Blogging: Ways To Make Money

The word blog is a contraction of web log; in other words, a kind of online diary containing the posts made by various users regarding a given subject.

The long form was first coined in late 1997 by computer programmer and Usenet participant Jorn Barger; the following year one Peter Merholz jokingly stated that the term actually stood for “we blog.” Over the next decade thousands of blogs mushroomed all over the Web, most of them created by lone individuals until 2009.

Blogging is not just a popular pastime. It can also be a way of making money online. The rest of this article is about how to make money blogging.

Choose Your Blogging Topic Direction

Before you decide to make money blogging, decide first what kind of career path you want to pursue. Do you want to be work for a particular blogging company or would you rather be a freelancer who hires himself or herself out to whoever has work for him to do? In what subject would you like to do your blogging?

This way you can narrow down the scope of the places where you can seek to make money blogging online.

What You Should Know About Blogging Online

There are those who have made a prosperous living from blogging.

Not only does it require a minimum amount of time and effort to get the blog started up – you need only pay for web domain registration and hosting fees – but it requires little effort to generate large amounts of traffic through the blog.

One of the most common uses for blogs is as a way of targeting a niche market.

You can find something in which many people are interested and use your blog to write product reviews and make money through affiliate marketing, which we will deal with in detail in a later section.

The quality of your blog

When writing content for a blog you should always make sure that it is of high quality. That way people will want to keep coming back for more and you will be surprised with the results.

Affiliate marketing

An essential part of learning how to make money from blogging is learning about affiliate marketing. In this type of arrangement, one business entity enters into an affiliate relationship with another for whom it attempts to gain customers through its own marketing efforts.

In exchange, the business thus benefited pays the affiliate a certain portion of its sales revenue. You can use your blog to post reviews about the products of another company and thus draw customers to its site.

To monetize your blog in this way, follow these four steps:

• Choose a relevant affiliate program, one that will provide ads that are relevant to your blog.
• Consider using an aggregator service that will automate access to thousands of affiliate sites and monetize the links that you have listed on yours. Vig Link is an example of such a service.
• Make sure the content that you write actually sells. This involves writing reviews of products and not just making lists of them for people to click.
• Integrate your affiliate links in the right way. Include a minimum of ads on your blog site. Each page you list should potentially be a gateway to monetization.

Other methods involved

Among the numerous other channels through which your blog can make money are:

• Email Marketing: There is software that can help you with this, whether you want to send bulk emails or send smaller campaigns.
• Social Networking: Facebook and Twitter are the biggest names in social networking and you can also use them to make money blogging.
• Pay Per Click: This is when you get paid every time somebody clicks on the link to your site. LinkedIn is even better for this purpose as that is why it was created.

Blogging can be a very lucrative source of income. You only need to know how to hone your blogging skills and use them to your advantage!