Monday, August 30, 2010

Legitimate Money Making Idea: Blogging

Blogging started out as a way for people to connect to others and share pictures, stories and experiences. It was considered a personal journal one could use to leave his or her mark on the internet.

Since then blogs have evolved as excellent Marketing Tools as well as media to make money. There are a few ways to earn income from blogging. Here are a few:

Adsense ads

Popular search engines such as Google offer a way to earn a little extra money with any blog or website. The idea is to place these ads on your site, and when a visitor clicks on an ad from your site, you earn a pre-determined amount of money. The more clicks you can get from your site visitors, the more you can make. However, there are some strict rules involved, so if you choose to go this route, be sure to learn what not to do before signing up for their programs.

Product Reviews

There are some websites you can sign up with to help you connect with other companies who need people to review their products and get them some exposure on your blogs. Usually the main requirement for this is to have a blog that’s been around for awhile and has a fair amount of traffic. Those companies would pay you a specified amount to review their product on your blog.

Contextual Links

Some business or website owners will pay a blogger to post one of their links within their blog posts. It may be the owners themselves contacting the blog author or a company that acts as an intermediary. Those businesses will find blogs that are similar to their companies’ sites, so the links provided on the blogs will be search engine friendly. This is a great way to earn some extra traffic for your site.

Sell products

Blogs are another way from where you can sell your own products. Those who have businesses selling home décor items or food container items often use blogs to help sell their products and make more money online.

With these ideas for making money through blogging, what will you need to make your blogging experience worthwhile?

What skills would be helpful?

There isn’t much skill involved in this type of business except the ability to market your blog. You would want to research blogging as much as possible to learn some of the tricks of the trade to make your blog popular.

What Tools would be needed?

Your main tool, besides a computer with an internet connection, would be a blog. There are many blogging programs out there to choose from. Some are free to set up while others require a monthly or annual fee to get started.

Paid blogging programs can help you connect with other blogs and increase your blog’s traffic. The free versions are extremely easy to set up, and most are extremely popular amongst bloggers. Therefore, finding people to connect with wouldn’t be too hard to do.

How to get started

Sign up with a blogging program and start posting entries to it. Make sure you are blogging on a regular basis, which would be about 2 times a week. Blogs that aren’t updated regularly tend to get lost in cyberspace.

Market your blog as much as possible. Get listed on blog directories, such as Technorati. Also, get on other people’s blog rolls and comment on other blog author’s posts to get some exposure to your blog. You should also ping your blog each time you make a post; use Pingomatic to do this. The more traffic you drive to your blog, the higher your chance of making blogging a lucrative way to make money.

Most of the blogging programs will have a sign up for adsense ads already included in their set up feature, so getting started with that will be easy. Blogger allows you to plug in your Amazon affiliate id. If you want to provide product reviews and contextual links, you will want to blog for a period of time to get a fair amount of traffic coming to it.

When your blog is ready, find the companies that will help you connect with businesses that will want to pay to have their products reviewed or have their links embedded with your blog post entries. Once that is set up, you can start earning some extra income with your blog.

Blogging is an easy way to earn some extra cash if you plan to work hard marketing it. Those successful at blogging for money use every route possible to get their blog well known in the internet communities and the search engines. The ones that do not tend to earn only a few cents a week, if even that.

So become one of the more successful bloggers and make your blog your business instead of just a hobby to partake in once in awhile. Your pocketbook will thank you for it.

Search Amazon.com for Blogging