6 more free steps to earn money online
If you read my previous article, you will know that the point of these articles is to teach you ways to start making money online without spending money.
This is the second in the series and this time we take care of having your own blog. There are endless ways to earn money once you have traffic, and your blog will generate traffic for you. The income that we will see today will come from Google Adsense.
There are multiple benefits of blogging, including the low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you drive traffic to your blog, and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates on their RSS reader.
Let's start with our 6 steps.
1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what to blog about. You must decide on a topic and name your blog appropriately.
There are several free ways to create a blog and host it for free.
Blogger will let you create a blog for free, they will host it for free and ping the search engines every time you update, which means they will find you with spiders.
Visit blogger.com and click the button on the home page labeled "create your blog now" and follow the step-by-step instructions provided by Blogger.
Some key settings you'll want to get right are:
- I) 'Host your blog on Blogger' = Yes
- II) 'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes
- III) 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes
- IV) 'Publish site feed' = Yes
2. Write some content. Before proceeding, there must be some information on the site and that means you need to make some entries. You can write some of these posts yourself and some may be quotes from sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google toolbar.
The toolbar includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest to your readers, you can highlight the appropriate text and click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link to the site.
3. Once you have some content, for example a week of blogging with 1 or 2 posts for every day, you can apply for an adsense account. When you log in to Blogger, you will see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for an account.
You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page, but you basically get Google ads on your site and get paid if your visitor clicks on them.
Google will decide which ads will show on your site based on the content it finds.
You should be aware that Google will reject your request if your site is deemed to have no content. No one outside of Google knows the precise rules in this regard.
Once it's been accepted, you can get some javascript from Google to add to your site. Copy this and then log into Blogger.
Once you have logged into your blog, you will see that one of the tabs at the top of the screen is labeled "Template". Click on this. You will need to know a bit of HTML to find the correct location to paste your code from Google. But with a little experimentation, you will find the right place for you. See the resource box at the end of this article for more help.
I would suggest that the ads should be seen when the site loads, but they shouldn't be too obvious or dominate your site.
4. Write more content. Try to get your content to arrive at regular intervals, as various directories will see your site at regular intervals and the smartest ones will visit you on a schedule based on their update schedule. They will likely determine this in the hours after you first ship them. What we will do next.
5. Submit your site to the Blog and RSS directories. Since you are hosting on Blogger, Weblogs.com will already receive a notification when you update your blog. (That means every time you make a new entry, they are automatically notified.) You will need to manually submit to the other directories, some of which will require a link on your site to theirs.
You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a list of directories to get started,
6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally, people will return again and again. As with customers, it is more difficult to get a new visitor than it is to keep existing visitors.
As with most free ways to earn money, this will take time, but it doesIf you can get followers, you will earn money.