You’ve Googled it, you’ve read about it, you’re interested in it…but you just don’t know how to make money by blogging. Hopefully you at least know WHAT a blog is. 
According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blog) the definition of a blog is “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer”.
So How DO You Make Money By Blogging?
Well, let’s think about this for a minute. If the definition of a blog is …”an online personal journal with reflections…and hyperlinks…” then logically, a blog can be about anything you want to write about, and your links can be pointing to anywhere you want them to point.
Hint: Affiliate links – if someone clicks on your link and they buy the product through your link, you make a commission on the sale of that product. It’s easy to sign up for affiliate accounts. There are so many programs to choose from. Some of the most popular are Ebay, Amazon, Clickbank, and Commission Junction.
- Write about dogs, and put affiliate links on your website to dog products
- Write about birds, and put affiliate links on your website promoting bird products
- Write about weddings, and put affiliate links on your website promoting wedding products
Are you getting the idea yet? Pick something that you are passionate about and want to write about. Create a blog based on that concept, and then go to town. Also, it’s a good idea to check out other blogs about your topic. It will give you some ideas on how you want your site to look, and what your competition is doing. The purpose is not re-invent the wheel here, but to do what is already proven to work.
Another method of monetizing your blog is adding advertising space. You can sell advertising space on your blog to other website owners, charging them monthly, or a one time fee. This method works well for a blog that has a lot of traffic. People don’t want to spend advertising dollars that aren’t going to bring them much results. You can also add Google Adsense or other click through advertising on your blog. (Here’s a previous post I wrote that will help explain what Adsense is and how it works: How to Make Money From Google – What’s the Deal?
If you’re just starting out, I recommend not spending a lot of money on your blog. You can start a blog for free with blogger.com. Until you know if it’s something you want to continue doing, why not play it safe? When you start making money with your blog THEN you can invest in more advanced blogging techniques. Down the road, you’ll definitely want to buy your own domain name, get your own hosting, and have complete control over your site. But for now, start blogging for free to get your feet wet.
You may want to read this post as well, to give you some more insight on how to make money from blogging 2013. (You know, you want to make sure you stay up to date with the newest trends and stuff!)
Once you’ve put up your blog, the most important thing to remember is to add content frequently. This means you should add new posts at the frequency level of 1 a day for the first 2 weeks. After that, you can slow down the posts a bit, but don’t ever stop. Posting at least once or twice a week after that should be good. You want the search engines to know that you’re site is always adding fresh content. They love that. Stale and old content is the best way for the search engines to forget you.
After your blog is set and your adding content to it and it’s been monetized, unfortunately that’s not the only thing you need to do. The next step is to generate traffic to your site. You can pay for advertising (that will be an entirely different post) but I don’t recommend it if you’re just starting out.
The best way to get traffic to your site is from the search engines. It’s free traffic, and who doesn’t like free? In order to get the search engines to notice your site, there are certain things and criteria they look for. (Posting frequently is definitely one of them.) You want to make sure your site is optimized for the search engines. Make sure you have the correct keywords and your site is user friendly.
You Must Create Backlinks to Your Site
A backlink is a link from another website that points to your site. An example of a backlink is the link at the beginning of this post. I put the link to Merriam’s Dictionary. I gave them a backlink. Make sense?
Backlinks are important because not only do they give you traffic to your site (I wonder how many of you actually clicked that link), but they also add an authority value to your site, thus giving the search engines reason to rank your site well.
If you really want to learn how to make money by blogging, here are 2 free reports you can download that have some incredible information in them. They are currently free (even though they could be charged for) and you’ll find valuable information in them that you probably won’t come across doing searches.
