How to Earn a Full time Income from Blogging

The purpose of this hub is to describe all steps involved in creating and maintaining a successful blog.

What is a blog?

If you don't already know, then a blog is like an online diary where the author can post about anything and everything.

Before starting a blog, here are a few considerations.

1. The topic of the blog

Write about something that you're passionate about. It could be cooking, art, personal finance, debt problems, losing weight, scrapbooking, etc.Anything and everything.

2. Select the keywords

This is a very important step. Make sure you obtain a list of related and popular keywords for your website. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. You can check for relevant keywords FREE on these websites

Keyword Tracker

Keyword Selector Tool

3. Buy a Domain name & Hosting

You can get free hosting from Google's Blogspot or Wordpress, however, we strongly recommend you get your own domain name and hosting. It gives you more control and more credibility as a blogger. Choose a domain name that is related to the topic of your blog, ideally .com domain. However, if your target audience is UK, you can opt for a co.uk domain name.

Buy a domain name and hosting at Global Domains International. GDI offers a great opportunity to earn lots of money online too. The best thing is that they offer a 7 day trial during which you can cancel if it doesn't appeal to you.

You can also buy cheap web hosting from:

UKHost4U: You can get a Free Domain name when you buy hosting from UKHost4U: the single source for innovation, great value, hosted services. Their easy to use web solutions have made us the leading provider in the UK for internet based services from 1999 till today! Visit UKHost4U:

NamesCo Limited: NamesCo Limited is undoubtedly the nations' favourite hosting and domain registration company. NamesCo offers a wide range of additional services such as ecommerce solutions, email antivirus and spam protection and much more.

This year Namesco won the ISPA best shared hosting award, based on the products and service levels provided to customers! Visit NamesCo

Alternatively, you can create an account with Blogger or Wordpress and get it hosted for free. However I suggest you buy your own domain name and hosting as it creates a more professional image of you as a blogger. And it really doesn't cost much.

There are several ways in which you can earn money from your blog:

1. Placing Advertisements on your blog

Place Adverts on your blog and get paid. You can decide to put either flat-rate adverts (a fixed amount is paid every month) or place Pay per click ads (e.g. Google Adsense Ads).

Text Link Ads

Sign up as a Publisher with Text Link Ads to earn money for selling text links on your blog! Choose the number of ads you want to display, and how will they appear (on a single page or sitewide). This will of course, affect the cost of each link; the more ads you choose, the lesser the price per link. You can also choose the placements of links.

You can also use the Text Link Ads calculator to see how much a link is worth on their site. The left side of your webpages can earn you the most amount and the link worth decreases as you move to the right side. The links price also depends upon the Alexa Rank and Google PageRank of your blog.

Monetize Your website with Text Link Ads.

The Ads Network

The ADs Network is an advertising network that pays bloggers to place advertisements on their blog/website at a flat rate of £5 per advertisement per month. A total of 3 webpages are allowed per domain and a total of 5 domains are allowed which makes it £15 per month per website or a potential of £75 per month from all your websites! You will also get Free £10 bonus if the blog/website is accepted into the network.

Join the ADsNetwork and Get paid to place banners on your Website/Blog.

Money4Banners:

Money4Banners.com pay $5 per month for displaying 3 of their 468x60 Ads on your website. It doesn't matter if your website is large or small, or has high or low traffic count, you will continue to get $5 for as long as you continue to show their Ads. You will also get a $10 sign up bonus if your website is approved and you upload the banners.

Join Money4Banners.

Google Adsense:

Sign up free as a publisher with Google Adsense and submit your blog for approval. Once approved, you can place Google Ads on your blog and earn money when visitors click through the Advertisements. Minimum payout is $100 paid via direct deposit or check. You can find out more about Google Adsense on the blog All You need to know about Google Adsense.

Bidvertiser

A very popular alternative to Google Adsense. The payout is quite low, $10, and lots of options are available.The payment per click is obviously lower and they don't have many advertisers but it's a good program to work with. Join Bidvertiser.

2. Sponsored blogging:

Sponsored blogging is quite a popular way of earning money from a blog. Write posts for the advertisers and earn money. There are quite a lot of blog advertising networks where you can get the opportunities.

ReviewME: Review Me is a blog advertising network that allocates assignments to bloggers and pays them. Payments are made weekly by Paypal. Join Review Me

BuyBlogReviews

A blog advertising network where bloggers can bid on opportunities and earn money for writing sponsored posts. Difficult to win bids though. Register for free and submit your blog for approval. Once approved, you can start bidding.

Get Paid to Blog with BuyBlogReviews

Blogitive

Blogitive also allocates assignments to bloggers and pays them weekly for writing sponsored posts. Join Blogitive

Pay Per Post

Pay per post is a very popular blog advertising network that pays members to take opportunities. The opportunities available to you depends upon the quality, page rank anad popularity of your blog. Payments are made within 30 days via Paypal. Join PayPerPost.

SocialSpark

Social Spark is another blog advertising network where advertisers and bloggers exchange opportunities. Join Social Spark and take sponsored opportunities. Earn money for writing posts on your blog with SocialSpark.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Promote or review the products and services related to the niche of your blog. Remember, your readers trust you, so make sure the reviews are honest. This will build your reputation. If you want to read more about affiliate marketing, here's my Squidoo lens on "Beginner's Guide to Affiliate Marketing" which will get you started.

4. Participate in Blogging Contests

Bloggers hold contests to gain more popularity. At the very least, you'll get a link back, and if you win, you could win vouchers!

Get a list of popular blogging contests.

Getting traffic to your blog can be a challenge. Here are a few tips for getting targetted and quality traffic to your blog.

1. Write high-quality, useful and original content. After all, "Content is the King".

2. Write a few posts about yourself too. Personalize your blog.

3. Maintain a Posting Frequency. If you want to post thrice a week, that's fine. But try to remain consistent.

4. Make sure that the title of your blog is relevant to your blog's content. Use Meta tags too.

5. Monitor the traffic of your blog. You can do this free with Google Analytics. Read my blog post on How to use Google Analytics.

6. Submit your blog to different Search Engines especially Google, Yahoo and MSN.

7. Submit your blog into blog directories especially Technorati, blogcatalog, etc.

8. Leave comment on related blogs. You can ask other bloggers to exchange links with you. You can also leave comments on DoFollow Blogs.

9. Join Social Bookmarking sites e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon and submit your blog posts.

10. Exchange reviews with other bloggers. You can join reviewback, which allows you to exchange free reviews with other bloggers.

11. Join Forums and communities, and interact with other bloggers. Blogcatalog and mybloglog are quite popular communities of bloggers.

12. Write a few articles about your topic and submit to a few Free article directories e.g. EzineArticles. Make sure you write an impressive bio for the resource box with a link back to your blog.

13. Post advertisements at Free Classified Ads site. I have personally found posting ads on the free classified website Vivastreet has brought a lot of traffic. Other Classified websites are craigslist, Preloved, postgumtree. etc.

All these steps take time, and it will be some time before you will see a regular stream of traffic to your blog. You can also buy traffic.

Simply put, when an author of a blog invites other bloggers to post on his/her blog. Why would an author want to do that?

Guest blogging is done for a number of reasons. By interacting with other bloggers in the blogosphere, you get to learn from them, and exchange links. The author of the blog benefits from guest blogging as the blog gets more quality content. For the Guest blogger, it means more exposure and free traffic to their blog/website.

For these reasons, bloggers invite other bloggers to post occasionally on their blogs. If you intend to do the same, and invite guest bloggers to write on your blog, make sure that they have a good reputation, write well and are trustworthy. It is also recommended that you compile a list of guidelines and rules for posting.

If you are invited to become a guest blogger, make sure that the blog receives good amount of traffic and has a number of readers.

You can enhance your blog with these Free resources and sites mentioned in this section. I update this section regularly so bookmark this hub.

Free blog Templates

A blog template is vital for the success of your blog. I have changed the template of my blog a number of times. I have finally settled on this one I found on the Free Blog Templates site.