Blogging for beginners

Author: Nabeel Shamshad

Blogs now a days are becoming very popular and common for those who want there articles to be read and commented upon and primarily for those who want an easy way to earn right from the comfort of their home. But, let me make something very clear, if you are among the 2nd group (They who want to earn from a blog) success will not be a piece of cake and will not come over a night.

Having said that I still say it is easy. Working from comfort of home should increase your patience. Patience, research, lots of hard work, a little amount of intelligence and common sense are the basic ingredients for a money making blog. I recommend you to not believe on all those "overnight success stories" spread all over the page which is a result of "online earning" search on any of the search engines. These are only plots to trap you in their deals which initially say "We are 100% free with 100% earning guarantee" but in the end of signing up a deal with them comes a request of so called easy and reasonable payment. I bet that you have been a victim to such sites. Well don't worry, nothing is lost.

I will share with you in details about blogging and other ways of online earning in my articles. I don't guarantee you success and neither can any one else in the e-world but i will encourage you to put in hard work and see the results yourself. I will try to keep things as simple for you as I can so that newcomers can also understand and make the most of my articles.

In order to start with a blog you need to keep in mind following steps. By one by one reading following steps and acting upon them you will be soon owning your very own blog and then comes the hard work part that you will have to put in: giving your time to it and keeping it active.

• Selecting a topic for your blog
• Selecting a blog service provider
• Creating a blog
• Selecting affiliate programes
• Increasing traffic
• Keeping your blog active

Selecting a topic for your blog

Selecting a topic for your blog is just like selecting a business in which you will earn. This is the very first step towards your success and if taken lightly will surely not let you achieve what you desire. People who are in a hurry to start with a blog don't think about what topic they are selecting and come to a decision. This way they may select something that they are not very good at and end up calling this program a scam.

As I told you earlier that patience is the basic ingredient for successful earning online. Don't hurry while choosing a topic. You should always choose a topic which you are good at. We cant expect a farmer to write blogs about rocket science. If you write a blog on a topic which you are good at you will definitely add in it better matter which will subsequently increase your readers and traffic.

Don't forget to ask your family and friends suggestions about what you are good at because I also didn't know that I am good enough at this topic(earning online) to start a blog on it. Think a normal internet user, what people search on internet mostly an

Select a blog provider service

Once you are done with selecting a good topic of which you have detailed knowledge and on which you can write a lot of stuff the next step comes in. Now you will have to choose a blog provider and almost all are free of cost. There are a lot of blog service providers available on internet you just have to choose one.

While choosing a blog provider you must keep in mind that you will be using that to create your own blog. If you are a newcomer or even if you are not you will like things to be easy and flexible for you. Thats what you need to keep in mind while selecting a blog service provider. Some providers give their users quite difficult tools to create a blog and they are quite inflexible which results in a bad looking blog which instead of attracting users repels them while some are very easy to use, user friendly and provide their users with very flexible tools to create blogs. Keep in mind that good looks also make your visitors want to come again and tell others about your blog.

Following are some user friendly services that you can use to create your very own blog:

Blogger.com
Sixapart.com
wordpress.com

You can find alot more such sites if you search but blogger is the number 1

Creating a blog

Once you have selected a blog provider service open its site. You will be asked to sign up in order to create your own blog. After signing up comes the creative part. Dont forget that your every action is directly responsible to draw traffic to your blog and while I say about creation of blog it is damn serious.

You will find a "create a blog" or a similar link after signing up procedure.Click it and after that select the looks of your blog, colors, fonts, templates, gadgets and other functionality for your blog. While doing so be very simple and think from a visitors mind. Choosing of better colors, templates, fonts and gadgets should be for making the visitor say that your blog is simply beautiful and different from other blogs.

Dont make your blog look so redundant, complex or superfluous try to keep it simple. When you see a very complex website you tend to find an alternate for that and of course you would not want that to happen to your blog

Directing trafic to your blog

Creating a blog after filling up long time consuming forms and placing ads after joining an affiliate program is not enough to get you a decent cash while you sit back on your comfortable chair. I told you that you generate a small revenue when a visitor of your site clicks on the ads you placed there. In order to have your site visited you will have to spend sometime each day to direct targeted visitors on your blog.

Q: What is a targeted visitor?
A: All those visitors who visit a site related to the topic they were searching are called targeted visitors.

They who accidentally come across your blog are not targeted visitors and their probability of clicking on any of the ads placed by you is almost zero. But the targeted traffic's probability of hitting the ads is very high because they were looking for the topic of your blog and the ads placed on your blog are also relevant to the topic.

All the affiliate programs share a very little amount with you lets say they give you 0.1$ for every clicks your visitors do on the ads of your blog. So, in order to make your "online earning" dream come true you will have to direct a huge amount of traffic to your blog keeping in mind that all visitors dont click on the ads. The grater the traffic higher the earnings.

Here I will tell you a few effective ways of directing traffic to your blog. Going through all the following ways will drastically increase the traffic of your blog.

• S.E.O (Search engine optimization)
• Joining communities that discuss about blogging
• Joining programs that offer traffic to your blog
• Telling your own friends, relatives and family about your blog

Selecting affiliate program

What are Affiliate Programs?

An affiliate program is an excellent way of getting other websites to sell or promote your product or service for a commission. Affiliate programs are arrangements between an online merchant website and an affiliate website—the affiliate posts a link to the merchant site and is paid a commission for any traffic or sold items. Posting links with affiliates is an excellent way to sell products online, and it is an inexpensive and effective marketing strategy.

The two hottest techniques for generating a profit from blogging, involve marketing with AdSense and marketing affiliate programs and or products. I recommend begginers to use google adsense affiliate programe but I will explain both to you.

Using Affiliate Opportunities in Your Blogs

Starting blogs to recommend and promote particular affiliate products is very popular and easy to do. There are a quantity of internet sites that only deal with the offered affiliate items.  You just sign up at these sites and when a member, you have access to any and all of their listing to promote and make money.  How these work is after you are registered with them you will have your own personal ID, and that ID along with the vendors id numbers, you will be tracked with any clicks and business that come from that link.  Your one website that you can start with is clickbank.com, however if you go and google affiliate programs, you will find several more.  You can even go to certain business or product internet websites to check if they offer affiliate programs.  As a rule business sites that offer an associate program generally has a 'affiliate' link towards the bottom of their web page.  The best ones to look for are the ones that require the prospect to sign up for a membership.  If anyone signs up for those by way of your affiliate link, your profit will not only be that one time, but every month that they stay with that program.  Of course, any affiliate sales are good sales, membership or not, they all count up to revenue in your paypal account.

Using google AdSense to Create Revenue

Using AdSense is probably the most well-liked methods for bloggers to get revenue from their blog. Using this method is so popular since it can also be incredibly simple. AdSense is a program offered by Google where bloggers agree to have advertising on their blogs or website and are compensated after users click on these ads.  Bloggers merely have to design a blog and submit the website address of your blog as well as some added information to apply for involvement in AdSense. After a blog is approved the owner is assigned a code they can easily copy and paste to exhibit ads displayed on their blog. Google then serves correct advertising every time the blog is accessed. Whenever doable, the advertisings served on the blog are closely associated to the content of the blog, because Google crawls the website ahead of time to find out which advertisements are appropriate to your contents.

Having a Google adsense account is the first proper step to make living online using ads by Google. To this goal, it is wise to ensure that your website is in proper working condition before you apply for an account.

What would be the next step then?

Later on, Google will use its scripts to go through your website in order to evaluate it. Then, it will follow up with you using your email address in 2 to 3 days. In case your application is not denied, you will be able to use your account instantly.

Then, it is your duty to place the advertisements on your website. In this manner, the optimal position for your ads depends on the pages' layout and the content of your site.

Keeping your blog active

Keeping your blog alive is no doubt an important factor if you want to continue making money. To keep the blogs alive, bloggers have to put in a lot of effort to effect continual blog maintenance to their blogs. Technology supports this move. Blog-publishing tools are helping to automate blog maintenance.

Certain factors that will have a bearing on the results of blog maintenance include the following:

Quality of Content and Extent of Time Commitment

What your blog needs is content. It should be fresh and of quality. The reason for this is because you need to entice readers to return to your blog for more refreshing information. It needs traffic to keep it alive and grow. Content for your blog should be updated actively. It can be scheduled to be on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You have the prerogative to determine this schedule according to time availability.

Management of your Time Commitment

Posts can be written at any time of the day and at any place. When you have an inspiration or when an interesting topic strikes up in your mind, jot it down first. You should do the same even if many inspirations come to mind at the same time. There will be no scarcity of ideas to write your posts when you need them urgently. It would be good to fix a certain time of the day to compile your posts onto your blog.

Simple and Fast posting

Different types of posts can be written in many styles that suit your writing mood. Posts may vary in length. They may be easy or slightly more difficult. Posts can be written in a simple and fast manner. Be straight to the point in sentence construction. You can include a little personalization and emotion. Things that you can write about include a topic about your favorite memory, your ideal wish, what have you heard on the news today, or even what thing you have done lately that makes you feel proud to share. You can show your passionate feelings on such topics, and this makes writing so easy, because these are things you are familiar with. Reading will be so much more fun and pleasurable.

Archival of your posts

The archives that are part of your blog will support the function of archival for your posts. This is extremely effective as your readers will be able to retrieve them easily. You can decide on how the archival system should be constructed. Archives can be done on daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For instance, monthly archiving will show the link indicating a single month Jan 2008, Feb 2008 and so on. Archives can also be categorized according to different topics.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/blogging-for-beginners-3971274.html

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