Blogging is a very simple way to make some extra money. However, you must keep your content current as well as relevant. If you run a technology blog, you shouldn’t put a post about how you saw a rat at Taco Bell…it just doesn’t work like that. In order to be a successfull blogger, you most likely need to have your own domain name, rather than using blogger.com. If you have no blogging or webpage creation experience, then use blogger for a few weeks to get the basics down before you invest $10 to get a domain name and a hosting service. That $10 is the only thing you will ever have to invest. Popular blogs obviously make more money than less popular ones. The ways that blogs make money are through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a way for people to advertise their product or service and get sales through other peoples websites. You might get paid for people clicking on the ads on your website, for giving the advertising company leads for a purchase, or even get a cut of the price the customer pays for a product. I utilize all three on my other websites to create a residual income. Google adsense is the way to do this. Google owns www.blogger.com, so you can insert the google ads easily and quickly. It make take a day or two before your site is approved, but as soon as it is, you have income potential. If you are making your own website, then you will need to make a google account and set up and adsense account before you can get started with it. Just select the type of ad you want, then copy and past the html code into your webpage. If your site gets popular, (250 views or more per day) you have a decent income potential.

Traffic: Even though you might have the best blog in the world, no one will go to it because they do not yet know about it. In order to get traffic to your blog you will want to submit your blog to at least google, yahoo, msn, and aol search engines. Also you can put ads up on craigslist.com for your site, or even post about it in relevant forums…but don’t spam. I usually just submit mywebsite to different search engines and get linked to by other sites. If I can get linked to, then I am guarunteed a spot in the search engines. More traffic means more money. (if it is targeted traffic) Also, please don’t buy traffic from a service, or use a traffic exchange, save yourself the time. I have never had them work.

The most important thing as far as content of the actual blog goes is to have relevant content that people can apply to their lives today and also in the future. I have found that certain topics like self help or do it yourself blogs generally have more traffic because people will always need the information that they offer. Content is the most important thing. Make sure you post useful content. If you are an expert at something, make a blog about it and describe how to do certain projects using your skill. If you keep at it and start getting some traffic, you will make a decent amount of money.

www.blogger.com

www.google.com/adsense