Home Working Ideas

Many people assume that they can create a blog and start earning through paid adds and sponsored listings immediately. But this is not the case. There are several important vital stages that you need to go through first. Here we look at them.

Getting a blog together and preparing it to earn an income involves several stages. Firstly, of course, you have to register a URL, publish the blog and then start writing to it. Many of the top income systems actually demand at least 20 posts spread out over a period of 90 days, with some insisting that these are evenly spread. But creating a blog and publishing the required post once every four days is far from a satisfactory starting point for a blog.

Page Rank

The next answer that people will give when asked what is needed to set up a blog will be that it needs a good Page Rank. A Page Rank is a measure of the importance that Google places on the site and individual pages and is relative to the number of other sites that point to your new site.

Whilst a good Page Rank should ensure that a few opportunities arrive and a low Page Rank will ensure that nothing much arrives, this is not the singularly most important factor to consider, although it is where a lot of people will stop.

This is a shame. Stopping with a good Page Rank means that you have only generated part of the interest in your site that you could earn and therefore only a fraction of the possible income.

Many People Are Wrong About Page Rank

Many people openly think that build a good Page Rank and then the visitors will arrive. In fact, many people wanting to earn an income from a blog are not really interested in the number of visitors they are getting. If they have a good Page Rank they can sell links and that is all they are interested in.

But this is wrong. I now say that although it is important, getting a genuine readership is far more vital to the success of a blog and the potential advertising.

Real Visitors Bring Their Own Rewards

If you can write informative and interesting articles and build up a loyal readership, there are many benefits:

* you can sell affiliate products to these people

* they will leave comments and interact with you - which is a great moral booster

* potential advertisers will look at your Alexa ranking and see that you get genuine traffic

* potential advertisers will see the ongoing genuine comments and value your blog more, thus you can earn a higher advertising fee

* your visitors will talk about you and your ideas away from the site, Tweeting about you and linking back to you - this is how your Page Rank will climb naturally!

If you are running a blog, whether as part of your existing business or as part of setting up an online work from home scheme, make sure you work at getting genuine readers.

Keith Lunt

So you have setup your own blog, got some traffic to it and now you want some reward for your efforts. What are you going to do to earn an income?

Incomes from blogging can be massive if you take the right steps, but pitiful if you get it all wrong. If you have done your preparation you should be able to make a reasonable amount with these ideas.

Contextual Advertising
This sounds complicated, but it really is not! It just basically means that someone who provides the advertising for you checks every page of your website and picks from their advertisers those that are most likely to be of interest to your readers, based on the content of your website. This means that the adverts are suited to the centext of your site.

This is all very easy to sign up for and easy to install on your website. Some blogging tools already have the code built in. The best known of these would be Google’s very own Adsense system. With these you are usually paid every time a reader just clicks on an advert. So if you have a reasonable amount of people visiting your website, whether loyal visitors or one offs, then this can earn cash.

Affiliate Schemes
Slightly more tricky, here you are promoting products or merchants in return for a commission on every sale or in some cases leads. Your blog might be talking about a certain product that your readers might like and therefore you provide a link to buy it. This link is a special tracking link so that the merchant knows to pay you. Look for suitable product suppliers and see if any of these have affiliate schemes to sign up for,

The problem with affiliate schemes for an income is that you have to pick carefully a product that will appeal to your readership. Unless anyone buys, then you are not going to be making an income. Probably best for blogs with high volumes of regular readers.

Sponsored Posts
Debatable as to whether this is good practice or not, this is a way of making money even if your blog does not have a huge readership, but you have worked on it and it has a good page rank. Ideally for the best payments you want good rank and lots of readers, but merchants will pay you to post about them in the hope that by having a link on your website increases their favour with the search engines. With a very popular blog with a good page rank, just a post or two a day could bring in good money. But with no page rank and no readers, like all payment methods it is unlikely to bring in the cash.

Why is this technique debatable? Well, you are being influenced to write about something, possibly singing its praises, because you are being paid. You telling your readership that you think it is worthy of their note, even though you might not have heard of them before.

Well, that is my top 3 methods of driving income to a blog. There are probably other methods that some people would put on their top three lists, but personnally, these are the ones that I would use above all others.

If you want to know more about making money with a blog or how to prepare a blog to make money, then call in at our home working ideas blog. All articles there are our unique content.

Article by Keith Lunt.