If you’re reading this, you may already know what a blog is. If not, then a blog can be used to write a personal diary or as a platform to write online articles similar to the kind of thing that’ve been appearing in Newspapers & Magazines for years.
Many people do this, and don’t earn s***, probably because they aren’t that fussed about earning from their blog, but in other cases they just don’t really know how to do it properly, or they just don’t put the effort in.
There are other people who do this, who claim to make $1000’s doing it, and even write books to boast about it and tell other people how to go about doing it. I’ve had a flick through many of these books recently, and they pretty much all say the same thing without being maybe as truly helpful as they could.
There are even people who have become millionaires from blogging, and it may be possible for you to do the same, but you’ll have a hell of alot of work ahead of you laying the foundation stones to be able to get there.
If you want to have a go at this yourself, you will need the following things:
1) An idea about what you want to write about, think of a topic that you’re actually interested in, know about enough to not look like a moron when you’re writing about it, and have the willpower to write about on a regular basis.
Most of these books about blogging suggest trying to find a specific niche on the topic to write about, but not one so weird there’d be a very limited people wanting to read it. For instance “How to make money blogging” is probably more likely to attract readers than “How to make money by giving elephants nipple piercings”.
2) Energy….. if you’re totally knackered you’re gonna have quite a struggle engaging your brain to assemble words to use in your blog posts in a way that makes sense, if any at all.
3) Time… let’s face it, writing takes a while to do…… but you can also write a crapload of blogs at once (providing you don’t over-burden yourself to the point you get bits of them mixed up), and set the blog website to release them to the world at a set time if needs be.
4) A blogging platform…. there are numerous options, with Free WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot + WordPress hosted via paid webhosting among the most popular.
5) Advertising to make money from your blog posts by monetising them. The most popular choices are Google AdSense + Amazon Associates, which I’ve also found to be the most reliable for payouts.
6) SEO & PPC Advertising Skills, to bring people to your blog to click on the adverts that will earn you money.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”, and is the dark art of tweaking your website to play nicely with the search engine robots when they come to visit your website to gather information to add your pages to the listings on the various Search Engines.
PPC stands for “Pay Per Click”, and is a form of advertising where the owner of the pages an advert is displayed on gets paid when someone clicks on it. Just as you need it to earn money on your own pages, you also need to run adverts through it to display adverts to your blog site on other people’s websites to bring people to your site in the hopes they will click on your adverts.
There are popular options including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads + Bing Ads. It can cost from as little as a tenner a month, through to well over $300/£300+ a month.
7) Social Media accounts to promote the blog and lure people in to read your content. All the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, etc.
8) Software, to make running the blog more painless & look more professional…….. you may want to consider graphics software, image editing software, video editing software + SEO Software for starters.
If you liked this article, check out our one on Youtubing, which you can use to earn an extra stream of online cash alongside your Blog.
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