Professional blogging as a full time job
More and more people are jumping into the blogging bandwagon. Some new bloggers just want to be unofficial journalists that comment about the local issues, some want to show people their knowledge in special niche, while some just wish to “bare” all for visitors to know about their private life. No matter what is your reason, you can definitely be a star through blogging. There is a level playing field for all who have a determination to ride on the train of serious professional blogging. That means something that started as a online diary has been turned into a strong internet force that can let you earn a full time living just posting articles to blogs or networking with other bloggers in the cyberspace.
Who would have thought of that just few years ago such a possibility. I have seen more and more successful examples of normal people turning into star bloggers earning possibly more monthly income than their office slogging counterparts, all in the comfort of own houses in pajamas and underwears.
Well like all professions, making money at the earliest stage is not easy. What you see in successful bloggers probably tried repeatedly to get their own success formulas. Next mindset is important too. It is not going to be a overnight cash and ATM machine for you. You need to believe you can do it like what others do. For the first few months, you may only receive pittances of $20 to $30 a month and that could totally demoralise you. My advice here is, do not think of the monetary benefits. If you have the passion to blog, that passion will bring you through thicks and thinks. Continue to do it and implement right monetization models to your blog along the way. Once you the basics laid out, things will gradually build up. Ultimately, you need to have a vision and know where you want to bring your blogs to. Continue to learn and pick up new knowledge as you are seriously in a very fast moving playing field where new technologies come and fade.
Once you have decided, you need to choose the right blogging platform. Normally beginners start with Google’s blogger platform. It’s free and easy to setup. However, there are limitations once you are more experienced, that is why wordpress platform is the rage nowadays. I would advise you to register your own domain and webhost for a self-hosted wordpress blog, just like the blog noneedforspam.com you are seeing now. Why? Because there are many highly useful “plugins” developed by wordpress experts who usually have the kindness to let you install for free. So if you are serious about blogging for money, go and get a self-hosted wordpress blog.
Next, comes to the blog monetization. There are several ways. The most common and popular is to use contextual advertisement services. Examples of these are Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, MSN AdCenter, Miva, Clicksor, Adbrite and some others. Of course the biggest of them all is Adsense. In contextual advertisement model, you register with a company selling advertisements to display relevant ads related to the content of your blog. Let say you have a blog in which you show off your expertise in getting cheap mortgage loans, the ads displayed will be related to mortgages and loans. That’s why it is contextual. So whenever someone pops into your blog, read your posts and stumble upon the contextual ads there that interests him, he will probably click it to check it out. Through such a simple click, you will earn some money and the amount will depend on how much the advertisement company wants to share with you. Its as simple as that! I’ll write more about that in details next time.
Another way where you are earn from blogs are selling other people’s products. Here, you are the affiliate of the product and you are paid a good commission for each product you have sold. You could probably review some affiliate products and when visitors buy that, you will be earning some extra money. Clickbank, Commission Junction, PayDotCom and Linkshare are probably some of the most well-known companies where you can register as affiliates and start marketing the products listed in their huge database. Successful affiliate marketers are well sought after in internet marketing arena for their expertise and they can easily earn in a month what a normal office executive will earn in a year.
A new way to earn from blogging is to write paid reviews. Here the advertisers will team up with a company that acts as the “middleman” and you just need to register with this middleman company website and scour for “opportunities” that are related to your blog theme. These advertisers are looking for bloggers to review their products or services as part of their marketing plans to expose their products to the loyal readers of the blogs. Hence you are see that the more popular the blog is, the paid review written can have a substantial influence to this group of loyal followers, and as a result, the advertisers are willing to pay top amount like $50 or $100 per paid review. Easy money earned just for writing 100 or 200 words, right? Of course, if you are starting up, you still can write paid reviews, just that the money offered here will be much lessor in the range of $5 to $10 depending on the earning opportunities. A popular paid review middleman website is PayPerPost which I’m already a registered blogger there. It’s nice receiving those paypals from PayPerPost regularly I admit. Other sources of income through writing reviews are ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews, Bloggerwave, LoudLaunch, Smorty and Linkworth
As you can see, there are a lot of ways for you to start making money online using blogs. The opportunities are out there, waiting to be grabbed by you. These are just the basics, once you get a hang of it, you can start diversify your source of income through direct advertising and sponsorship. But all of these don’t mean anything if you don’t start making things happen right now. So start setting up your blogs and good luck in your making-money-online endeavor.