Blogging For Beginners: How To Start A Business Blog For Money
Posted by
eli
on 1/19/10• Categorized as Business Advice
Sophia, a college student from Milan, Italy, asked me by e-mail: “How do I start a blog for money? I know how to make a blog, but can you give me tips on how to start a business blog?”
image source: 4.bp.blogspot.com/.../GlobalSmallBusiness
A Business Blog is still a Blog
A business blog is still a blog, except that it is one that you make to attract visitors to buy or sell your products or services online. It is like having an online store, which is different if you are blogging as a hobby or for self-expression.
How to Start A Blog
If you are new to blogging, there are blogging platforms which you can use, like Blogger.com, WordPress.org, Blogspot.com and others that offer free blogs to users.
Depending on the site you choose, the themes and plug-ins (added features) will vary. There are plenty of tutorials that will teach you how to start a blog such that you can be up and running in just a matter of 2-3 days.
However, for a business blog, it is important to have a self-hosted domain, so that you are not at the mercy of free blogging platforms. Besides, advertisers will respect you if your blog is self-hosted.
Starting a blog is easy. It is how to make it successful that is hard.
Attracting Traffic
That is why, to monetize your blog, it is important to have traffic. Traffic represents one of the best way to measure the success of your blog. If you have traffic, you know that people find your site and read your posts.
Thus, you can sell more ads, ads will bring more money that will help you to cover your costs and generate profit. That is blog monetization or blogging for money, pure and simple.
How To Attract Visitors
To sell your products and services online, or to sell ads on your blog, you must have traffic.
To attract visitors, you must publish unique, good quality and informative content for your target readers. You must advertise and promote your blog to your target niche, or the specific group or class of readers that you cater into and who find your posts useful and responsive to their need for information, knowledge, tips and advices.
In addition, you should submit your site to search engines, so that people who search the web will find your blog or content in the search engines result page.
How To Make Money
Once you have traffic, it is easy to monetize your blog. Aside from selling your products and service online through your blog, you can also make money by:
- Putting Google Adsense ads
- Selling advertising spaces
- Doing affiliate marketing
- Marketing e-books
Sophia, these are some ideas to start and run a business blog, or blog for money. Once you have started blogging, have traffic and make your blog known to your target audience, other money-making possibilities through your blog will follow.
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This is a wonderful article and I find this helpful. I think it inspired me enough to start a blog of my own and do blogging. When I have a blog soon, can I also ask your advice if I encounter problems related to my blog? Hope you’ll advice me, too.
I am sure Sophia will find this post very helpful
Good explanation for beginners on how to make money with blogging.
I would just add that a free blogging platform isn’t anymore so bad like in the past.
When you look at the keyword “Make money online” you can see that there is one blog from Google’s free blogging platform http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com
The statistics are impressive, daily up to 2.100 unique visitors, TOP Ranking in Search engines which deliver 95% of the traffic.
The ad prices on his blog are between 50 $ for a 1 month text link and 280 $ for a big ad on top of the page.
Someone knew how to build links and connections with other bloggers and communities to establish this blog in the TOP 3 within 3 1/2 years (the advertising article is already from 11/2008 -> 2 1/2 years work).
In the first year (2006) he didn’t publish regularly but from mid 2007 there have been almost in each month daily posts which is a big help as it keeps the search bots of Google active to come and look more often for new articles on his web page.
A real success story
You are very right that getting traffic is the hard part. I am not sure that EntreCard, Adgitize or CMF Ads is the answer though. They provide traffic but, they ruin the bounce rate. I use these methods but, I question if they are the best method.
Great tips man. Will incorporate them all into my blog.
Well written article for beginners. Traffic is always matter if you want to make money online. The problem is beginners always frustrated with low traffic.
Thanks for the article.
Those are great ideas and I have to agree that getting the traffic is hard. I have found that if I go around commenting on other people’s blogs, that some of them will come back and comment on my blog. And just trying to get the search engines to look at your blog is hard too. I guess the answer is always, write good content and I also think that having a personal touch helps to get people interested in your blog.
Yes, traffic is what every blogger should work hard for. And, once a visitor is in your blog, it is the good quality and informative content that will make them engage and come back for more.
Got these tips from Atty Eli’s other/previous posts.
Sophia, aside from this post read also other posts in this blog. I am sure you will learn a lot. I always frequent this site and read the tips written by Atty Eli. Now my blog have a PR1.
Regards,
Yljien
http://iempowermyself.net/
I also maintain several blogs to earn money online. sometimes it is hard to keep your daily earnings to stable levels..:~`
money blogging takes also lots of work but the rewards are great if you get it right,“