Niche Blogging For Profit

Blogging is popular (almost everyone has one), fun and possibly profitable. But before you get into blogging, all the themes, plug-ins, widgets and other lingo can be overwhelming. So if you’re wondering how do I start blogging, this article is for you.

Choose a topic

If you’re planning to blog for fun, you can choose any subject that appeals to you – one that you’re passionate  and hopefully knowledgeable about.

If you’re looking to make money with a blog there is an entire process you should go through. You can read more about that here. Odds are if your find something interesting, there are other people out there who will too (provided your interest isn’t the world record for longest nose hair)

Find a hosting company

There are plenty of free blog hosting companies that are very good. Blogger.com is my favorite – easy to use, plenty of modules, and the ability to place ads. WordPress.com is the free version of the popular WordPress.org hosting. If you want to use your own domain name (www.yourpick.com) you will need to pay for hosting. I strongly recommend using WordPress blogs hosted by HostGator. They are affordable (about 10 bucks a month) loaded with options, you can host as many domains are you want with one account and their customer service is excellent; quick, friendly and helpful.

Set Up Your Theme And Format

Once you’ve picked your hosting option and set up anything you need to set up, comes the fun part – choosing your theme and format. Blogger.com has limited number of themes (about 12) but some are very nice and should suffice for a basic personal or professional blog.

WordPress.org has hundreds of themes and formats to choose from. Two, three, four, or even five columns in every color and background you can imagine. These themes are made by other people – not employees of WordPress – and submitted to the theme catalog. Not all of the themes have all the bugs worked out yet so you might need to pick a backup. The free partner of WordPress has more than 60 themes to choose from and many of the user-friendly aspects of WordPress.org.

Start Blogging/Posting

That’s about it for setting up! All that’s left to do is start writing. For your first post you’ll probably want to introduce yourself and explain a little about what your blog is about. After that the sky is the limit. Let your creative juices flow and have lots of fun. Happy Blogging!

Blogging is not only fun – you can make money with it too. In fact there are many different ways to make money with your blog. Here I talk about just four of the many.

Advertising

Ever since Google came out with their Adsense program, many companies have created similar contextual advertising systems. Simply put you insert a small bit of code on your blog that will display ads related to the content of your blog page. Each time a visitor to your blog clicks on one of these ads, you’ll get paid a certain amount. This amount usually isn’t a lot – between .01 and 2 or 3 dollars on average.

If you really want to make good money with advertising, you’re going to want to sell advertsiing space on your blog directly to advertisers. Once your blog has achieved a following, it should be easy to sell space on your blog. Many well know blogs make hundreds a month just by selling advertising.

Product Sales

Selling affiliate products is another way you can use your blog to make money. Search for your niche plus the words “affilliate product” to find products. Write a post or a page about the product to give your readers an idea of the benefits. If you sell quality items and don’t push by selling, selling, selling all the time – your readers will be more likely to buy.

Pay Per Review

There are companies online that will pay you to review their product, blog, site, etc. Of course how much you get paid depends on how much traffic your blog gets. Keep in mind that both the product’s creator and your readers want an honest review. Don’t feel that because you’re getting paid for the review that it has to be all positive. The review should be thorough and complete, perhaps with screenshots if appropriate.

Membership Blogs

If your blog is suited to a very specific niche and provides quality information, maybe that is unavailable elsewhere or teaches a valuable skill, you could consider running a membership blog where your readers pay a certain amount of money to become a member of your blog. This isn’t the easiest way to make money but if you can pull it off, you’re looking at a great source of residual income.

Blogs have been around almost as long as the Internet itself. Even before blogging as an activity became popular, people created online communities. At some point in the 1990s, the concept of “Threads”, or online conversations that went back and forth, became popular.

During the late 90s through the turn of the century, people began using the Internet to keep web diaries or journals. This was the beginning of the basic blog. A student at Swarthmore College, Justin Hall, is generally credited as being one of the first bloggers – in 1994

Blogs were quite popular at this time with the “tech geek” crowd but hadn’t really taken off yet.

By 2001, blogging was becoming a full-fledged fad. Books, videos and tutorials on blogging began to pop up. Within the next three years, celebrities, politicians and companies slowly began to use blogs as a way to reach people and get their message out.

Today, blogs are used for just about everything. It seems like you’re no one unless someone is reading your blog. Companies have blogs to announce product changes. People have blogs to express their feelings about just about anything. Bloggers have blogs to inform and sell. And I have a blog just to let you know all this about blogging.

Every family gathering is the same for me. Eventually someone asks me what I do for a living usually by saying something like “so-and-so said you work on the computer.” I respond by saying that I’m a blogger and an Internet Marketer. I pull out a business card as if to prove both those jobs actually exist. Then I brace myself for the next question which I know is coming, “How do you make money at that?”

How to explain that money trickles in from various sources – advertising, affiliate sales, freelance writing, product sales, paid reviews, and others? Explaining what I do to someone who doesn’t know a lot about computers and bloggers is a lot like trying to teach someone a foreign language within a fifteen minute conversation.

Have you ever had this same awkward situation? If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky but prepare for the day when some well-meaning but blogging-illiterate person asks you what you do for a living.

What is a blog? – For complete beginners

A blog is both very different and very similar from a regular static website. While the content is created in much the same way, blogs are more fluid to allow items to be placed at the webmasters whim and allows the visitors to respond to the writer’s content. This is beneficial for both sides as well as being quite fun. As a side note you can tell people that technically blog is short for web log and was originally intended mostly as an online journal.

Once people discovered blogs they gravitated that way because blogs were easy to create and powerful for gaining attention and traffic. Basically blogs were a dream come true for people looking to spread information over the Internet.

Since income can begin to dripping in slowly for awhile before you start to see any real income, people will ask you what it is that you do and how do you make money at it? There are several ways to make money with blogs. Selling other people’s products, selling your own products, selling advertising, using contextual ads like Google Adsense and selling your reviews to people looking for marketing.

Finally you will get the most annoying and I find the most insulting question: “Is that a real job?” Yes it is a real job. It is similar to crossing a copywriter and a journalist. I spend hours every week researching and reading. I also spend hours writing and rewriting articles before typing them into my computer and putting then where they need to go. And that’s just the pleasant part of my job. Forget about SEO, networking, marketing, article marketing, link exchanges and keeping up with Google’s frequently changing policies.