Make Money Blogging for Beginners

Web logs, or blogs for short, are a type of website where an individual shares his or her personal experiences and opinions in a format that resembles a journal. Because blogs are such a popular medium on the Internet, many people want to learn how to make money blogging. To make money blogging, you’ll need to follow a strategy that consists of two parts. In the first part, you’ll need to get readers by some means. In the second part, you’ll need to make money from these readers. This formula is pretty straight-forward and open-ended, so there are a lot of ways that you can put your own personal touch on the process. In what follows, we’re going to break down different ways that you can approach this two-step process to make money blogging.

Strategic Choice of Industry or Niche

To have the best results, your blog is going to need to center around a specific topic. You should decide on the topic of your blog before you begin anything else. The industry or niche that your blog focuses on will naturally be something that your visitors are interested in. The point of deciding on a specific niche is that knowing what your visitors like allows you to make money from them more easily because you can appeal to their interests in a more direct way. We’ve said already that there are two parts of making money from blogging, and choosing a topic to focus on with your blog will help improve the effectiveness of both of these parts.

Promoting Your Blog

Once you have a niche picked out, you’re going to need to do some promotion as you’re starting up. Most people who want to know how to start a blog and make money skip this step, and it costs them dearly in the long run. You’ll want to start promoting your blog in very indirect and unintrusive ways on message boards and other blogs related to your industry. Using a spreadsheet to organize all of your accounts on message boards and blog comment systems is a good idea when it comes to this point. Since you should have different screen names for different accounts for security purposes, having a spreadsheet is necessary unless you want to try to remember all of the accounts and passwords individually.

Put your blog’s information in your signature and profile on message boards, and spend a few minutes each day answering questions or talking about industry news. Try not to spam or blatantly advertise your blog. Instead, you should just let it show up in your signature under all of your answers and contributions to discussions. This will give you a small traffic source initially, but will serve the greater purpose of getting search engines to notice your blog.

Monetization Strategies

While promotion is mostly a matter of putting in the effort, monetization requires more strategy and planning than pure work. The main way that people choose to monetize blogs in the beginning is advertising, and there are a few different ways to go about this. The easiest way to make money blogging when you’re starting out is by using a contextual advertising service like AdSense or Clicksor. These platforms automatically serve up advertisements that are relevant to your blog’s content, so your click-thru rates will be higher than if they only served up random ads. Once your blog gets more traffic and recognition, you can try to reach out to companies that would be interested in sponsoring you. These companies will want advertising blocks on your website in exchange for sponsoring your blog, and this is a good way to advance the money-making capabilities of a blog.

The Growth of Your Blog

The main idea that you have to keep in mind when it comes to knowing how to make money blogging is that it takes constant effort and a steady amount of work to bring a blog up off of the ground. For the first few months your blog is up and running, you’re going to have to put in a lot of time doing promotional activities like posting on relevant blogs and forums. You’re also going to have to add content to the blog at a steady pace. If you can keep up this work and you cover both the promotional and monetization aspects of blogging strategy, then you’ll be successful at making money with your blog.