Setting up a blog

francohoops

Thanks very much for your help and advice, much appreciated!:beer:

TamiBolton

I have also set up a blog and I post a few times a week. My traffic started to increase as soon as I got my Facebook and twitter accounts linked to the blog. Everytime I post I know have that content being syndicated to my twitter and my Facebook page. You can do this via your blogs RSS feed using a service called twitterfeed or Hootsuite. Monetising it is easy if you are using things like Google adsense ads but the real money comes from having your own product and building a subscriber list.

This does not have to be an expensive product and an informative guide on the topic of discussion you are blogging about can be given away in return for an email address. Once you have that you can email people to tell them about a new blog post as well as offer them products that you are an affiliate for.

Google is becoming increasingly sensitive to low traffic sites which makes it harder for new sites to rank well unless they have some great sites linking to them. Building a following on social networks, getting them to your site, offering a giveaway to get them on your mailing list and then mailing them everytime you have an informative post will get traffic to your site and Google will take notice if your site is getting social activity as well as traffic WITHOUT NEEDING THEM!!! This ironically is when my blogs have received the best Google rankings.

LushesFaith

once your blog is established you can sell advertising space on your blog.

JackieChan

Having a blog set up is one thing, but promoting it is another. If you aim to make money through your blog, you have to promote it like crazy as people will need to know it is there. I would personally not "monetize" your blog until you have a substantial amount of daily traffic coming to your blog.
It is far easier to make money once you have lots of traffic going to your blog than when you are starting out and have very little or no traffic.
You don't need to write on your blog every day, but make sure that your content is interesting and that you are sure that people will want to read what you have posted.
Google Adsense really only brings in small amounts, unless you are an expert is such things as SEO and you are getting thousands of visitors a day.
Start off by writing about things that interest you and find online forums on the same subject and start posting to that forum and leave a link to your blog in your posts (in your signature). Get to know people on the forums and you will find that you'll start getting more visitors to your blog.

Jenna_Appleseed

JackieChan wrote: »

Start off by writing about things that interest you and find online forums on the same subject and start posting to that forum and leave a link to your blog in your posts (in your signature).

Unless you're on sites like here where they don't let you promote/post links to your sites in your sig (or posts).

If your going to do this, check the forum rules first, put being part of the community over promotion & don't make pointless posts just to spam your link. If people can google you/your url and just see you constantly plugging your blog across various forums, they're gonna be less likely to want to visit it and a lot less likely to help you earn money.