Making money with blog isn't a bad idea if you want to earn some extra dollars online without quitting your job. Internet is the place which gives you opportunity to work part time from the comfort of your home without disturbing your routine. There are hundreds of ways to make money online without investment but making money with a blog is the method which has potential to cover all other methods. That is why most people prefer making money with a blog.
A point to remember is that it isn't necessary that every blogger gets succeed in making money. There are thousands of blogs running on World Wide Web and daily hundreds of blog are created daily. Every blogger isn't earning from these blogs. Only those bloggers are making money with their blogs who have strategy to succeed in this opportunity. Who have set a target for themselves to achieve. Blogging isn't the way by which you just create a blog and money starts falling from sky without any hard work, target, achievements and a plan.
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| How To Make Money With A Blog? |
1. Choose Wisely A Blogging Platform: To start with your blog, the first thing is to choose a blogging platform for your blog. Many companies are providing facility to create blogs or free websites. Its up to you which platform do you choose but choose wisely. You are intelligent enough to differentiate what is good and what is bad for you so check your skills, your targets and then choose which suites you better.
I am sharing some info with you which may help you in choosing the right path for you.
Types Of Blogging Services: Basically there are two types of blogging services from which you can make money.
Type 1: First type consist of those programs on which you can create a blog of your own and can modify it yourself. Like its template, content, domain, Ads, etc. You have full authority to use your blog as you wish. Blogger, wordpress and weebly are most popular blogging services of this type. Usually you will find blogs created by blogger and wordpress only on internet so its better to know something about both these platforms in order to make full of blogging experience.
Blogger is owned by Google and works on HTML. It has many flexibilities including 15GB free space and ease of access to all other Google services. It was started in 2003 and since then it is most popular blogging platform ever. Blogger is easier to use and customize.
Wordpress is second most popular blogging platform. It is just a little bit complex than blogger but it also fulfills the needs of those who have to work with PHP. If you have to work with PHP, then wordpress is the best option for you because unfortunately, you can use PHP in blogger. Wordpress gives 3GB space for free members. Additional space can be purchased as a premium member. I recommend choosing wordpress only if you have to work with PHP otherwise blogger is best choice to start blogging with its flexibilities.
Type 2: Second type consists of those platforms where you have to write articles only and do nothing else just to bring traffic on your articles which give you money. These blogging platforms are usually called User Content Generated Revenue Sharing Programs. In this class, you will be providing them unique content to be published on their website and in response, they will share the revenue with you which comes from your content. So those who don't want to twist their brain in setting templates, domains and niche for their blog can write on these websites.
Click Here To Get Info About Some Popular Revenue Sharing Websites
Don't forget that you will have to write under their instructions and terms if you want to get paid and get your articles published. Your compliance with their terms is necessary so stop here and go to first type if you think you cannot write for other programs and want to work alone.
2. Getting A Domain (Or Skip If You Are Satisfy With Free Sub-Domain Of Your Blogging Service): Your blog needs an address. Your blogging service is responsible for providing you with the web-hosting and a domain for your blog. You will see blogspot.com extension on your blogger's domain or wordpress.com on of wordpress' blog. If you are satisfy with these domains, no need to buy a paid domain but if you want to remove these extensions from your domain to facilitate your readers, then you can purchase domains from any popular domain hosting service like hostgator, godaddy or else you can purchase domain from your own blogging service provider. On world wide web, you can also get free domains like dot.tk and cu.cc. Choosing a paid domain option is good because some directories and websites doesn't allow free domains so you might not get backlinks from them.
3. Choosing Blog's Niche: Your blog niche most important factor after choosing a blogging platform. You are free to choose any niche for your blog. Niche refers to the content which you will provide to your blog readers. You can write whatever you want and there is no restriction to write on any topic. The niche is required to make your users know what type of content will they find on your blog. If you start posting every type of topic in your blog without any classification and categorizing them, your reader will be confused and he will find it better to leave your blog. Choose only the niche on which you can write well. For example, you are Medical student so you can write well on topics related to Medical field. In this scenario you can choose a medical related niche for your blog which help your readers understand blog's content. A wisely chosen niche is important for you and both your readers.
4. Choose A Template For Your Blog: Now its time to choose a template for your blog. The blogging services which you are using provides you with default templates for your blog and you can choose from them which you think will be suitable for your blog. If you aren't satisfied with the default templates from your blogging service, don't worry. We have an option for you. You may apply custom templates which are available on all over the web for blogs. Search over internet to select a custom template of your choice and apply it to your blog. Try to select the template which you can handle easily because the custom templates sometimes come with extra widgets and plugins which you don't need. If you are good enough in designing languages, you will face no difficulty in handling templates but if you are a newbie, then you must search and read for blogging tutorials available on internet to get information about applying a template to your blog correctly. SEO friendly templates must be installed because you are intending to make money with blogging, not making a blog just for fun and reading.
5. Creating Pages: Before posting something on your blog, I recommend you making Privacy Policy, Terms Of Service or Terms of Use, Contact Us and About Us pages for your blog. You can create them afterwards if you aren't willing to create them in beginning but remember not to avoid them. These are the pages which Google must check while reviewing your Adsense application. A blog's or website safety and reputation is measured on these pages too. If you don't have these pages in your blog, then most probably your site might be declared as Unsafe or Not-Recommended by Website safety checking programs so users will not take interest in your blog. Not sure how to create privacy policy or terms for your website.
Don't understand the complex language of these terms and privacy policies? Don't worry. Its not necessary that you write these pages yourself. You can hire some freelancer to do this for you on freelancing services like freelancer and fiverr. If you still don't want to hire someone and want to keep your budget almost free, then just search on Google for "Free Privacy Policy Generator" and "Free Website Terms Of Use Generators". These search terms will show the results having the free programs which will create Privacy Policy and Terms Of Use for your blog. They will ask your website URL and How will you use your website. After getting the answer of these simple questions, these programs will generate professionally written Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for your website.
What about contact us and about us pages? Don't get afraid of, Contact US page contains your contact details and if required, you can also insert a contact form in that page. About Us page contains few sentences about your blog and your services. Confidently create these pages and start blogging afterwards.
6. Start Posting Articles: Google prefer text rich website to approve for Adsense. Not only Google, but most of Ad Monetizing services ask their publishers to have rich text in their website. So start posting articles on your blog related to your niche. You can use videos and images to enhance your website looks but there is no need to depend solely on videos and images. Write text articles in order to get approved. You must take care of following factors while posting an article for blog.
Length Of Article: Length of article plays an important role in SEO of your site. Though 100+ words are article is acceptable but it couldn't considered as ideal length. An article up to 250 words is somewhat better but still you can write more to enhance your blog. A 1000+ words article is perfect for SEO. Well you can write as much words as you want to be more descriptive.
Avoid Plagiarism: Your articles must be unique, written by yourself and not published before on world wide web. Plagiarism means to steal content from internet and pasting on your blog. You must keep in mind that plagiarized articles can result in penalty for a blog and they also negatively effect blog's rankings. That is why you must write articles yourself and post them on your blog. If you are not willing to write yourself, hire someone to write for your blog but make sure the person you hire doesn't use those articles at other places.
Keywords Use: Remember to use keywords in your blog related to niche. These keywords will help you in appearing your site in search engines. Keywords are those phrases or words which a user writes in search engines for getting results on a specific topic. Your keywords are crawled by search engines and they decide on the basis of your keywords if your site can be appeared in search results. You may use Google Adwords keyword tool to get info about trending keywords and then use in your blog.
Use Of Headings: Headings get attention of search engines before the text of your article. So it is important to add descriptive headings in your article containing important keywords. If we see from HTML point of view, we have 6 types of heading tags from <h1> to <h6>. <h1> shows most important heading while <h6> shows least important heading. A heading must be made by heading tag if you are working in HTML or if you are working on advanced text editor like Post Composer in blogger, you have an option to make headings automatically by selecting the heading text and just clicking on Heading button. But remember, unlike other Word Editing Programs like MS Word, Wordpad etc, heading is not the bold and relatively larger font text.. While writing on a blog or a website, it is to remember that heading works only with tags, not just by increasing the size of text or making it bold. These options are just to make your text according to your choice. Headings have their own tags or option.
Write In Easy Words: Write your articles in easy to understand way. Most of your readers are coming from different parts of the world and all readers don't have equal calibers to understand something. Its your work to present your readers easy to understand articles so they might read you again. Its my personal experience that I like to read only those blogs which are written in an easy language unless I am reading something classical or related to literature. Keep your mind free and not bother yourself to get typical vocabulary and use difficult classical words in your articles. It will be just waste of time. You are writing blogs, not working with fiction or literature. So don't make your readers leaving your blog by the use of difficult to understand sentences.
Be As Descriptive As Possible: Try to be descriptive in writing the articles. No one is stopping you from writing and showing your knowledge to world. Write point to point but your article would be ideal if you cover all aspects of a point in your article with description. For example, you are writing about Tourist Places In Maldives, your reader is totally unaware of them so its your responsibility to give a brief introduction of special tourist places, informing your readers with pros and cons of those places with a general expression of hotel rates, special features etc. The description of most important places must be given but you can mention only the names of those places about which you think your reader is not gonna taking interest. This is the right way to write an article. Didn't understand this example, lets work on writing about an online program. You know about it so you are writing on it. Its your responsibility to guide a person for that program so you must write the introduction of the program, about the legitimacy of the program, pros and cons of the program and ways to use that program. That is the thing which you need to apply in your articles.
7. Bring Traffic To Your Blog: After completing the above work, the time comes to bring traffic on your blog. It is the most important factor because you are gonna make money only on the basis of your blog traffic. The traffic, in easy words is the number of visitors to your site. The more visitors to your site, the more chances of becoming your blog useful. But remember one thing, only organic traffic i.e genuine traffic which comes originally to your blog, not by paid means will be allowed. There are many methods to increase traffic of your blog. I am sharing them with you.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): As it is cleared by the term, SEO is the method of optimizing your blog in a way that it gets higher rankings in search engines. I have already mentioned some factors which effect SEO of your blog in above lines. I am not gonna bother you any more on this topic because world wide web is loaded with tons of article on this topic so you can get help from them. It is a complete subject on which you have to work in order to get appearance in Search Engines. Get your blog registered with Google Analytics, Google and Bing webmaster tools, writing a brief meta description for your articles and blog are some key factors in SEO. Anyways, you will need to search Google in order to increase your SEO knowledge. Visit SEO Tips To Get Higher Index Rankings On Search Engines
SMO (Social Media Optimization): Like Search Engine Optimization, you have to make a prominent presence of your blog on Social Media. That will be gaining more visitors and views. It is recommended to make pages on social media sites for your blog and link them with your blog. Share your articles on social media with the groups having similar niche as your blog so you will get some strong readership. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, PinTrest, Instagram etc are best sources of gaining traffic from social media. There is an option available for creating channels on video sharing sites, making videos and run on these video sharing networks like youtube, metacafe, vimeo, videofy.me etc to promote your blog. A strong presence on Social media ensures the increase in traffic to a blog.
Getting Backlinks: Backlinks are the links found on different websites, blogs, forums, web directories which point towards a specific domain. In simple words, you can say that backlink is the presence of your domain on other website. Backlinks decide the Pagerank of your domain. Google has introduced a scale namely Pagerank from 0 to 10. 0 for least important domains and 10 for most important domains. The popularity of a domain is measured by its backlinks on different websites. A blog having many backlinks on the sites having greater pageranks is preferred by Google to show in search results and assigning it a higher pagerank. The pagerank also shows the worth of domain. In order to get a higher pagerank, you have to set a unique backlink strategy. It is a time taking effort to go on different forums, directories, websites, blogs and wikis to get backlinks from those sources but it is also necessary and unavoidable. You have to do it or if you cannot, then you can also hire some one who delivers you quality backlinks for your blog but remember not to confused with those programs which promise you to give thousands of backlinks in just minutes. These all are ponzi schemes and may result a penalty by Google for your blog so just acquire original backlinks by posting your links in other websites, blogs, forums and wikis. Its better to get backlinks from websites with higher pagerank. That ensures the quality of your domain and increase in traffic. Backlinks not only help in getting a position in search engines but they also help to get visitors. Suppose, you add a link to your website on a forum, daily at least 20 people click on that link and an average user visits at least three pages of your blog so it means you get 60 pageviews for your website in a day by a single link. That is the strategy which works with backlinks but again saying that keep your blog free from toxic backlinks which have a negative impact in your rankings and go for only unique and organic backlinks.
Add Social Media Share Buttons: Adding social media share button is another option to increase your blog's traffic. Your readers can quickly share your article using the Social Media Share buttons on your blog so their followers and friends can also reach your blog. You can get social media plugins directly from social media sites and install them on your blog or else embed the AddThis or ShareThis plugins on your blog. By using these plugins a person can share your article on more than 400 social media services quickly.
8. Update Your Blog Regularly:
Keep updating your blogg regularly so that it gets more visitors. Updating refers to add new content on your blog. A blog with more articles and text is more likely to appear in search engines so keep an eye on this factor. Google likes to accept the Adsense application of those blogs which are updated on regular basis. I have also an example from our life that stationary water gets polluted but the running water doesn't. That also applies to your blog. A stationary blog doesn't get popularity but an up-to date blog appears in search engines quickly.
9. Apply For Adsense:
Its the final step in making a blog functional to make money online. Well this is the last step but it doesn't mean that after its success, you will leave the above steps. I am calling it Final Step because you are doing all above to get approved for Adsense but you will need to continue working on above steps to keep your Adsense account functional. Well come to the point, when your blog starts getting good traffic which includes most from search engines and your blog page views average between 1000 daily, you may apply for Adsense. Google will review your Adsense application and it will decides whether to select your blog for Adsense ads or not. If you are approved for Adsense, say thanks to God and start earning money.
Google will give you some HTML codes which you will have to embed in your blog. If you are working with blogger, there is another option to activate Adsense widget in blogger which will show ads automatically between your posts.
Read Here What Is The Correct Time To Send Adsense Application
After getting approved for Adsense, take care of Google terms and services for Adsense. Disobeying these terms can result in the deletion of your Adsense account which is no less than a nightmare for a blogger so keep working with Adsense terms.
Find Here Adsense Terms And Help
No need to panic if you aren't approved for Adsense. There are also many Adsense alternatives on which your blog can get approved for Ad Monetizing for example, infolinks, chitika, adcash, etc. So if you aren't approved for Adsense, try to work harder in order to approve for Adsense or simply switch to Adsense Alternatives.
Well this article ends here. If you have any further query feel free to ask me for help.