If you want to build make money blogs, you’ll want to consider your personal passions.

If you think that seems a little sentimental for the dollars and cents world of marketing, think again. Why would your feelings make a difference? It’s really just about finding a good niche with the right numbers, right?

Wrong.

If there’s one thing experience has taught us about blogging profitably, it’s the fact that those who are sincerely interested in their subject matters are far more likely to succeed than others are. There are some very persuasive reasons to choose a blogging niche that resonates with you in a meaningful way. Let’s consider four of them.

First, you’re more likely to create quality content that really answers the concerns of those looking for relevant information. You’re less likely to supply erroneous information if you’re a subject matter expert. Likewise, you’re more likely to provide information the audience will appreciate. Passion for a topic makes you a better content provider, and that’s how to make money blogging.

Second, you’re much less likely to abandon a project if you care about the subject area. You need to be motivated to succeed and picking a topic you love can give you that motivation. Blogging involves more than a one-time effort. Success relies on updates and ongoing attention. If you choose a niche that doesn’t match your passions, you’ll find it hard to keep things running–and making money.

Third, here are other benefits to working a niche that matches your passions. When you care about your niche, you may find new ways to build your business that you’d miss in a less interesting niche. You’re not likely to spot ways to improve the profitability of your widget blog if you don’t really care about widgets. You won’t find hot-button issues around which to center your content. You can’t hope to see the best opportunities to profit if you’re not fascinated by your niche. If, on the other hand, you love your niche, you’ll be motivated to discover new and profitable ways to transform your business.

Last but not least, it’s fun. There’s nothing better than doing something you love. We all want to start making money online with our blogging. That doesn’t mean we always need to think purely in terms of money, though. Why shouldn’t we strive to make money and to have fun at the same time?

Consider your personal passions when choosing niches for blogging. Don’t just edit the most unbearable options from your list of choices, either. Actively search out ideas that match your personal passions. Keeping your passions in mind is one of the best things you can do for your business.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to make money online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as you commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

1. You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go! And of course if you are already blogging all you need to do is add your affiliate links into your posts.

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.