Blogging is like writing a diary or journal, except that your scribblings are live and accessible to the whole internet community.
So, if you’d like to make money blogging, but haven’t yet started, set up a blog (free at Blogger.com) on a subject you love and get writing! This will give you a taster of whether you’re the sort of person who enjoys writing and whether you’ve got the stamina and determination to make regular blog posts over a period of time.
Interacting with other bloggers will also teach you a lot about blogging, as well as enabling you to get more visitors to your own blog posts.
If you’re serious about making money from your creativity – then here’s seven ways you can earn money by doing what you love:
Elance – this is a site where website owners needing blog posts and articles post jobs. There is a small subscription fee, but once you get your first couple of jobs and get good reviews, there’s definitely money to be made for anyone with good writing skills. Get those first jobs by posting low bids for work, often a client will return to you if they like your work, but getting started is the key.
Pro Blogger – this is a site where people advertised blogs where they need regular content written. If you’re looking for a regular income, this is the place to look. However, there is lots of competition, so you’ll need to submit a professional looking bid as well as already have a blog up and running so that advertisers can see the quality and style of your writing. You can find the latest blogging jobs posted at ProBlogger.
Blogging Jobs – there are a number of sites to look on,similar to Elance, but often with a different range of jobs available. These include Scriptlance, Craigslist, Writers Weekly, to name a few; searching for “blogging jobs” on Google will give you a far longer list of place to look than this.
Advertising – one of the easiest ways to make money with your own blog is to add advertising to it. AdSense is one of the easier ones, as they automatically place relevant ads to your site, and all you need to do is add the AdSense HTML into your blog. If your site starts to attract a lot of traffic, you’ll probably find advertisers will be emailing or approaching you to advertise their products.
Affiliate products – sell affiliate products with products from Amazon, or sourced via Chitika. Or you could promote the type of ebooks that are offered via sites such as ClickBank.
Reviews or Paid Posts – sites such as “Review Me” and “Pay Per Post” offer to pay you for reviews or posts on your blog. It’s possible to earn anything from $10 to $500 for one review, depending on how much traffic your site gets. You can keep an eye on your traffic using sites such as Alexa to monitor your traffic increasing. Of course, sites such as Blog Lovin’ (bloglovin.com) make it easy to subscribe to other blogs or to see how many people have subscribed to your blog.
Guest contributions or articles – with thousands of webmasters looking for a good link back to their website, offering them the opportunity to “submit an article” will get a regular stream of people from related (and unrelated!) fields offering to submit articles in exchange for a link to their site. It’s not uncommon to charge a small fee for this, in the region of $10-25 for uploading an article they’ve written, with a single link back to their site. You can also offer them the opportunity to be a “guest blogger” for a limited time, blogging on relevant items, which adds quality content to your site, and gives them relevant links back to their website.
So, get blogging, read other successful blogs and start finding out what money