How To Make Your Blog An Online Business

By Wendy Smith

Blogging began years ago as a method for people to link up to other people and share stories, pictures and experiences. It was regarded as a great personal journal type tool that was used 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 make a little additional income with any blog or internet site. The idea is to position these advertisements on your web site and once a visitor clicks on an advert from your site, you make a pre-determined sum of money. The more clicks you are able to get from your web site visitors, the more you are able to make. There are a few rules, so if you decide to go down this path, make sure you find out what not to do prior to signing up for their programs.

Product Reviews - There are some websites that you can sign up with that can help you connect with other companies who need people to review their products and get them some exposure on your blogs. Usually the main requirement for this is to have a blog that's been around for awhile and has a fair amount of visitors. Those companies would pay you a specified amount to review their product on your blog.

Contextual Links - Some business or website owners will pay a blogger to post one of their links within their blog posts. It may be the owners themselves getting hold of the blog writer or a company that acts as the middleman. Those businesses will find blogs that relate to their companies sites, so the links supplied on the blogs will be search engine friendly. This is a great method to build some additional traffic for a web site.

Sell products - Blogs are another way you can 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 make more money online.

What skills would be helpful?

In this type of business there isn't a great deal of skill required except the ability to market your blog. To learn a few tricks of the trade in getting your blog popular, it would be a good idea to research blogging as much as possible.

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.

The paid versions of blogging programs can help you connect with other blogs and increase your blog's traffic. The free versions are extremely easy to set up and most are extremely popular amongst bloggers, so finding people to connect with wouldn't be too hard to do.

Getting 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 possible. Get listed on blog directories, get on other people's blog rolls and comment on other blog author's posts to get some exposure to your blog. The more traffic you can drive to your blog, the higher your chance of making blogging a lucrative way to make money.

Most of the blogging programs will already have included in their set up feature a sign up for adsense ads, so getting started with that will be easy. You will need to be blogging for a while as well as having a lot of traffic, if you want to provide product reviews and contextual links.

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 means to make some additional cash if you plan to work hard at marketing it. The ones successful at blogging for income apply every route imaginable to get their blog well known in the internet communities. The ones that don't, incline to make only a couple of cents a week.

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

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