Getting Paid to Blog: Part One

During my time on the internet, I have been asked how I make money blogging more times than I care to admit. To be fair, a lot of my online income stream comes from Triond and other article writing websites, and I’m a ludicrously busy person. I haven’t had time to update my numerous blogs in any regular fashion and this has led to a sharp decrease in my income from blogging.

But that doesn’t mean my method didn’t work back when I was active. I was easily pulling in about $80 or so a month from sponsored posts and advertising. Over $100 on a good month with plenty of posting opportunities. Now I’m lucky if I pull in more than $10 from my blogs, again due to a busy schedule outside of the internet and as such less maintenance and posting on those blogs.

Rather than explain my methods every time someone asks me, I figured I’d just write a few articles to help people along the way. This is the first article, and covers the basics. Setting up your blog and getting your content prepared. Hopefully I’ll also be able to impart some knowledge regarding the mistakes I made so you can learn from them and hopefully avoid making them in the first place.

Setting Up a Blog

Depending on howyou want your blog to appear to visitors (how professional, mainly), will depend on how you set it up. In most cases, BlogSpot is more than enough for a blog owner just looking for a nice easy blogging experience. It offers loads of options for customisation of your blog, and is free to set up an account. It also allows you to purchase a domain name in the event that you want to have a www.yournamehere.com style URL, otherwise the standard blogspot subdomain should be plenty for your purposes.

Next up is deciding what kind of blog you want to write. I’ll leave this up to you, but niche websites tend to earn the most when it comes to making money through your blog. If you write good quality, valuable articles for people to read and come back to, you’ll make far more than a personal blog writer who every so often posts something interesting or amusing. Make sure whatever you write is easily understood by people who want to read it. Also make sure you find it interesting! This is very important. If it’s not interesting to you, you won’t write interesting posts about it, and your readers will notice.

Try doing some research and then write up a few posts prior to going public and promoting your blog. This way when you do start the promotion side of things, you’ll have plenty of articles and information ready to be read by your incoming visitors. Have a good 20 or more articles ready before you start leading people to your blog.

Getting Visitors

To get your first readers to your blog, and thereby start the ball rolling, you can use one of two methods. You can rely on search engine optimisation and Google search results, which will send more reliable and relevant traffic to your blog. If you set everything up right, you should see a steady stream of visitors coming in after a week or so. This is your holy grail of visitors, since the incoming people from Google searches are people you know are interested in your topic, because they searched for it.

Use Google Analytics to keep on eye on the keywords used to find your site, and then target those keywords. Look out for what posts are popular, what topics keep your readers around longer and try to emulate the successful parts of those posts in your future articles.

A cheap, and less reliable (but infitiely easier and faster) method is to use Entrecard. Look through the list of blog categories to find the one which suits your blog the most. Visit a few of the blogs there and drop your Entrecard on their site. This let’s them know that you visited them and more often than not they’ll visit you back to drop off their own Entrecard. Make sure to drop back on anyone who drops on you because it encourages people to keep coming back to drop their ECs. Then, using the EC Points you earn, you can buy advertising on people’s blogs, getting you even more viewers.

In the next article, I’ll cover the part you’re probably waiting for. How to start making money. But first, make sure that you’ve done these two steps and have a steady stream of visitors incoming to your blog (no matter how small). Keep updating regularly so that when you do start monetising your blog, you’ll have a solid abse of viewers to earn an income off.

Until next time. Happy blogging.