Getting paid to blog

IDN101

Just my 2p's worth.....

If you are "serious" about making money from blogging (or a website in general)- then cut out as many "middle men" as possible- they're all taking a share.

- get yourself an appropriate domain name

-get yourself some (decent) paid web hosting

-get yourself a free CMS (content management system) installed

-Start writing

-Get indexed by Google. = Traffic

-Get accepted onto Google AdSense.

-Get paid by people who click on your links


This is not a "get-rich quick" scheme. Will probably take years to generate a decent monthly income- but the whole "shooting match" is YOURS.

I started website last July. Started with Adsense last September. Have made £160 so far- paid in USD, so would be a lot more cash if the exchange rate was better! Monthly traffic is increasing all the time.

Regards,
Ian

red_devil

id like to do a blog about a holiday destination. I set up a squidoo account but have done nothing about it as i dont understand what to do and how to make money.

Think there would be a market for people who wanted to earn money to pay people to help them. I know i would pay for some good advice on the steps to take.

musician11

I want to set up my own blog and was wondering if anyone had done the research with the various places you can set them up - blogger, wordpress etc., in terms of how much money you can make from advertising there (or if the company shares the advertising income with you?) and therefore which the best one is income wise? Do any of them charge?

Also, is there any difference in terms of how much traffic you are likely to get from the different hosting blog sites? Which ones have categories that you can pick up extra traffic from etc?

And any other general differences it may be worth thinking about?

I guess if a site is getting a cut it may be worth it if they help with categorising the site and increasing traffic etc?

Thanks very much

musician11

I also see that you can use myspace and Vox, has anyone got any experiences of these as well?

cazac71

Sorry to sound a bit thick, but is a blog just one page, or as many as you wish?

Caz

geordie_joe

cazac71 wrote: »

Sorry to sound a bit thick, but is a blog just one page, or as many as you wish?

Caz

It's a series of post that build up over time. You don't need to create any pages as each time your write a post the software adds it to the database and shows it on the page when someone wants to see it.

You can, if you want, create "static" pages that have other things on them, but that's entirely up to you.

geordie_joe

musician11 wrote: »

I want to set up my own blog and was wondering if anyone had done the research with the various places you can set them up - blogger, wordpress etc., in terms of how much money you can make from advertising there (or if the company shares the advertising income with you?) and therefore which the best one is income wise? Do any of them charge?

I suppose that is what we are doing now, researching into how much money you can make.

I have no experience of creating a blog on a site such as blogger, mine is on my own space and I control it. Not sure if blogger or wordpress (if they host your blog) allow you to make money from it.

I reckon IDN101's post sums it up nicely, but if you don't want to spend any money and haven't got web space then you can get some free. Just "shop" around for free web space that gives you at least one mysql database, doesn't put it's own ads on your site but does allow you to put your own ads on it.

I have a blog on Freehostia and they have been very good to me since last November. But I'm sure there are other sites out there that are just as good. Just remember to read the terms and conditions before you sign up.

richt71

Yes agree that to make good money you really need a host (I use hostgator who offer a free trial and a wordpress blog plugin) and a domain (godaddy are good at $6.95 with a code).
However to make serious money you'll need to invest a lot of time and learn search engine techniques to get lots of people to visit your blog or you can pay some talented people to do this for you but your costs could be quite high.

geordie_joe

richt71 wrote: »

Yes agree that to make good money you really need a host (I use hostgator who offer a free trial and a wordpress blog plugin) and a domain (godaddy are good at $6.95 with a code).

I have Hostgator space (paid) and can say they are good. I've had my space since before xmas and never needed to contact them for any reason. Everything just works and there's been no need to contact them.

richt71 wrote: »

However to make serious money you'll need to invest a lot of time and learn search engine techniques to get lots of people to visit your blog or you can pay some talented people to do this for you but your costs could be quite high.

Yes but you have to keep in mind that we are doing it for a bit extra income. We just want a little extra money for a little extra work.

That's not to say some of us won't get the blog bug and go on to bigger and better things. But first things first, we just want someone to pay us for putting links in our posts.

theinsider

Hi I thought I'd mention another option which I have had success with on some of my websites - selling text links - this might be an option when your blog matures, has some traffic and is ranked in Google.

IMO this is a better source of income for a blog owner as including paid for posts / digivate links on your blog will lose you credibility and therefore readers, particularly if you don't disclose you are being paid. Digivate rates are also quite poor and rely on you continually adding new posts.

In terms of how to sell text links, you can either sell the links directly (can work quite well if your blog has a decent numbr of readers), take payment via PayPal and keep 100% of the revenue

or

you can use a broker like www.textlinkads.com. They will set the price and take 50% of the revenue but they do all the management in terms of finding advertisers, taking payments and housekeeping of expired links. They also provide you with code to drop directly into your website/blog.

Hope this gives you another revenue option

Also, anyone looking to get into blogging could do a lot worse than follow the advice in this post - many hosting accounts will include Wordpress as an option that can be automatically installed from the control panel with a few clicks - no technical know how needed.