren also has a site called Digital Photography School which I would argue is the best online photog learning centre hands down!

Anyhoo…let’s make it happen!

Step 1.

Read 10 steps to Finding Your Passion and Purpose. You gotta name it before you can claim it.

Step 2 : Identify Your IDEAL Target market. Who are you going to be selling your product or service to? Male? Female? What are their interests? Do they have the resources to pay for what you have to offers? What would be their price point based on their income? What is their income range? You get the gist?

Step 3.

Develop your NICHE - You know your passion now you need your niche. According to Wikipedia, a niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs. Based on this your next step is to dig deep into that passion you’ve uncovered and find a specific market. When you were on the forums and blogs did you notice a missing area/topic/need? What were they talking about? What where they complaining about?

Step 4

You have to research the demand. So now you have an idea on the niche you want to target, there seems to be a demand. But is there enough demand?

a) Go to Amazon.com. If there is a magazine published targeting that market, there is a need and a want for what you do. Go the larger book store and look at the magazines. Look at the ads at the back, what are they offering? If possible order back issues and see who the repeat advertisers are. There is a reason they keep advertising there.

b) Go to Dummies.com, is there a dummies book for the market. This could be an indication that there is a desire/need.

c)Go to Meetup.com and do some investigating. See how many people are joining specific groups, join and observe the potential holes you could fill with a product or service

d) Go to clickbank.com. ClickBank is the largest affiliate marketplace on the internet. You can sign up with them and choose products to be an affiliate sales person for – So sell other peoples products and make money doing it. Go to Clickbank and sign up for free. How well are products in your niche selling? If there isn’t much going on, you might need to rethink your niche.
d) Do keyword research. Are people looking for your niche online? There are various keyword research tools on the market such as Market Samurai. Alternatively you could do your own research. Start by going to GOOGLE (not Yahoo or MSN) and typing in your keywords in quotes. The results on the left hand side, are organic listings, what naturally comes up. On the right you will see paid or sponsored listings. If these two columns are full, than you know people are searching for what you have to offer. This is a very loose method and I would suggest using Market Samurai or something similar to get more detailed data on determining you’re your best keywords would be and provide the relevant data on said keywords and SEO Competition.

Step 5: What is your branding? How do you want to present yourself? Your site? What colours, words phrases are in line with the decided niche? Picture how you want this final product to look and what you want it to say. Remember it needs to inspire people to pull out their credits cards and pay for your product, service or information.

Step 6: Register a Domain Name Think of something catchy, not too long, but describes what you do and who you are. Try to keep your main keyword in your name as well and be sure to reserve a dot com. If the name you want is gone for dot com but available in dot net, I encourage you to find another variation in dot com. Dome hosts do domain name registration as well. It may be worth while to keep everything in the same place.

Step 7: Get a hosting company. I suggest Bluehost. That’s who I use and it’s been great. Full service, you get one free domain name registration, unlimited hosting, email etc. What’s even better is the seamless setup and integration on Word Press. Love it!

Step 8. Set up your blog: The best place and only place I personally recommend for a money making blogsite is www.wordpress.org. Now when I did this I was VERY confused. I went to blue host they asked me to upload my blog, but I couldn’t really get a blog (with WordPress) till I had a host! It was actually a very simply process I just allowed my frustration to blind me. So now you can learn from my mistakes.

1. Go to your Bluehost CPanel
2. Scroll down and click on Simple Scripts
3. Scroll down. Under blogs, click on WordPress
4. Click green Install button
5. Where it says “Where would you like WordPress installed?” pick the drop down and select your domain
6. Click on Advanced Options and give your blog a name and choose your password for logging in to your blog to do posts, design changes etc.
7. Accept the Terms and click Complete
8. You will get a page with our Admin log in info. You will also receive and email. It will likely be something like this www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
9. Now you can log into your WordPress domain which is being hosted by Blue host and post, design etc

Step 9. Designing your blog. There are thousands of templates for WordPress out there, some free, some not. You can even hire someone to design a completely new one for you. I’ve read for optimization (Google ranks you) reasons, the free templates are not the way to go. Something else to consider when designing your blog in ensuring the layout is ideal for monetizing the site, that a whole other post!

If you like my site I have a variety of base style I can customize for you. Drop me a message here or visit me at Style Sheet Diva

One last point to consider, remember step 5? Ensure our design and layout and I key with your branding and what your target and Niche would want.

Step 10: Build your content. Now you have your blog, your hosted, you know your niche which is in-line with your passion. What are you going to say, do, offer? Utilize the research you’ve done to create top notch content that brings in people and convinces then to stay, buy, and tell others.

Coming Soon:

• Monetize and Optimize your blog
• Selling an eBook

Resources:
For Domain Name Registry and Hosting, visit BlueHost:

ForWordpress Themes: Click here to visit StudioPress.

The Challenge (previously The 30 Day Challenge) Free step by step guide to setting up your blog

Live on PURPOSE!