Making Money With Your Blog- Getting Started

Over the next week I’m going to be going over the steps to earning extra money with your blog. Blogs are a great way to keep a diary, keep in touch with friends and family, expand your business and sell products, and earn extra money online from home.

Where Do I go to Start My Blog?

Blogger (free)

Wordpress.Com (free)

Wordpress.Org (free, but must self-host which you means you need to pay for hosting. Wordpress.org is recommended if you want to earn money with your blog. I also like the large variety of blog templates to choose from. It’s much easier to personalize your blog to make it look different than all the other blogs out there.

You can always start with a free service like Blogger or Wordpress.com but prepared to spend extra time and work if you decide to change your blog to Wordpress.Org down the road. Take my word on this.)

One of the next steps you need to take is something that preferably should be done BEFORE you even make your first blog post. If you already have a blog, read on, it’s not too late.

Ask Yourself:

*What audience am I trying to reach with my blog?
Is it a personal blog, business blog etc…? What am I going to blog about?

*What should I name my blog?
Is that domain available? People see so many websites each day, you want your blog to become memorable. Try to think of your blog as a “brand”. Have the title and domain name match.

If you name your blog “I Love Purple Dogs” but you talk about how to sell Tupperware, people may skip over your blog entirely because they think you are going to talk about Purple Dogs.

If you are using blogger your domain name might be www.purpledogs.blogspot.com. For only $5.99 (which is the cheapest I’ve found) you can buy a domain name from 1&1. Your hosting will be still be free with Blogger, Wordpress.com or whoever you choose, but your domain name would be www.purpledogs.com, and you will have a blog domain name that will be easier for people to remember.

A note about domain names (yes, this is a bit of a “tech talk” DH is a network whiz so I learn a lot about the internet, servers, computers etc… from him). ALL domain names come from IANA -Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. All companies that sell domain names must go to IANA to see if the domain name is available. They purchase it from them and then sell it to you. Whether you use 1&1, GoDaddy, Hostgator or someone else, they all must get the name from IANA. What’s my point? Pay the cheapest price possible for your domain name.

*Blog Branding
What colors do you want to use with your blog? Try to coordinate all any avatar’s, blog headers (the picture at the top of your blog), favicon’s (the symbol to the left of your web address) that are associated with your blog. You want people to recognize you and your blog. More on this later….

*Get a Blog!
I am most familiar with Blogger and Wordpress. I suggest checking out both and seeing which will work best for your needs. Keep in mind, if you plan on adding Google Adsense and you use Wordpress your blog must be self-hosted (ie. you must pay for your own hosting) in order to add Adsense. It’s not a hard thing to do, but if you are on a tight budget keep that in mind.

Now you just need to sign up with blogger, wordpress or whoever you choose.

August 7, 2007 | Filed Under Earn Money With Your Blog