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I am only a week or so into the development of Blog Addick as I write this post and am now sure that you can make some money blogging; the questions on my mind now are:
- How much can you generate?
- Is it enough to live on or is it just going to be pocket money?
The great thing is that you can start to build a blog for free so any money you do make will be profit. Whether or not you start to spend money to further enhance a blog depends on how quickly you wish to drive the blog forwards.
The purpose of this post is to act as a guide in developing a blog that will generate some form of income. Of course as I keep building Blog Addick and hopefully keep increasing the amount of money I generate from this Blog as I do I will share that information with you via posts.
Here are the steps that I have taken so far:
1. Choose a topic to Blog about.
This is crucial! You don't want to start writing a blog about something that you have absolutely no interest in, your readers will soon get bored and stop visiting. You don't need to be an expert in the matter that you are blogging about, the blog can be a journey describing how you have learned about the topic, your readers can help you to learn. I definitely do not claim to be a blogging expert, but the web is a great tool that can help you to learn a great deal very quickly.
I have a blog that I have started about cricket and in particular the ashes series between England and Australia. You see the site here The Ashes 2009 News. It's just something that I love and want to write about.
2. Create your free Blog.
You can do this for free (like me) with Blogger, all you need to do is follow the instructions. I have chosen blogger for the very reason that it is free! Many of the experts out there say that you can build better and more successful blogs via wordpress and your own domain name. Whilst this may be true, it is not for me at the moment, it may well be another blog building journey for me somewhere down the line. Right now I want to see if I can build a blog for as little money as possible and to make it as popular as possible. Try and think of a good original name for your blog that means something to you!
3. Optimize the Layout and Colours of your Blog
Once you have your blog created you will need to start optimizing the layout etc of your blog. I changed the template to a four column one in order to create more room on the page. I would suggest that you decide on three or four colours that you are going to use in your blog, you can mess around with this in the web layout page of blogger.
I visited two sites that have helped me enormously. They both provide blog development tips specific to blogger.
They are Tips For New Bloggers and Blogger Tips and Tricks. I think it's great that these guys are willing to share their secrets and tips with us, otherwise I know I would be lost. I strongly suggest that you add both of these sites to your favourites so that you can refer to them whenever you need them.
4. Keywords
I have used Traffic Travis to generate keywords. The programme has proven very useful throughout the building of Blog Addick. Find out more about Traffic Travis by reading the article dedicated to Traffic Travis.
5. Content
It is crucial to provide you readers with some decent content to make sure that they keep coming back. Search engines also scrutinize the quality and information provided in a blogs content to ensure that it provides it's customers (the people searching information on the net) with the best service.
There are many providers offering Blog content, the issues with these is that the content is often not that unique.
Experienced and established Bloggers usually have a number of people they use to write articles/posts for them; this is fine if you have the money. Personally I am going to build my blogs with my own posts (initially anyway).
Tip: To find decent and informative content on your niche subject search the web. Break down the category's that you consider important to your subject and put together posts on those topics. If you want to write about breaking news in your niche, simply set up a Google Alert, that way everytime a story breaks on your topic you will be able to upload a post onto your Blog. Re-write it of course to make it your own, using a story is fine as long as you give credit to the author.
