If you read my previous article you will know that the goal of these articles is
to teach you ways to get started making money online without having to spend any
money.
This is the second in the series and this time we deal with having your own blog.
There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic, and your blog will
get you traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come from Google
Adsense.
There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost (or no
cost), the resources that will help you get traffic to your blog and the fact
that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to
automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader.
Let's get started with our 6 steps.
1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog about.
You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately.
There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted for free.
We will go with Blogger.com for our first blog.
Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will host it for free and
they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning you will get
spidered & found.
Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page labelled 'create your
blog now' then follow the step by step instructions that Blogger provide.
Some key settings you will want to get right are:
I) 'Host your blog at Blogger' = Yes
II) 'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes
III) 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes
IV) 'Publish Site Feed' = Yes
2. Write some content. Before we move any further there has to be some
information on the site & that means that you have to make some entries. You can
write some of these entries yourself & some can be quotes from sites of interest
to your reader that you can post using the Google Toolbar.
You can download the Google toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com. The toolbar
includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest
to your readers you can highlight the appropriate text & click the Blogger
button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link back to
the site.
3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging with 1 or 2 entries
for everyday, you can apply for an adsense account. When you sign in to Blogger
you will see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for an
account.
You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page but basically you get
Google ads on your site & get paid if your visitor clicks them.
Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on the content it finds
within.
You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your site is
not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules
on this.
Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript from Google to add to
you site. Copy this & then log in to Blogger.
Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one of the tabs across the
top of the screen is labelled 'Template'. Click this. You will need to know a
little bit of HTML to help find the right location to paste your Google code.
But with a little experimentation you will find the right place for you. See the
resource box at the end of this article for more help.
I would suggest that the ads need to be seen when the site loads but should not
be too obvious or dominate your site.
4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content coming at regular
intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular
intervals & the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your update
schedule. They will probably determine this in the hours after you first submit
to them. Which is what we will do next.
5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you are hosting at
Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your blog. (That
means that every time you make a new entry they are automatically notified) You
will need to manually submit to the various other directories some of which will
require a link on your site to theirs.
You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a list of
directories to get you started visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss
6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come back again
and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor than to keep
existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that
they can't help but tell all their friends about it also.
As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going, but if
you can build a following you will make money.
Free steps to making money online by: Darren Power