What To Know About Blogging and Making Money

Blogging is nothing new.  People have been blogging for years, but over the past year or so many have learned how to make money blogging.  The reason isn’t that the tools haven’t been in place to make money blogging, but people either thought they couldn’t make money sharing their thoughts, that they didn’t have enough audience to make any money with, or they simply just didn’t know how to start.  Fortunately, there are many new tools today that make it even easier for people to blog and make money doing it.  The following are some tips and resources on what to know about blogging and making money.

The first thing to do is get a blog. If you have one already, great!  If not, don’t worry, it’s pretty easy to get one.  There are some sites that offer free blogs and people can have them up and running in matter of minutes. The following are some ideas of blogging systems.

• Wordpress - They offer a free blog on their host system, and the URL is associated with them at Wordpress.com.   A person can register with them for free and have a blog up in just a few minutes.  However, they also offer a complete download of their system and make it available for people to put on their own domain. This means that a person can register their domain, host it themselves, and run Wordpress for free.  This is by far the best system out today and has a huge community of resources, apps, support, upgrades, and themes.
• Blogger - They also offer a free blog on their hosted system.  This service is ran by Google and a person just needs to have an account to create a blog and start blogging.
• TypePad - Is another hosted solution for bloggers.  This is free to setup and has lots of great themes and plug-ins to use.
• 3rd Party Sites - Sites like Facebook, Myspace, Mixx, and host of others all have blogging platforms for people to use. However, they all have limited control and the display ads are not always profitable for the blogger.

Not that you have a blog, what to do with it to make money blogging.  The following are some things to consider when setting up the blog and getting it ready for profits.

• Pick a topic - This is very important as people can’t be everything to everyone. It’s good to pick a subject or specific topic and blog about it. This will keep your audience focused on a certain product or idea, which then makes targeting ads and making money a lot easier.  The most successful bloggers have learned to build blogs around one or two niche ideas so that the content gets ranked well and the audience has a specific purpose to be there.  Sites that try to do everything often get lost with their audience and their marketing falls short because they are trying to do so much that the return is not worth the expense.
• Find out what the audience wants - This is key to making money with a blog. A blog about coffee wouldn’t want to display an ad about Pepsi, but may want to display an ad about Starbucks. This kind of audience evaluation will help determine the items that will make money on the blog.  The best thing to do is use a company that helps personalize ads based on the content and audience.  There are performance based services that build custom offers based on the publisher that will drive the highest conversions and payouts.  It’s good to use a company that will work directly with the publisher, as not all publishers are the same with the same needs, and can build exclusive campaigns that will make money for the blogger.
• Set up social tools - It’s not a field of dream and just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.  Even the most successful bloggers, those with high search rank, knows the power of social marketing, social networking, and social media. These things all help the blogger get exposed and drive traffic back to the blog.  Getting on sites like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Youtube, and Mixx are crucial for today’s blogger, and it’s not enough just to blog if they want to make profit. They also have to support their blog with other rich media that can be shared with others. Things like videos, photos, polls, and comments, are all ways to get more people talking about a blog, which will drive more traffic and more profits.  This means that getting an account on these sites is important and the best thing to do is use tools that help automate this process so that a person can spend more time blogging, which is where the money is at, and less time socializing.

Now, you’ve got a blog, got a topic, figured out what the audience wants and set up some ways to make money with them, and set up a social network to share things with. This means that you are ready for blogging. The following are some points to consider when writing a new blog posts.

• Try to keep the post topical and on subject. Having a blog about travel and then writing about how great the ice cream is at Basking Robins may not be the best thing for the audience.  If you want to post something not related to the subject of the blog, then just create a new blog.  It doesn’t hurt to run more than one blog, and in fact, it’s encouraged.  The best bloggers run a dozen  or more and each money makes a little bit of money, but combined together they make quite a bit.
• Put keywords that people would search for int he title and post. If the post is about travel in Europe, and the blogger wants to rank for something related, they would need to include the terms in the title and content of the blog post.  However, the title and topic should also be somewhat interesting and will get people to click. This is a trade-off that many have to consider when making a blog post.  Do you want the wow factor that gets people to click on the catchy title, or do you want to the search factor that will drive traffic from the search results typed in.
• Don’t write one or two lines and call it day.  There are so many blogs out there that only re-post information that is already available in more detail in other places.  Try to write unique content that is relevant and helpful to the audience. Posting two lines about something you saw really isn’t much of a help, so elaborate some on the blog and make at least 200 words per posts.  Plus, the more information shared, the more people will share it back. This means that postings some with two lines isn’t going to really get shared a lot, versus something that is substantial.  The bottom line here is to make it count.

Now, you have the knowledge and tools to go out today, start a blog, and make money blogging.

Related posts:

1. How To Make Money With Your Facebook Account Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites. People...
2. What To Know About Social Marketing There has been a lot of talk over the past...
3. Social Media Marketing Is Not A Fad Heard of social marketing, social networking, or social media but...