Blogging - Making it pay

If your only goal from blogging is to express your thoughts and feelings, perhaps even share some expert knowledge then all you really need to worry about is choosing a great topic for your blog and for every entry. If you have found this site then I am guessing you want to make a profitable blog and so once you have chosen a great topic for your weblog there is more to the business you need to worry about.




First of all I must talk to you about driving traffic. Without traffic you have no chance of making money online because you have no-one clicking on your advertisements. So how do we do this? Well actually there is no single 'get traffic quickly' method that will do this for you, no matter what you might read online. You need a combination of methods and some patience. You need to make sure your domain name is a common one so that you can get a modest click-rate right from the word go and so that your site is easy to index by search engines. Then you need to submit your site to lots of search engines and continue to write good, high quality articles regularily. Usually I would stop here when discussing blogging with beginners because I feel it is important to master the basics of blogging before moving on to the more elite stuff.

However, in this article I am going to reveal a tried and tested blogging technique that could boost your blog traffic by an order of magnitude. I use this method for all my blogs and you really can notice the difference. This phenomenon is so simple but so effective and is called back-linking. You need to sign up to sites like Ezine Articles and Go Articles which are free online article directories. You can get free content for your blog from these pages but in this instance you are going to give away your high quality articles. But won't that aid the competition? Yes is the short answer but for every article you submit you must submit a source web address, then anyone who ever uses your article must quote the source. This is just online referencing but because the source is your domain name this gives you lots of links pointing back towards your site. Search engines love this process and it really boosts your ranking = more visitors!

Now I will discuss how advertising on your blog can help supplment your income with simple but continual effort on your behalf. I will assume your visitor counts are reasonable and will outline the different methods you can use to make money online.

Advertising and affiliate marketing are the two buzzwords in the 'making money online' sections of most how-to websites. Both are relatively easy to setup on your blog but placing adverts on your page is perhaps more eyecatching and requires less work. This will be our starting point. So what do I mean when I say you place adverts on your page? Well as an example there is a marketing program available from Google called Adwords where companies will pay Google to advertise their sites on their search engine and on affiliated sites. Google gets paid every time a web surfer clicks on the link they have advertised. Bloggers and other website owners can also benefit from this program by signing up to the Adsense program which in a nutshell allows Google to advertise on your site. So when somebody comes to your site and clicks on an advert hosted by Google, Google get paid and you get paid. Simple! The amount you get paid per click is small but with large visitor numbers and a high click-rate you can begin to earn a steady income.

Remember that the Google adverts are created based on the content of your site so this is a real quality over quantity matter. If you write great content you will get great adverts and hopefully a great revenue stream. Good Luck!

Next Time: Affiliate Marketing