Blogging

There's no doubt that some people do make money from blogging, but in order to make decent money, you need to be able to attract visitors. In order to do this, you're going to need to create something fairly unique. So if you're thinking about setting up a blog from scratch, you really want to have a good think about what topic you are going to focus on.

Ilona wrote: »

Thank you, I wondered why my page views have been creeping up again, ha ha. I have written a paper diary since 1963, doing it electronically is an extension of that.

I'm glad you say it's honest, because it's a personal record of how I live my life, and I would not be able to say that if I had guest posts full of adverts, product and service reviews, and stand alone adverts. I have to be true to the principles of my blog which is living a good life on a pension, it's not about making more money.

However, if anyone wants to make money writing a blog, then by all means do it. But I don't consider that is a blog in the true sense of the word. Writing about freebie products or services, is advertising by the back door. At least when you read my blog you know no one is paying me to say nice things about them.

Ilona

I think it really does depend on the balance. I read many blogs and some balance it really well, if you review a drill when you are doing a home reno then that's fine. But if you're a food blog and you suddenly start reviewing free make up then it ruins it.

I have blogged casually for a few years but I will be hitting it hard after Christmas as a creative outlet while I'm not working. I may get a small amount of money from it but mostly I'm just aiming to break even if that makes sense?

Is there any way at all to monetise blogging on Wordpress.com's free plan? I'm running a blog about my spending issues, but I can't have ads on my blog unless I upgrade it, which I'm wary to do.

I have four wordpress blogs which generate income purely from display banner advertising i.e. no promoted content, paid articles, or affiliate links.

I make around £300 to £400 a month from Adsense and another £400 a month from other display network advertisers.

I do this as a hobby and have a full time job which is unrelated to blogging. You can make good money from blogging if you put the time and effort in.

My advice to anyone else looking to start a blog is to choose a topic you are really interested in and forget about earning money to start with. Don't just write random articles about your life, you must focus on something very specific.

You will need to write a lot of good quality content that you are knowledgeable about, to have any chance of getting the required number of visitors to make a decent amount of money.

There are many different methods to be successful, but what has worked for me is:-

Only use .com domain names.

Use a cheap managed wordpress provider to host your initial wordpress site. For example with Godaddy you can get your first full years hosting and a .com domain name for under £20. When your site is successful you can look to move.

Choose a really simple and clean wordpress template that looks good on desktop and mobile.

Try and publish at least two 300 word+ posts a week. If you can write longer posts great, but don't publish any posts under 300 words.

Do this for at least three months with no advertising, at which point you should notice your visitors increasing week on week. Providing your visitors keep increasing, then keep going.

After you have a decent number of visitors then you can think about advertising, better hosting and all the other stuff that comes with running a successful blog.

I don't put ads on a site until I have 1,000 page views a day, but it does depend on what you write about as you can make money on less.