Blogs

If you are relatively new to the internet or know nothing about building your own site, then a blog is an excellent place to start. A blog (short for web log) is basically a site on the internet where you can post your thoughts or opinions on literally any conceivable topic. They mostly come in the form of a diary or journal, and are becoming increasingly popular with both individuals and businesses.

The best thing of all is that these blogs are completely free in some cases, and you can be up and running with your blog within about ten minutes. I've personally got several blogs running on Blogger, the largest blog site on the net, using their free service, which I can personally recommend.

 It takes just a few minutes to enter your details, choose a title for your blog, choose a template, and that's it, you're ready to make your first post. You don't need to worry about web hosting either as the blog is hosted on Blogger's own server.

If this is going to be your only site to start off with, then you need to know how to make money from it. There's a few ways of monetising your blog.

Firstly you can talk about specific products (make sure they are related to the theme of your blog) and at the end of your review include your affiliate links to these products. When one of your readers buys this product after clicking on your link, you will earn a commission (see affiliate programs for more details). Don't overdo it with your affiliate links though if you're hosting your blog on someone else's server, such as Blogger, otherwise it will classed as spam, and you may get your blog removed.

Secondly if you don't have any products to sell or promote, then the best way of earning money is to include some adverts in your blog. There are several of these companies offering this service, but the biggest and most popular is Google Adsense. Google will pay you for displaying it's advertisers' ads on your site, and every time someone clicks on that ad, you will get a sizeable percentage (no-one knows for sure but thought to be around 50%) of what the advertiser paid Google for that ad. Just make sure you don't under any circumstances click on your own ads or get friends or family to click on your ads, as this is a sure-fire way of getting banned from the Adsense program, possibly for life.

To get lots of people to visit your blog site and click on your links, then you obviously need traffic. The best way of attracting people is by adding fresh content on a regular basis, every day if you have time. After you make a new post to your blog, you should also submit it to various sites who pick up freshly updated blogs. An excellent site that I can recommend for this is Pingomatic.

You should also submit your blog to as many directories as possible, and get links from as many different sources as you can. These subjects are discussed in depth elsewhere on this site.

If you are planning on having a main site as well as a blog, or maybe you want to include this blog as part of another site, and host it yourself, then I recommend you take a look at the free service offered from Wordpress, that will allow you to do this. This gives you complete control over your blog as it's hosted on your own server/hosting account.