How to Blog and Make Money in Three Easy Steps

Posted by Jonthan

With an exploding blog population the size of a large country, it’s no wonder that advertisers are casting their collective appraising eye over this popular magnet for readers in extremely high numbers. Those advertisers are willing to pay to place their ads on blogs that have good readerships in similar fashion to magazines and periodicals with good circulation. So it’s never been a better time to put your blog to good use and make money from it. Let’s look at three easy steps you can take to make money with your blog.

First, your blog needs to have a decent number of regular readers. Without this, nothing you can do will make money from your blog. So your first task is to take action to increase your blog’s readership. But before you can even do that, your blog has to offer something. Those visitors, when they start to flood in to read your blog will expect to see lots of interesting, entertaining, well written and on-topic articles. So if you want to make money from your blog but haven’t already written a lot of very good articles you had better get started, right now!

The fastest and most effective way of increasing the number of visitors to your blog in order to make money is to join some social networking sites and start making lots of contacts with other bloggers. This will not only get you better known in blog circles, it will also open the door to a huge number of blogs that fall into the same category as yours for you to visit and leave comments on. This is a very effective way of getting traffic back to your blog. Join forums and including your blog’s link in your signature. Don’t spam them or you will just get yourself blacklisted. Better to create interesting posts that the members will read and click the link to your blog out of curiosity.

In addition to these traffic building methods, you should ensure that you add a new post to your blog at least every other day – more often if you have the time. This will show your readers that you are serious and that your blog is regularly updated, so they will be more inclined to return often to see what’s new. After each new post, you should also “ping” your blog to all of the blogging services. These are visited by huge numbers of people so you can effectively reach a large audience every time you ping. An added bonus of doing this is that it only takes one top blogger to be alerted to your new post by one of these services and then to be impressed enough by the quality of your post to blog about it. Then you could suddenly find the flood gates opened to your blog!

Second, while you are busy nurturing a sizeable number of daily visitors, you’ll also need to get busy increasing the popularity of your blog as far as the search engines go. To make money in decent amounts from your blog, you will need a decent page rank from Google and to do that, you will need to show them your blog is popular and highly respected.

That doesn’t come quickly, so while you are busy building your readership and your reputation, build up the number of back-links from other sites and blogs with a similar theme to yours. Offer other bloggers the chance of link exchanges with your blog. Submit your blog to online directories. Write articles and submit them to ezines and article directories with a link to your blog in the resource box at the end of the article, just like this one has!

Thirdly, having acquired a sizeable readership and obtained a reasonable page rank from Google, you can now make money from advertisers. There are several good sites that will pay you to review websites and businesses in you blog posts. Site like Pay Per Post, Review Me, Sponsored Reviews and Smorty all pay you to post reviews. The higher your page rank, the more you’ll be paid for each review and the more reviews that will be open to you.

You also have the option to include text links in your blog’s sidebar which will make money on a monthly basis for just sitting there. A very good company for that is Text Link Ads Inc. Again, the higher your page rank, the more money you’ll make from these advertisements.

If you are an affiliate marketer, include links to some of your more popular affiliate products as well as any products that you own yourself to make money promoting them.

You can add contextual links like “adsense”, but while they will make you some money, they cause visitors to leave your blog when they click the link, so for the few cents you might earn from those clicks you may have lost some affiliate commissions for many dollars. The choice is yours.

So there are the three easy steps you should take in order to effectively make money with your blog. While they can be time consuming and you may have to wait a few months before they come to fruition, in the long run they are amongst the most effective methods you can use to make money from your blog.

By Terry DidcottÂ

Make Money related resouces: Get more about Affiliate Program resouces and Affiliate Marketing tips.