What Is Blogging And How Do People Make Money Online

Blogging is a simple medium on the internet, which can be used to share your thoughts, opinions, expertise, pictures, videos – almost anything – with everyone around the world.

Blogging is like having your own magazine and anyone can create one. You can create a blog on any topic of your liking. You can create blogs just as a pastime or hobby or even to make an income.

One of the main advantages of blogs is that they are very easy to create and you need not have any real technical knowledge or website designing skills. No matter whether you are a student, a housewife or a businessman, you can create a blog of your own.

Blogs are also an effective medium for the celebrities and renowned personalities to interact with their followers. The visitors can drop in their comments and the blog owners can reply to those comments. Blogs are not only handy for personal usage. They are used by many companies as well to reach out to their employees and clients.

Making an Income

But blogging is not only a means of social networking and reaching out to your followers. There are many blog owners who consistently rake in 5 digit and even 6 digit income via blogging. All that you require is a computer with internet connection and you are ready to earn.

Some Of The Ways To Earn Money From Blogging

1) Selling your own service or product
Let’s say you were an electrician by trade. You could start a blog sharing your advice and also allow people to contact you for your services. Or what if you were a retired electrician? You could create a product called something like, “101 best ever electric DIY tips” and sell it via your blog.

These are some of the fastest growing products and services that sell on the web:

Products:-

• Books
• Gifts
• Gadgets
• Software
• Collectables
• Advice type information

Services:-

• Web design, hosting, marketing, building
• Financial
• Legal
• Writing
• Proof –reading
• Administrative
• Consultancy

Does you service or product fit into any of the above?

2) Google Adsense
It is one of the most popular ways to earn money on the internet. Here, you host the ads of other web merchants on your blog. When any user clicks on the ad, you get a portion of the revenue generated. But here, you have to test where to place the adverts. The best place is normally just under the title of the post and before the blog post text starts. But you have to test it. Change the adverts to a different place on your blog and see what difference it makes to your income. One thing I will add – don’t expect to become rich via AdSense. You have to have a huge amount of daily traffic visiting your blog before you start seeing even only $100 a month.

3) Adding affiliate banners and links
Affiliate marketing is basically, where you introduce the buyer to someone else’s service or product, and for the introduction and ultimate sale you receive a commission percentage. Look at almost any blog and you will see banner type adds for products. If you were to click on one of the banners and buy the product, the owner of the blog would receive a commission for that sale. Commissions can be as high as 75%, so if you were to display the right banner ad, you could make a lot of money.

Some of the bigger affiliate marketing companies where you can search for products to promote includes:

Click Bank: http://www.clickbank.com
Pay Dot Com: http://www.paydotcom.com
Commission Junction: http://cj.com/publishers/

4) Amazon is the largest affiliate company around
You can sell Amazon products on your blog. The niche of your blog will determine whether you can make money via Amazon. Again I’m personally in the wrong niches to make any serious money. You have to sell a lot of books at $10 when you are only getting 5% or 10% to make anything serious. But if you are in any physical good niches like TVs, gadgets etc then you can make a good income by selling Amazon products.

5) Writing product reviews
This is another form of making an income via affiliate marketing. Write a review via a blog post of a product or service you have used and benefited from. I recommend you actually use the product or service and benefit from it before you write your review. That way your review will come across as more personal and believable.

6) Selling links
If you have a high traffic to your blog and have obtained a high page rank (PR), you can earn money by selling links i.e. someone puts their link or banner on your site for a monthly fee. If your blog has a high PR, its space can be sold to other bloggers / web merchants. The money that you earn depends on the PR of your blog. Higher the PR, more money you can get.
On my sites, I use all methods listed above except Amazon.

What brings me the most income?

My own products and services, by far.

Then recommending and selling affiliated products and affiliated banners/links.

Then selling links and banner space

Then Google Adsense.

These are some of the ways of earning money by blogging. Which method you adopt will depend on your blog’s popularity, niche and the efforts that you are willing to put behind it.

What’s been your best way of making an income via blogging?

About Author :
This is a guest post from Andrew Rondeau at www.webuildyourblog.com where he covers all the aspects of starting your own blog and making a blog income.

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