Although this beginners guide on how to make money blogging is designed to teach you how to make money blogging, you should know that only your own hard work and determination can ultimately make that a reality. After reading these blogging tips for beginners, you will be armed with the proper knowledge to get started.
You will also learn some of the key concepts like how to start your own blog, writing a blog post, marketing your blog, building a loyal reader base and how to convert all of that into some cold hard cash. You may also find some other sources of information helpful, like this free blogging for beginners ebook that will guide you step-by-step to make your own blog that will generate money with free search engine traffic.
Start Your Own Blog
You have a number of different options when you are starting your own blog. If you want to make money, you should really be self-hosting your blog. This means that you buy a domain name and pay for a website hosting account for your website. It’s actually quite an affordable process that is easy to get set up for a blog.
There are a couple of free ways to make a blog, but they have limitations on how you can make money. WordPress.com and Blogger will let you make a free blog as a sub-domain on their site. Blogger is more flexible with their advertising freedoms, but neither option will give you the complete freedom of self-hosting your blog.
You should use the WordPress.org software for a self-hosted blog – this software will let you do everything you need to do and it has no advertising restrictions. Best of all, the software will cost you absolutely nothing.
There is a ton of information concerning how to use blogging software, so you should definitely read through any tutorial guides that are offered by the blogging software that you choose to use for your site. This will ensure that you will cover areas that are simply too expansive for this guide.
You will be better off if you can select a niche market for your blog site instead of writing about everything. A niche market can be general or very specific topics. We will use cars as an example of a niche market for a moment. Cars is a pretty general topic and unless you are writing about anything and everything car related, you wouldn’t want this to be your niche.
Let’s say you are a mechanic – choosing car repair as your niche would be a more appropriate choice. You could even decide to be more specialized and just blog about repairing car engines or even repairing flat car tires.
Make sure your niche is something that you can potentially write something about every day, possibly forever. You should also pick your topic based on what is interesting for you because this will give you a head start plus your readers will recognize your passion for the subject.
Writing A Blog Post
Some people may be intimidated by the thought of writing articles or blog posts that other people will be able to read and even comment about. You really should not be worried about this and as long as you follow some simple guidelines, you will be able to write a blog post with ease.
One of the most essential parts to writing a blog is to check your spelling and grammar. You should always re-read your blog post after you are done writing it to ensure that is written without errors. Simple mistakes like this can have dire consequences for the success of your blog. People can mistake you for being unintelligent or simply careless.
Either way, you want your blog posts to be easy to read and understand. This means you should try to get too fancy with your vocabulary. You may think that using big, complicated words will make you sound smart, but you also don’t want people to have to have a dictionary at their side when their read your blog.
Another key to a good blog post is article formatting. It is a good idea to have smaller paragraphs in your articles to give more white space to the page. The more white space you can have in your blog post, the easier it will be for your viewers to read. Huge paragraphs of neverending text are a big turnoff for website visitors in general and not merely limited to blog readers.
Determine a well defined topic for each blog post that you write. You do not want to cover too wide of a variety of information in any single article. Get across the information/opinion that you want the reader to get from your post and then be done with it. Writing too much or rambling can leading to your readers losing interest.
Blog Marketing
Although marketing your blog may be the most confusing aspect of starting a blog, once you get the hang of it and grasp a few important methods you will be more that confident when it comes to any kind of internet marketing.
The point of blog marketing is to get your blog’s name and website address in front of as many people as you possibly can. The best place to start is to think about where people go that might be interested in what your blog talks about. These places can be online websites or even places in your local community where people gather for a common purpose.
You can usually find message boards or discussion forums on the internet related to almost any given topic. These websites are generally free sites where you can register and then engage in conversation with other members. Often, you will be able to promote your own ideas on these sites. This should be done discreetly so you do not get banned from websites for spamming. Place a link in your forum signature if it’s allowed for the forum. You can usually make a mention of your website in your profile on the sites.
Get your friends and family involved. This can also be done online and offline. Social networking websites are a great online method of marketing a blog. Use these websites to let your friends know about what you do and even publish updates when you release new blog articles.
You should also consider building backlinks to your website. Backlinks are links that a search engine can follow from a website back to your website. Some of the above methods can be used to generate backlinks. You can also write articles that you can casually put relevant backlinks within the content and then publish these articles on other websites.
Building Loyal Readers
The key to building loyal readers for your blog is to give them something to stay interested in. The most popular blogs post daily content for their readers. Generally, the more posts you can write the more readers you will have. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you also do not want to overload your readers with more posts each day than they can handle. Any more than ten in a single day can be overwhelming.
Stay loyal to your topic and the people that came to your blog in the first place will be interested in your future blogging. Try to engage the users to interact with you and other readers. You can accomplish this by taking polls or encouraging comments and discussion from your members.
Make Money Blogging For Beginners
There are a lot of ways that you can make money blogging, even for beginners. Many companies have advertising systems set up where you can promote various opportunities to earn real cash. There are a few primary types of advertising companies that you will want to consider to make money blogging.
Pay per click advertising is possibly one of the best known ways to make money with a blog and is often a favorite for beginner bloggers. Google Adsense is the leading PPC advertising company. Once you get your website approved to display their ads, you can put them on your blog and earn money any time a reader clicks on one of the advertisements. The amount that you earn depends on how much the advertiser bid for the keyword that your website relates to. Often, you can make 25 cents to numerous dollars for every single click.
Affiliate marketing is probably the other leading way to make money blogging. Websites like Commission Junction and ClickBank will allow you to register to promote services and products of their advertisers. With this type of advertising, your goal is to generate a sale for something and not merely get someone to click a link. It can be more difficult to start making money with affiliate marketing, but it is also seen as being a more profitable method of making money with blogs and other websites. The key is to promote products and services that your readers may actually want to buy. It is not uncommon for commissions to range from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars for a single sale, which highly depends on what type of product or service is being promoted.
If you need a specific guide that will give you more in-depth detail on how to make money blogging for beginners, read this free blogging ebook for a real business plan to making a successful and unique blog.
