How to Make Money Blogging

Blogging was fun... It was... Until we were told that we should be making a few thousand bucks from it every week - at least.

We started to think: "Well, I've been posting to forums and posting to my websites and blogs for a few years, and I hardly made any money from it. What's wrong with me?"

What could I be possibly doing so wrong?

Those of you who are not used to posting on forums and blogs, you should know that it can be very fun, indeed. Profiting from it is what can ruin it all. "Am I earning enough? What do those big bloggers know that I don't? What are they doing, that I'm not?" - As soon as you start questioning yourself like that for too long, the fun is leaving through the front door, and you got yourself a job; a non paying job.

That is why, on top of everything, this lens is an attempt to bring back the fun from blogging, networking, and meeting people online. Profit should come; we expect it, as a consequence of our focus on giving our contributions and of our pleasure from doing what we do with the time spent online.

What to blog about?

First, we make a list of things that we find the most pleasant to share with other people.
Next, we make a research online to discover the best topics from our selection; in terms of how high is the demand for information, services or products on that topic.
Finally, we divide those topics into niches, and find the less competitive ones to focus our blogging efforts.

Although you will probably be better off with your own self-hosted blog with a well chosen domain name (www.yourkey.com), you should still think of complimentary topics to cover on two more blogs: yourkey.wordpress.com and yourkey.blogger.com.

After you publish a few posts on them, you can crosslink them to your main blog.
Choose the topics of your blogs wisely - research the best key phrases. If you are just starting out, chose a long-tail key phrase, with 3-4 words. Make sure they match the topics you want to write about. It doesn't help to only have a great key phrase without great content for it.

Use your main key phrase for:
1) Your URLs, like shown above.
2) Your tittles for all the blogs, with slight differences - to make each blog unique, not only in content, but also on how they approach the topic.
3) Your links' titles, either internal or external.
4) Your headers and images.

For example, if your key phrase were "cooking light meals", you could publish the following blogs:

Recipes-cooking-light-meals.wordpress.com ->Titled: Recipes for Cooking Light Meals -> where you'd publish a few recipes for light meals, desserts, etc.

cooking-light-foods-books.blogger.com -> Titled: Cooking Light Foods Book Reviews -> where you'd publish a few reviews of books about cooking light foods.

Cookinglightfoods.com -> don't use slashes on this one! People will have a harder time remembering the URL of your blog if you do so. Publish wordpress here and select a few extra plug-ins to help you add videos, news feeds and more to your blog. As frequently as possible for you, keep this blog updated with new posts; stay on the subject, and add quality content.

Remember how you were supposed to be passionate about your blog's topic? Here's why... you must publish unique content on each of these blogs, and you should publish a new page on each, at least once every week or two; this is how you'll keep them updated.

So, you must enjoy researching all kinds of stuff related to your topic. This way, you can have different approaches on different blogs and offer quality content on each of them. Separating them in different blogs will help with your network of blogs, but will also be a valid form of organizing your content.

Wordpress.com is one of the best known blogging hosts. They allow you to host your own blog, for free, as long as you follow their Terms of Use. If you host your blog with them, you won't have to worry about other expenses or about learning too much to use it. On the other hand, you will have a smaller selection of themes (themes control your blog appearance). The types of blogs you can build and the number and quality of the links you post are limited to their terms of service, and might give you less freedom.

Wordpress.org is the best known open source, self hosted blog publishing platform.
A blog publishing platform is software used to build and publish blogs online.

Being self hosted, it means you can download it form http://www.wordpress.org, and publish it wherever you want. No one will delete your blog because it has "too many links" or anything like that.

Wordpress is also open source - when you download it for free, you have access to it's source code, meaning you have access to all of the instructions it passes to computers when building your blog.
Having access to its code, you can change it however you want it. Anyone can.

In fact, so many people could change it and expand it, that currently there are thousands of options to expand and design your blog inside the wordpress platform. Even so, you have the option of using only the most basic functions, so you don't need to learn too much stuff before starting out to use it.

The down side of a self hosted blogging tool is that you need to find a hosting service for your blog, which will give you enough freedom to install wordpress and write about anything you want. You will need a hosting account with access to PHP and Mysql databases.

List Your Blog at Link Directories:

One Way Text Link - This is a great website that lists many link directories. If you register for free you can also keep track of all the places you have already submitted your site to. Directories are already organized from the highest Page Rank to the lowest ones. You shouldn't bother wasting your time with directories with no page rank, since there are so many free directories with good PR for you to submit your blog to.

Post to Article Directories:

Send some of your blog posts to article directories. Include one or two links to your blog inside your text. That will give quality back links to your blog. You only need to bother sending articles to these article directories:

- Articles Base
- Article City
- Ezine Articles
- Go Articles
- Isnare

Submit Free Press Releases:

- Newswire Today
- PRWeb Direct
- 24-7 Press Release

Submit Your Blog to 2.0 Bookmarking Sites:

- Digg
- Yahoo! Buzz
- StumbleUpon
- Delicious
- Twitter