Blogging Your Way to a Decent Income

Can you make money just writing a blog? Yes you can. How much would be more of an accurate question. If you have a blog already that has some decent readership or a Google Page Rank of 3 or more you are well on your way. What you need to decide before you go any farther is how you want to profit from your blog. Do you want make money from Google Adsense or from paid advertising in the form of paid blog posts. Depending on how you want to earn your money from your blog depends on how you run your blog. Let me explain.

Making money from Google Adsense or any other type of banner or photo advertising on your blog requires visitors and lots of them. The more visitors the more chances they will click on an Adsense ad or buy something from an affiliate's ad. If you plan on going this route then you just need to bring visitors to your blog. I find that it takes about 150+ visitors to the average blog to get one click on an Adsense ad. You need to publicize your blog and Digg.com is one of the best ways to do this. Write an interesting blog post that readers would want to come and read then go to Digg.com and digg it. While at Digg you want to become friends with as many people as possible much in the same way a myspace and send them shouts whenever you submit a new item from your blog. While on the subject of myspace you can also message all your friends there too about your latest post on your blog. If you are a member of any message boards you will want to let your friends know about your blog too. I have found out you don't have to leave links to your blog all over the place, simply because Google indexes blog posts so fast that your blog posts are in the search engines sometimes within minutes. This is particularly true if you use blogger as your blogging platform.

If you are planning on the Google Adsense route then keep your blog strictly to one subject and one subject only. The most unsuccessful blogs are just ramblings on about anything and everything. Niche blogs that just cover one subject not only do very well they can also become famous in their own niche. Niche blogs also attract and keep regular readers. Picking the right niche to write about and get high Adsense income can be a challenge. The highest paying Adsense words are in the following fields: insurance, medical and finance. If your blog has a niche within one of these fields then the Adsense ads placed on your site could be worth $3 or more when someone clicks on them. To find out what the current highest paying Google Adsense words are just do a search on the phrase "high paying Adsense words". There will be many websites that will list them for you.

Earning money from a blog that you do paid posts from is much easier but takes longer. What the advertiser is looking for is a blog with a high Google Page Rank. They often don't even care what the blog is about because what they are after is raising their own Page Rank via links from other high ranking websites. Google frowns on this practice of selling links but it is not illegal or even immoral it is just that Google does it via Adsense and they don't want the little guy doing the same thing. None the less there are at least 4 large companies that you can sign-up with to be "paid to blog". Almost all of them require the blog to be older than 2-3 months because they want a blog that has been indexed by Google. What you need to do is get your Page Rank up on your blogs to qualify for the highest paying blog posts, often around $50 and up.

Improving your Page Rank is not just getting everyone and their mother to link to you - no that is not it. You need to have quality links come to your blog. In other words you need higher ranking blogs or websites to link to your blog to raise it up. 200 blogs that are PR1 will only raise you to PR1. Now if you had several websites and blogs that were PR6 you might be raised up to at least a 3 or 4. Now how do you get linked to higher ranked sites? There are several ways and one it to leave comments in a much higher ranked blog. Another way is to reference that high ranking blog post in your blog post with a link, thus creating a "ping back". Time is also a great factor in your favor here. The older the blog is, the higher it's Page Rank goes. This is mainly due to the blogs and websites that have linked to you in the past have also gone up in Page Rank. Strangely enough you don't even have to have many posts on a blog for it to have a high Page Rank. I have one blog that has 12 posts on it right now and it has a Page Rank of 4. The blog is only 5 months old and was quickly put together for Halloween. It is about real haunted houses. Even though it has a high Page Rank it only gets 5 visitors a day if that. So Page Rank has nothing to do with the amount of visitors.

Now you can decide where you want to take your blog: high Page Rank or lots of visitors. Both ways you can make money from but each takes a different approach.