Setting up a Blog and how to make money with Blogging

Setup, Market, and Monetize your Blog

If you are wondering that it’s a useless article as it not possible to make money with Blogging, then your are right. You are right till you read the article to the full. Today many people are starting Blogging with a primary purpose of making some money out of it. You can end up earning few dollars a month to pay for your coffee expenses, it may help you get rid of your part time job or even it could be your main source of living.

You can freely start blogging using WordPress, Blogger, or any other website that allows you to freely host the blog with a subdomain. But using free service won’t allow you to have complete control over the blog. And you will be bound to act according to their terms and conditions.

Choosing your Niche for Blogging

Once you have made up your mind to start blogging, the first thing you should do is choosing the Niche, i.e. the topic on which you would be blogging. Something which you love, you are passionate about, you can talk about, should be your niche. If you don’t have enthusiasm for it, it will reflect in your posts and your readers will lose enthusiasm in reading them. Your niche could be – Travelling, Online Marketing, Mobiles, Cars, etc. could be your niche, that excites you and you have deep interest and passion for it. I would recommend choosing the niche even before buying a domain name because once your niche is decided then you may want to include a keyword in your domain name.

For example – if you blog is about ‘Jobs’ then you can have your domain name something like ‘www.onlinejobs.com’.

Buying Domain Name and Web Hosting

Although you can host your blog on free sites but if you really want to make serious money with blogging you must have complete control over your blog. It will cost you few dollars to buy a domain and web hosting to have your blog and the benefits will far outweigh the cost involved.

Choosing a Theme

Once you know the subject on which you have to blog and you have a domain name and hosting space, you can search for the themes online. You must give reasonable time in choosing a good theme. While choosing a theme few things must be taken care of, like – it should have simple navigations so that the visitors on your blog can easily access other posts from one post. If your blog can have multiple categories then ensure that theme supports drop down menu’s, because some themes don’t support it. Have a good look at what options are available in Header, Footer and the Sidebar of the theme. You can get both free and paid themes online. And of course, if you know some HTML coding you can even get more control over the theme.

Promoting your Blog

Now you have your blog up and running with a good looking theme and valuable content on it. Now you have to ensure that you can get as many eyeballs as possible coming on to it. Yes, you have to promote you blog so that more and more people come to your blog. There are a number of ways you can use to have traffic coming on to your blog, but remember it does not happen overnight, you need to be patient and the techniques you adopt you have to follow them consistently. Here are few of them:

• Use Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc, have a link to your blog in your profile and when you make a blog post also share it on your facebook wall or your fan page.
• Submit your blog to as many social bookmarking sites as possible.
• You can even visit other blogs and post a comment and share your blog URL in the ‘Website’ section.
• Write free articles for article directories and submit it there along with your blog’s URL at the end in signatures.
• Add your blogs URL as a Signature in your email, so that it goes to everyone to whom you sent the email.
• Submit your blog to ‘Blog Submission Directories ’.
• Write informative and valuable content for your blog. It will help in indexing of the page by search engines and also when the readers like it they will share it with others and thus your blog getting viral exposure.
• You can even use paid advertising like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to promote your blog.

Don’t copy and paste the content from other blogs or websites. Search engines can catch it and this will result de popularizing of your blog and obviously, your don’t want this. To get a fair idea about the content you can have a look at the content written by other bloggers on the same niche and then you can start writing. But copying is strongly not recommended.

Now you have your Blog up, running and traffic coming on to it now let’s look into how you can encash that traffic and make money from Blogging. There are various ways to get started to earn with your blog, let’s learn more about them:

• Google AdSense

  If you have a Blog or a Website you can sign up for Google AdSense and make money through it. It´s Quick, Easy to Set Up and Free. Google’s AdSense is an attractive revenue making opportunity for small, medium and large websites since a long time. Google AdSense program is based on Pay-Per-Click (PPC). When someone clicks on the ads on your website, few cents are added to your Google AdSense Account.

• Affiliate Marketing

  It’s a platform where you could use your Blog or Website to sell someone else’s products. The good news is that you don’t have to waste your time and energy in keeping a stock of Products and deliver it to the customers. Affiliate Marketing is simply referring the Product to the online shoppers and on every purchase you get a certain amount of commission. As an affiliate marketer, you are given a link to a Product to be sold online so that when a sale is made by you, it’s traceable and you get paid for it.

• Selling a Product Online

  Making money online by selling a Product is a known phenomenon. You can get started by selling your own Product or other people’s Product and get paid in return. Talking about your own products or service – you may provide services like developing websites and software, or you may have written an E-book that you can sell online. Selling other people’s product can be like – selling domain names and web hosting packages of other companies, travel packages of companies and much more such products.

• Selling advertising space on your website

  Once your blog is established and is having regular traffic you can offer space on your blog to advertisers to place their ads on your website and in returns you get paid. More the number of visitors on your website more you can charge.

• Amazon Associates

  You can earn through amazon affiliate program by referring its products to others on your blog.  Their affiliate programs are called Amazon Associates. Amazon is very popular and reliable website, so many people purchase through this website and adding to it, it has a good selection of products for sale. You can buy almost anything you want from their website. So if do a deep study it could be a good earning corner for you on your blog.

• Selling your Blog

  This may sound strange to your, but this is what bloggers have done in past. You have many ways to make money from your blog and this one is the last and final way to make money from your blog. Once your blog is popular and is having a regular number of visitors coming daily you can even sell it for 10 times of its monthly revenue. If you have a blog that you want to sell and is worth selling you can visit search for ‘best marketplaces to sell your blog/website’ on google and find websites that will help you in selling your blog.

I hope the above information will help you in owning a profitable blog. HAPPY BLOGGING 🙂

If you have any questions write in the form below and you can even share more on the topic so that the readers could benefit from it.

Tags: make money with blogging, market a blog, monetize blog, setup a blog, vineet gupta