A way to make some fast income from a blog

This is a guest post from Justin Aldridge, another Brit who lives in Spain.

I first started blogging about five years ago.  In those days I used to blog all the time as Google, in particular, loved it.  I would blog about a topic and within minutes my blog post would appear in Google's search results.  My main aim in those days was to blog to drive traffic to my main website, and it worked really well.

Blogs still work incredibly well when it comes to search engines.  There are some websites that I blog on all the time and those blog posts are literally indexed within seconds of me hitting the submit button, especially with Google's latest Caffeine algorithm.

But apart from enjoying great rankings and traffic from my blogging, I soon discovered a really easy way of making some quick money through my blogs posts.  I don't use this method any more only because I don't need to.  Thankfully I am in a comfortable financial position today which means I can lead a more relaxed lifestyle and don't need to go all out there attracting advertisers.

If you have a half decent blog, or even just starting out, here is a way you can make some money from your blog posts without too much effort.  I taught this to some friends of mine and some of them are still using it today.  It works.

This method ties in a little with Mike's recent post about One way to make some money from domains.  That method also works, and I still use that one, but there is a quicker way of making some money.

The method is very simple.  If you serve a niche or a physical area, do some searches in Google to see for which keywords advertisers appear in Google for.  In Mike's post he mentioned his "scuba diving" website.  If I search for "scuba diving lanzarote" I get five advertisers come up with this key phrase in Google.  There are 86,000 results so it's not particularly competitive to rank for.  You could easily be in the top three for this term in Google with a well optimised blog post.

So go ahead and create your optimised blog post!

Then you contact each of those advertisers and say "Hi there,  I just came across your website and I wanted to let you know that a page from my website is number 1 (or 2) on Google for 'Scuba Diving in Lanzarote'.  I am doing a special promotion this week and you can sponsor that page with your banner for just €97 for the year, it's usually €147, and I'm only offering this spot to one company for the whole 12 months.  Let me know if you'd like to take it ASAP before I offer it to someone else".

I'm not kidding you, I used to make between €500 and €1000 per month doing this.  It's so easy.

The reason it works is two-fold.

Firstly, these companies are already spending money to advertise.  Perfect.

Secondly, to most people, SEO is like a black art and most don't have a clue about ranking in search engines.  Therefore, many are instantly impressed by the fact that you are at the top of Google for THEIR key phrase. Also Perfect.

As I mentioned earlier, it's important to properly optimise your blog post.  The most important part being the title.  Make the title the key phrase you want to target.  In our example above the title would be "Scuba diving in Lanzaorte".  And that's it.  Mention it a couple of times in the main body, nothing spammy, and talk about the subject from an information perspective only.

When I was doing this I used to blog several times a day, so dropping in all these sorts of blog posts was easy and didn't deteriorate the popularity of my blog.
Anyway, hope you found that useful.  Now go and make some money today!

Justin has been "Living online" for the past seven years having built and sold several popular websites. His latest venture is Online Property Lab where he teaches estate agents about effective online marketing. You can follow Justin's personal blog at Eye on Spain

Here are some other posts you might enjoy:

1/ Getting a decent return from Adsense

2/ Review - 1 Shopping Cart

3/ Make it easy for your blog readers