Make Money with Blogging
One of the quickest and easiest ways to try your hand at running
a web site is to set up a blog. Once you're up and blogging, you
can sign up with Google AdSense and start selling ad space. Bear
in mind that starting a blog isn't going to bring you instant
revenue. You'll have to put some energy into promoting the blog,
getting it listed in the search engines, and of course writing
quality content that people will actually want to read.
There are plenty of free blogging sites out there to get you
started. My favorite is Blogger.com. Signup is
extremely simple, and you can be blogging in a matter of
minutes. See my blog here: Work From Home
Blog. Blogger has plenty of nice templates for you to choose
from, and they're all customizable should you wish to tweak
them. Blogger also gives you a nice blogspot.com subdomain
address for your blog, which looks better and may help search
engines find you.
When setting up your blog, you want to pick a topic that you
know something about. This will make it more interesting for
you, and will make it easier to keep the content fresh. It's
pretty much universally agreed that search engines prefer sites
with lots of content. And if you want visitors to find your
site, you have to get listed with the big search engines. You
should also try to pick a topic that will generate some
expensive advertising. Blogging about baby penguins is all well
and good, but it's not a highly competitive market as far as
advertising goes. Do some research on the Google AdWords site to
find some hot topics. Tech topics are generally good sources of
high paying ads, but there are others.
One thing to note about choosing a topic is that Google doesn't
allow AdSense ads to be displayed on sites with content that
they deem to be objectionable. Hate sites, sites with illegal
content, and so forth will not be accepted, so just keep that in
mind. Read the Terms of Service on the AdSense site if you have
any doubt.
Once you have your topic, start writing like mad. Try to use
lots of keywords relevant to your topic. This will help your
ranking with the search engines, and will also make sure the
right ads show up when you get to that stage. Don't take this to
the extreme, however. You're writing for humans, not search
spiders. Even if you have great keywords, if your content isn't
vaguely interesting, you'll find no one spends any time at your
site.
After you have several pages of content, you can sign up for a
Google AdSense account. Just go to www.google.com/adsense,
and click the button to sign up. You'll have to give them some
information about yourself, and about your website. A human from
Google will review your site within a day or two, and you'll get
an e-mail telling you whether you've been accepted. If you're
not accepted, they'll tell you why, and you can resubmit as soon
as the problem is corrected.
When you're accepted, log in to your AdSense account and create
some ads. They've got a very simple form to do this, and you
just copy and past the javascript code they generate for you. At
first you may see only public service or very generic ads on
your site. After a day or two, if you have enough quality
content on the page, you'll start seeing more relevant ads show
up.
You're now a webmaster! You didn't have to buy a domain, pay for
hosting, or even know much about web design. My next article
will deal with how to promote your blog (or any web site), and
build traffic to it. Check back soon!