“How to start a blog for free and make money?” is a popular question nowadays thanks to the huge popularity of blogs and pro bloggers who are actually making a living writing blogs.
While there are many different ways to earn money with a blog, one of the most popular and easy ways of creating a blog that makes you money is by building an Adsense blog, which is a blog that relies on the popular PPC advertising network Adsense from the search giant Google.
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The concept is fairly simple and straight forward; you create a blog and place the Adsense code on it. Adsense will then display relevant ads based on the content of your blog. Anytime someone click on any of those ads, you earn your commission. It’s a simple yet effective method to use your blog to make money.
Ready to blog and make money?… Here is a 6 steps guide on how to make money writing a blog that’s monetized with Adsense:
1- Find a niche
First you need to find a good niche for your blog. A topic that is popular and you are passionate about. If it’s popular, it means you have a better chance of getting more traffic to it, and if you have passion for it, it makes it easier for you to write about the topic.
Some of the most popular and profitable niches include making money online, weight loss, Relationships, Stock trading system and Blogging. For example; if you choose “making money online” as your niche, your blog will be mainly about topics related to online money-making.
2- Create a blog
Although, it sounds like it will be the hardest part, specially for non technical people like myself, it actually is the easiest part, thanks to the free blogging platforms like blogger. Of course, you can use paid blogs as well, but you don’t really have to. In fact, I encourage you to start with free blogs. You can always upgrade later on if you decide to.
If you are going to use free blogging, I would suggest using blogger. It takes less than 2 minutes to create your blog, and with a few clicks you can install Adsense on your blog (you have to be registered with Adsense), since it’s already integrated in blogger. Also, blogger is owned by Google, which makes it easier (debatable!) to rank blogs built on it, compare to other blogging platforms.
3- Sign-up for Adsense
If you don’t already have an account with Adsense, you will need to register one. Of course, your blog will be reviewed by their staff, and if approved, you can then start using it on your blog to earn money.
If you have to only sign up for one paid survey site to make money with, I recommend Ipsos-iSay. Ipsos is the most fun and well-paying panel. Give it a try to see how you like it. It is free anyway!
After getting approved, simply go back to your blogger blog’s dashboard, and use their easy to use drag and drop system to install Adsense on your blog. Adsense then will serve ads relevant to the content of your blog.
If for some reason your blog doesn’t get approved, don’t be discouraged. They will send you an email along with the reasons for rejecting your application, use it to fix the problem(s), and apply again. It’s really not that hard to get approved for Google Adsense.
4- Write quality blog posts
One of the most important elements of creating a successful money-making blog, or any kind of blog for that matter, is writing good posts, posts that are useful to your readers. Without quality content your blog is nothing.
If you want to make money with your blog, you have to provide useful information in order to attract visitors and keep them coming back.
Make sure you publish new content as often as you can. The more (quality) content you have, the more chances you have of getting more visitors to your blog, and ultimately more clicks on your ads.
5- Drive traffic to your blog
Although you have built your blog, installed Adsense, and have written good quality content, if you don’t let people know about it, no one will visit your blog. You need to drive traffic to your blog.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog, both free and paid ones. I suggest sticking with free methods. Free traffic generation such as SEO may take more time and work, but they won’t cost you money. Plus, I think free traffic (from the search engines) are usually much more targeted.
Some of the best free ways to drive traffic to your blog include commenting on other related blogs, publishing quality articles on major article directories with a link back to your blog, participating on related forums, using Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to spread the word, and also submitting your blog to major search engine and blog directories.
6- Repeat steps 4 & 5
You are not done yet! In fact, if you want to continue to earn Adsense revenue on your blog, you have to constantly post fresh and quality content, and also keep driving traffic to your blog.
Although blogging for money seems easy, it requires hard work and consistent effort. You have to remember that you are not the only one making money this way, there are thousands of people doing the same thing. So, if you want to not fall behind, you need to keep working to make your blog better.
It is important to know that for the first few months or more, most new blogs with Adsense, won’t make much money. It takes a little time and a lot of hard work to get there. But once you get the ball rolling, you will be amazed to see how rewarding and satisfying it is to start a blog for free and make money.