How To Make Your Blog An Online Business

By Lorraine Smith

Blogging started out years ago as a way for people to connect to others and share pictures, stories and experiences. It was considered to be a great personal journal type tool that one could use to leave their mark on the internet through their encounters.

Blogs then developed to become excellent Marketing Tools in addition to a medium to earn income off of. There are a few different methods to make money from blogging. Here are a few:

Adsense Ads - The popular search engines offer a way to earn a little extra money with any blog or website. The idea is to place these ads on your site and when a visitor clicks on an ad from your site, you earn a pre-determined amount of money. The more clicks you can get from your site visitors, the more you can make. There are some rules, so if you choose to go this route, be sure to learn what not to do before signing up for their programs.

Review Products - There are a few sites that you can register up with that can help you connect with other companies who want people to review their products and get them some exposure on your blogs. More often than not you are required to have a blog that not only has a fair amount of visitors but has also been around for awhile. Those companies would pay you a specified amount of money to review their product on your blog.

Contextual Links - Some website owners or business will pay a blogger to post one of their links within their blog posts. It may be the owners themselves contacting the blogger or a company that acts as the middleman. Those businesses are only interested in blogs that relate to their companies sites, so the links provided on the blogs will be search engine friendly. This is a great technique to make some more traffic for a site.

Sell products - Blogs are an additional way you are able to sell your own products from. Those who have businesses selling home dcor items or food container items use blogs a lot to help sell their products and earn further income online.

What skills would be helpful?

There isn't a great deal of skill needed in this type of business except the ability to market your blog. You would need to research blogging as much as possible to acquire a few of the tricks of the trade to get your blog popular.

What tools would be needed?

Your main tool, besides a computer with an internet connection, would be a blog. There are many blogging programs out there to choose from. Some are free to set up with, while others require a monthly or annual fee to get started with.

Using the paid versions of blogging programs can help you to connect with other blogs and increase your blog's traffic. The free versions are super easy to produce and most are very popular among bloggers, so getting hold of people to connect with wouldn't be too hard to do.

How do you get started?

Sign up with a blogging program and start putting up posts. It is a good idea to blog on a regular basis, normally, about twice a week. If you don't update regularly, the blog tends to get lost in cyberspace.

Market your blog as much as you can. To get some exposure to your blog, you need to comment on other blog author's posts, get listed on blog directories and get on other people's blog rolls. The more traffic you can get to your blog, the better your chances are of making blogging a lucrative way to bring in money.

Most of the blogging platforms will have a sign up for adsense adverts already included in their set up feature, so getting started with that will be easy. If you would like to supply product critiques and contextual links, you will need to be blogging for awhile and have a reasonable amount of traffic coming to it.

When your blog is ready, find the companies that will help you connect with businesses that want to pay to have their products reviewed or have their links embedded with your blog post entries. Once that's set up, you can start earning some extra income with your blog.

Blogging is an easy way to earn some extra cash if you plan to work hard at marketing it. The ones successful at blogging for money use every route possible to get their blog well known in the internet communities. The ones that don't, tend to earn only a few cents a week.

Become one of the more successful bloggers and make your blog your business and not just a hobby to partake in once in awhile. Your pocketbook will thank you for it.

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