Overview
In theory blogging for money doesn’t seem too difficult. In practice however, it takes time, discipline and patience to see any fruition from blogging for a living. If the blog is your own and the subject is something that you enjoy writing about, the blog will flow and over time will be viewed as an ‘expert’ voice in that subject.
Setting up a blog whether it’s self-hosted or hosted by a third party, will be covered in a separate article. Very briefly, WordPress and Blogger both offer hosted blog solutions for people who just want to write, post and publish. There is more control for monetization in self-hosted blogging.
Step 1
Choose a topic and start writing. I would suggest writing at least three to four articles before publishing anything, especially if it is for a self-hosted blog. Keep the articles longer than 500 words and aim to keep the attention of the reader. Short, well-structured sentences that can be easily comprehended make the reader continue until the end.
Step 2
When posting ensure that all grammar and spelling is correct. Nothing loses the attention of the reader faster than an article with mistakes. Also, if your article includes facts make sure that the facts are correct. Plugins for WordPress blogs will also be covered in a separate article, but before publishing, especially on a self-hosted blog, install a good SEO plug-in that will assist you in your search engine exposure. If your content is good and regularly updated, it will get indexed each time you make a new post, therefore using a good SEO plugin will help you to create the correct document title, meta-tags and meta-description.
Step 3
Once the post is published, share using social media channels. This will give you free exposure and the initial traffic to your site. Unless people find your site in search or you run paid advertising campaigns, this is the best way to get people to see your articles. Make sure that you give viewers the ability to subscribe to your blog. There are a number of ways to get subscribers. The cheapest and one of the most popular forms of website subscription is feedburner. Once a visitor subscribes to this, they will automatically be updated about new articles with automated emails from the feedburner engine. If you are looking to create a mailing list use services such as Aweber or Get Response which will then enable you to send newsletters and promotions to your subscribers. This is the beginning of the monetization process.
Step 4
Decide what you will promote either using ads on your site or through promotional emails to your mailing list. Find either products or advertising networks which will with ads that will appeal to your readers. If, for example, you choose Google Adsense and you strategically place banner ads on your site, you will receive money from Google each time a site visitor clicks on a link. If you promote products via affiliate programs, think of products that the people reading your articles would be interested in buying. You will only make money from affiliate programs if your readers actually buy the products which you promote. Therefore, focus the reader towards products related to your blog and don’t offer too much choice. Concentrate on one or two products to begin with and test them slowly with your readers. It is important to remember that people who are interested in what you have to say in your articles, may be put off if you bombard them with too many adverts.
Conclusion
This is just a high level overview of the concept of blogging for money. We will give more insight on each step mentioned above in our other articles. As I mentioned earlier, these things take time so patience, when blogging for money, is the key ingredient.
This site is aimed at you. You’ve probably read Forbes magazine and wondered how regular people manage to become so wealthy. First off, understand that it may not always be easy and it does require understanding some proven methods and concepts. On a plus side, it’s not complicated and it’s also not too difficult.