Making Money from Blogs

So how exactly does one make money from blogs? Whilst the answer to this question may at first seem obvious, making money from blogs is no easy task. Despite this, nearly everyone I talk to seems to know or know of someone who has managed to make a decent income from blogs, even people who know nothing about blogging whatsoever have heard of the likes of celebrity bloggers like Perez Hilton; whose website is now valued roughly, by website outlook, at $5.25 million.

Surely if someone like Perez Hilton can make money from a blog most other people can!

There are five factors that I see as key in creating a successful money making blog. It is important to look at these individually in order to best understand how each point helps.

1) If you want to make money from blogs obviously you need adverts. Google adsense is perfect in this respect as, once Google has crawled your blog, it will bring up relevant adverts alongside your content. Where adverts are not added using adsense, it is vital that they are relevant to the content you are talking about. No one will click on adverts for a new brand of shampoo if the content of your blog is about computer games.

2) The phrase 'content is king' was coined, i think, by Bill Gates. This term is more relevant to making money through blogs than any other form of website. If the content that you choose to fill your blog with is low quality, poorly written articles from ezine websites, then visitors are not likely to see your blog as a credible source of information and thus won't return. For this reason make sure that your content is well written, original and interesting.

3) Once you have your original, well written content it is vital to optimise it for the search engines. This means choosing particular primary and secondary key words and sticking with them. For example your primary key word could be 'make money online' and your secondary keywords could be 'forex trading' and 'paid surveys'. I will be writing a more in depth post on search engine optimisation but the basic jist of it is to use primary key words in the title of your apost, and secondary key words consistently in the article content. More on search engine optimisation will be revealed however in my later posts.

4) Backlinks: Once you have your blog up and running with adverts and content now you need visitors. A blog with no visitors won't make any money. One of the best ways to get visitors is through natural search traffic, that is, the results that Google brings up after a search term has been entered. Backlinking is considered by many to be fundamental in achieving high search engine rankings, the more relevant links back to your blog from high ranking websites, the more natural traffic you will see. To achieve this submit your blogs url and RSS feed to as many free locations as you can including dmoz.org, Del.Icio.Us and Digg, all of which have high page ranks and will see your site ranking higher as a result.

5) Keep at it! Blog success does not come overnight and requires time and dedication if you follow the above four steps I guarantee that you will start to see results within a month of blogging. Don't be disheartened by the slow start, you too could be the next blogger turning over thousands of pounds in advertisements but only if you keep at it.