How to Make Money Online with a Blog
If you are busily working at home trying to earn a full or part time income online there is a general need for many people for different reasons. Since I published the article entitled: Content is King, I will look at this need now.
Some need to do this for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it's because they lost their job, or because they got fed up working for an idiot who demanded more than they should reasonably expect. Or they could be a busy mother who prefers to stay at home and look after the kids while making some extra income using the Internet and its vast array of money making possibilities.
Starting with the Basics
At its most basic level, people are looking at the idea of how to work from home to make an income as a viable business precept. It can work and in some instances can work very well, but the person doing it has to spend a considerable amount of time learning the ropes and also avoiding the many scams and misinformation that is prevalent online.
Often then, success can be had as long as you take the time to do the ground work and learn from the ground up how to make that money. Then you need to apply it to your daily routine when you decide to work at home.
Start by Using Free Resources
Well, one of the easiest ways to earn money online is to use the free resources that are available to you. One of these is the many different kinds of free blogs that you can easily build and put up advertising such as Adsense ads on them.
If that sounds over-simplified, then it is to a point. The basic mechanics of creating the sites are the easy part.
You can use Blogger or any one of the several other free blog hosts which are simple to figure out and get started quickly. But you have to be aware of some things from the very beginning and this post will help you there:
Things to Watch Out For
There are some important things you need to watch out for when using free web 2.0 properties, such as:
- Not all free blog hosts allow you to place ads on your blog
- Not all free blog hosts allow you to link to other blogs you own
- Not all free blog hosts should be trusted with your content (they may be here today and gone tomorrow)
With these three main points in mind, it pays to start creating your blogs on hosts that allow you to place your own ads and to link out to other blogs you own (this is important). It is also worth mentioning that many free blog hosts will place their own ads on your blog whether you want them or not.
You can apply your own Adsense code to some of these, but the owners will take a share of your revenue for the privilege of using their hosts. So you need to know who you can use that will:
- Allow you to place your own ads
- Allow you to link out to other blogs
- Not put their own ads on your blog
- Not take a share of your Adsense revenue
Here is a short list of such free blog hosts that you can do that with:
- Blogger
Erm, that's a very short list, it seems. In fact, that's it I'm afraid! There are other good free blog hosts but they all have some restrictions or other that will strangle your attempts to succeed.
Some examples of other free hosts that are ok to use are:
- Wordpress (you can link out but you can't display ads)
- Quora
- Webs
- Weebly
- Webnode
- Tumblr
- SkyRock
- Wix
- Hub Pages (revenue share)
- Seekyt (revenue share)
Why Use Wordpress?
Why would I show you a host that you can't display ads on? Well, with the free version of Wordpress, you can create a few blogs that you won't be monetising. But as a part of the process of how to make money online, you'll be using to provide links and send traffic to your blogs that you will have ads on.
This improves their authority and gives them a better chance of ranking in the search engine pages (SERPs). Oh, did I mention you need to have your site listed high in Google (and the other search engines) in order to attract organic search traffic to them?
Well, I just did. You need that to be making money online. That's where you need to be getting links to your blog with ads so that people go there.
If you don't get anyone turn up at your site, who will click your ads to make money for you? Mmm. See the process is starting to get more complex now. I'm going to expand on that particular topic in my next article.