Make Money with Blogging
One of the quickest and easiest ways to try your hand at runninga web site is to set up a blog. Once you're up and blogging, youcan sign up with Google AdSense and start selling ad space. Bearin mind that starting a blog isn't going to bring you instantrevenue. You'll have to put some energy into promoting the blog,getting it listed in the search engines, and of course writingquality content that people will actually want to read.There are plenty of free blogging sites out th...
...ere to get youstarted. My favorite is Blogger.com. Signup isextremely simple, and you can be blogging in a matter ofminutes. See my blog here: Work From HomeBlog. Blogger has plenty of nice templates for you to choosefrom, and they're all customizable should you wish to tweakthem. Blogger also gives you a nice blogspot.com subdomainaddress for your blog, which looks better and may help searchengines find you.When setting up your blog, you want to pick a topic that youknow something about. This will make it more interesting foryou, and will make it easier to keep the content fresh. It'spretty much universally agreed that search engines prefer siteswith lots of content. And if you want visitors to find yoursite, you have to get listed with the big search engines. Youshould also try to pick a topic that will generate someexpensive advertising. Blogging about baby penguins is all welland good, but it's not a highly competitive market as far asadvertising goes. Do some research on the Google AdWords site tofind some hot topics. Tech topics are generally good sources ofhigh paying ads, but there are others.One thing to note about choosing a topic is that Google doesn'tallow AdSense ads to be displayed on sites with content thatthey deem to be objectionable. Hate sites, sites with illegalcontent, and so forth will not be accepted, so just keep that inmind. Read the Terms of Service on the AdSense site if you haveany doubt.Once you have your topic, start writing like mad. Try to uselots of keywords relevant to your topic. This will help yourranking with the search engines, and will also make sure theright ads show up when you get to that stage. Don't take this tothe extreme, however. You're writing for humans, not searchspiders. Even if you have great keywords, if your content isn'tvaguely interesting, you'll find no one spends any time at yoursite.After you have several pages of content, you can sign up for aGoogle AdSense account. Just go to www.google.com/adsense,and click the button to sign up. You'll have to give them someinformation about yourself, and about your website. A human fromGoogle will review your site within a day or two, and you'll getan e-mail telling you whether you've been accepted. If you'renot accepted, they'll tell you why, and you can resubmit as soonas the problem is corrected.When you're accepted, log in to your AdSense account and createsome ads. They've got a very simple form to do this, and youjust copy and past the javascript code they generate for you. Atfirst you may see only public service or very generic ads onyour site. After a day or two, if you have enough qualitycontent on the page, you'll start seeing more relevant ads showup.You're now a webmaster! You didn't have to buy a domain, pay forhosting, or even know much about web design. My next articlewill deal with how to promote your blog (or any web site), andbuild traffic to it. Check back soon!
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