Blogging for a second income - does anyone else here do this?

spiritus

biffoski wrote: »

Blogging is a great secondary income but to make any decent money you need to be an authority site in your niche. This involves 5000+ informative & unique articles.

Good luck everyone!

Well it very much depends on the niche !!!

5000+ articles is overkill in most cases.

I would personally recommend visiting sites such as Squidoo or Hubpages. They have their own templates that you can play around with and you can write about any topic you can think of. Squidoo also has an affiliate agreement with Amazon and some other merchants. They have a simple tool that allows you to choose which Amazon products are advertised on your Squidoo lens (page) and then the commission is shared between you and Squidoo.

The best lenses (pages) are full of content about a whole host of topics ranging from recipes to back pain and everything in between.

You don't have to worry about buying a domain name or hosting.

I would strongly recommend it

Chick_Loves_Thrift

In my experience the best blogging system for me is Wordpress by far. The seemingly limitless amount of plugins that can add extra features to your site, help you with SEO, do this, do that, are invaluable to me and that is why I've tried and left many other blogging/CMS systems. I recently found a way to get full-featured Wordpress for free (Wordpress hosted blogs at wordpress.com don't have the plugin functionality) and it is through the free webhost x10 Hosting It has everything I would expect from a paid host except it's free. The only way you have to pay your way is to log in to their forums (No need to post anything) once a month and keep your site active. Installing Wordpress on there is a super fast process, in fact if anyone needs help with it just PM me
Also for a free domain I use co.cc.

emlou

I've a few questions for those who have made some money from blogging.

Do you have your own domain name or do you use the blog domain ie blogger.com?

Are your blogs niche or are they made up of random articles, musings etc?

**Juice**

Hi Emlou. I have my own domain name (think it was about £10 for 2 years to own the domain) but there's plenty of blogs out there that just use their blogger address. My blog is predominantly about beauty - product reviews, industry news, a few random bits and pieces - but occassionally food, fashion and travel sneak in too. Are you thinking of starting a blog?

emlou

**Juice** wrote: »

Hi Emlou. I have my own domain name (think it was about £10 for 2 years to own the domain) but there's plenty of blogs out there that just use their blogger address. My blog is predominantly about beauty - product reviews, industry news, a few random bits and pieces - but occassionally food, fashion and travel sneak in too. Are you thinking of starting a blog?

Hi juice,

I already have a blog but that's more personal than profitable, it's about my journey out of debt which I just started.

I'm interested in a niche blog to make a little money, I was thinking about a saving or making money blog. I think those are two subjects a lot of people are interested in right now.

Do you think a free blog would get as much attention as a paid for blog i.e has it own domain?

Squidge123

I've always thought about blogging but I don't know what to blog about. I have a small jewellery business and wanted to do something along the lines of that. I also have an addiction to handbags but don't know how I can use the two topics or just one of them to blog and earn money

emlou

Squidge123 wrote: »

I've always thought about blogging but I don't know what to blog about. I have a small jewellery business and wanted to do something along the lines of that. I also have an addiction to handbags but don't know how I can use the two topics or just one of them to blog and earn money

Just think of a blog as another form of advertising.

Add pictures, descriptions, ask buyers to leave comments so others can see how popular your products are. As for the handbag addiction, I'm sure you're not the only one. :rotfl:

Google handbag addiction and see what other people are writing. It may give you some ideas.

Squidge123

How would I get people to put their ads on my blog etc?

Karmacat

Squidge - my last post on here happens to be at the top of this page - follow the link to the Guardian blog series, it discusses issues like that. Or google free lessons on how to write a blog (don't pay!).

EndlessStruggle

My blog gets 10,000 - 20,000 views a month without me having to write loads of articles but no idea where to start on monetizing it. Will give these a read.