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Banking and Finance  » Make Money with Blogging

Make Money with Blogging

One of the quickest and easiest ways to try your hand at running

a web site is to set up a blog. Once you're up and blogging, you

can sign up with Google AdSense and start selling ad space. Bear

in mind that starting a blog isn't going to bring you instant

revenue. You'll have to put some energy into promoting the blog,

getting it listed in the search engines, and of course writing

quality content that people will actually want to read.

There are plenty of free blogging sites out there to get you

started. My favorite is Blogger.com. Signup is

extremely simple, and you can be blogging in a matter of

minutes. See my blog here: Work From Home

Blog. Blogger has plenty of nice templates for you to choose

from, and they're all customizable should you wish to tweak

them. Blogger also gives you a nice blogspot.com subdomain

address for your blog, which looks better and may help search

engines find you.

When setting up your blog, you want to pick a topic that you

know something about. This will make it more interesting for

you, and will make it easier to keep the content fresh. It's

pretty much universally agreed that search engines prefer sites

with lots of content. And if you want visitors to find your

site, you have to get listed with the big search engines. You

should also try to pick a topic that will generate some

expensive advertising. Blogging about baby penguins is all well

and good, but it's not a highly competitive market as far as

advertising goes. Do some research on the Google AdWords site to

find some hot topics. Tech topics are generally good sources of

high paying ads, but there are others.

One thing to note about choosing a topic is that Google doesn't

allow AdSense ads to be displayed on sites with content that

they deem to be objectionable. Hate sites, sites with illegal

content, and so forth will not be accepted, so just keep that in

mind. Read the Terms of Service on the AdSense site if you have

any doubt.

Once you have your topic, start writing like mad. Try to use

lots of keywords relevant to your topic. This will help your

ranking with the search engines, and will also make sure the

right ads show up when you get to that stage. Don't take this to

the extreme, however. You're writing for humans, not search

spiders. Even if you have great keywords, if your content isn't

vaguely interesting, you'll find no one spends any time at your

site.

After you have several pages of content, you can sign up for a

Google AdSense account. Just go to www.google.com/adsense,

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and click the button to sign up. You'll have to give them some

information about yourself, and about your website. A human from

Google will review your site within a day or two, and you'll get

an e-mail telling you whether you've been accepted. If you're

not accepted, they'll tell you why, and you can resubmit as soon

as the problem is corrected.

When you're accepted, log in to your AdSense account and create

some ads. They've got a very simple form to do this, and you

just copy and past the javascript code they generate for you. At

first you may see only public service or very generic ads on

your site. After a day or two, if you have enough quality

content on the page, you'll start seeing more relevant ads show

up.

You're now a webmaster! You didn't have to buy a domain, pay for

hosting, or even know much about web design. My next article

will deal with how to promote your blog (or any web site), and

build traffic to it. Check back soon!

About the author:

Gary LaRock runs www.workfromhomespot.com, your source for information and ideas about working from

home. He lives in Thornton, CO, with his wife and son, where he

has worked exclusively out of his home since 2003. Work From Home.