Blogging for Profit and Traffic

Blogging for profit involves specific knowledge of how to make money online, although if you are only blogging for traffic then you are guaranteed that if you link your website to your blogs. In order to blog for profit, or to make money in other words, you need to understand the principles of Google Adsense, a selling advertising space on your blog and affiliate marketing. You could also advertise your products on your blog if you have any to sell, but you will likely be doing the selling from your website and that is another technique altogether.

Before discussing ways in which you can use your blog to make money, let’s first discuss your blog, and where you are operating it from. If your blog is a Blogger or Wordpress blog hosted by either of these two, then your options are very limited when compared to uploading your own blogging software from wordpress.org. If you are serious about blogging for money then you should do so from your own website.

If you have no web host as yet, and are seeking one from which to operate your blog, then make sure that your host offers MySQL. You will need that to run Wordpress from your website. The reason that Wordpress is recommended is that it is the best blogging software online if you have your own website. If you do not, then many people prefer Blogger, although others still use Wordpress from the Wordpress.com site.

I will not go further into this because it is not the object of this article, which is to recommend ways of making money from a blog. First register with Google Adsense. Enter that into your browser and follow all of the instructions. You will be able to offer adverts on your blog, and will be paid every time somebody clicks on an advert. They don’t have to buy anything, just click on the advert.

You should place your Adsense blocks somewhere on your sidebar, and also at the bottom of your blog so that when people have finished reading they have something to click on. If your reader reaches the end of your article, page of blog, it means that are interested in what are writing, otherwise they would have left and clicked on to somewhere else.

If you have nothing at the end of the post or the page, then people will feel somewhat let down. If you provide them with something to do, even just to click on an advert that interests them, then that is what they are liable to do. The theme of the adverts are determined by the Google contextual algorithm often called LSI, that determines the theme of your content through the vocabulary that you use in it.

You can also offer affiliate links on your blog: links to products being sold by others whereby you get a proportion of the sales price for each sales (frequently 50%). You can find lots of affiliate products to sell on Clickbank.com. or simply by entering the term into your favourite search engine. These links can take the form of banner ads, text links or clickable logo, and you can place them anywhere on your blog.

This applies predominantly for blogs run from your own website, where you have total editing over the html of the various components of your blog: the stylesheet that controls each complete page, the headers, footers, sidebars and everything else that makes up your blog. You do not have this degree of control over a hosted blog. If you want to use your blog to make real money, then it is necessary to have your blog on your own website rather than on a blog host such as Bloggit or Wordpress.com.

There are other ways in which to use your blog to make money, and blogging for profit and traffic is a combination of many sources of income and traffic generation techniques. Once you understand how to use these, you will find your blog a lot more useful than just a simple website.