How to make money online from blogging (Part 1)

Before we begin, it is probably a good idea to cover briefly the concept of blogging and blogs.  For some of you, this will be obvious and well known, but there are still many people that are unclear exactly what a blog is.  And while it could be possible to easily fill hundreds of pages in a book on the topic of making money from blogging, I will try to offer you a more concise background here in this article.

A blog could be described as a certain type of website.  This type of website comes down to the functionality.  It is essentially a site that allows a user or users to add short to long posts, on any topic, in various forms such as text, images and video and allows for readers to comment on the post.

Blogs can be used by anyone from the local college student, keeping an online diary of his fitness program, to a finance company that allows for their top executives to write formal articles about market conditions, investment opportunities or how they went at golf on the weekend.

Traditionally these days, when people think of blogs, they think of a way to make money online.  This is because there are many bloggers out there now that are writing regularly about a topic they are both an expert in and enjoy, and in return for high volumes of traffic and visitors enjoy revenue from such avenues as Google who pay them to display ads on their website.

The other good thing about blogs is that they don’t always need to be viewed as a website.  Many people these days subscribe to blogs and read them on their personal mobile devices, or in an email platform, where everytime the author posts a new article, an email is delivered to the reader.  They can either decide to read the article, or they delete it.

There are of course many blogs that don’t make any money at all, and nor are they set up to make money.  This is where it helps if you can define your purpose and goals for a blog before you start it.  We will go into detail more on this later.  For now, the important thing is that you understand that a blog is a website that allows you to interact with your audience in several ways, regularly or infrequent and is usually easy to maintain, such that you don’t need prior technical knowledge to manage.  When you want to add a new post this is straight forward and software installed on your hosting server takes care of all of the background processes.  Some websites such as blogger.com don’t even require you to pay for hosting so it is an area that has exploded to cater for everyone’s needs.

So the question, of How to make money online from blogging is a very broad question.  Before you can even begin to look at money you need to decide what you will write about.  Your content is key here.  If you have poor content that no one will read, then chances are very slim you will ever make a cent from blogging.  The only way you can make money online is to have traffic coming to your blog, to your website.  So lets look at content to begin.

“Content is King” is true when it comes to blogging.  You need to look at content as your ‘product’.  If you have a great product then people will want to use it.  They will even pay money for it, if its something that they want and can’t find else where.  Without content it is impossible to make money online from blogs.
The important thing to remember when deciding what you will write about, where you will focus your energy, is trying to decide what will be popular from a traffic and search engine point of view.  What do people want?  Do you want to please the masses with very generic articles, or do you want to write for a specific group of people who only them will ever see your articles, but when they do you will offer tremendous value.  I can tell you now that if you decide to write on teenage boys and knitting, then chances are your audience may be too small to generate much traffic and ultimately, much income.  So you need to keep a balance.  Try to write about something your passionate about and know a lot about, but also something that will appeal to a good size group of people.

So once you have decided on your topic for content, you need to set up a blog.  I won’t go into this here, but basically you can get a free blog from blogger.com or wordpress.org.  Wordpress is a very common platform and is very easy to use.  If your serious about your decision to make money online long term, then you may be better off getting a hosting account and registering your own domain name.  This way that you can build your traffic, links and readership to a site that is going to be around, instead of setting everything up on a free account, then having to transfer it across to your own domain.  If you don’t have a budget for it, then go with the free options to start, as this at least will allow you to test the waters and see if you  both enjoy writing and what the interest for your subject is like.

In the first few months of your blog being up and running, it is critical that you post some very valuable content.  Get it up there, information that is going to be useful to people.  You need to establish yourself as an expert on your topic and start to get subscribers to your blog.  Ask them if they like it and what they want to see more of.  If you keep them happy then they will continue to visit your site on a regular basis.

Once you start to see a large amount of people visiting your site, it can be time to turn it towards making money.  The easiest and most common way of turning your blog towards online income is to use Google Adsense.  Its free to sign up and implements well with most blog platforms. Bear in mind though, unless your getting at least 10,000 people a month visiting your site, you may be disapointed with the return from your advertising commissions.  If your site is generating over 50,000 hits  a month then your well on track to make a significant amount of money online.

So in summary for this part of the post, ONE way to make money online from blogging is to display ads on your blog.  The way you get people to your blog to see the ads is to produce excellent content.  If you have the content then the people will come.  Just remember though, it won’t happy immediately.  Most of the top blogs that earn money online from advertising, etc didn’t pop up there overnight.  They might have been slogging away for 2 or more years.  The thing is, those that have stuck at it, continued to develop and build their readership are now sitting back and enjoying large pay checks each month from the big companies like Google.