How to make money working from home, the realities. Part 3. Blogs.

In this series of hubs I have been exploring the realities of making money working from home, this hub will deal with the subject of blogs. If you have ever wondered if it is possible to make money from a blog then the quick answer is yes. But it does take time to build up just like most things. Blogs have the advantage of being free to set up and fairly easy to maintain, of course, you can pay for blogs and get more ambitious but I have found it’s best to start simply. Pick a subject that you are familiar with, something you are interested in. You will find it much easier to continue blogging if you are writing something you would want to read.

You can blog about just about anything. Whatever you chose to blog about try to set an informal tone and inject something of yourself into the blog. If a reader feels like he knows you a little he is much more likely to keep coming back to check out your blog. It helps to build regular traffic to your blog, which in turn helps to bring in revenue. The more people viewing your blog the more likely it is that some of those people will check out the adverts.

It is better to blog about one topic, that way you will be using the same keywords each time you blog, for example if like me, you have a blog about vegetarian food and a healthy vegetarian lifestyle then those are you keywords. The repeated keywords help with your ranking on search engines. But the trouble is that there is quite a bit of competition out there using those keywords, which doesn’t worry me that much as that particular blog isn’t just for making money, it’s a labour of love. But if you want to earn from your blog then you have to try to find a way of making it a bit more specific. Pick something a little more obscure and you will have less competition. But be careful it isn’t so obscure that no one will want to read it.

Update your blog frequently, daily is best, at least for the first three months. That is about the time I have found it takes to build up a few regular readers. I always like to have a few spare posts ready, something that I can go to and post without any effort. Just for those days when I am not feeling up to thinking of something or just don’t have the time.

Don’t forget to promote your blog, tell people about it. On forums, on information sharing sites like Digg and through links on your hubs if you have any. And of course through your other blogs if you have more than one. And to make any real money from blogs you are going to need more than one.

The easiest way to make money is through pay per click ads. Google AdSense is the most popular and is free and easy to set up. Once you are registered the ads will appear automatically on your blog, all you need to do is click on the monetise your blog link and follow the instructions.

You can also chose to display Amazon ads but you will need to pick appropriate ads from a drop down box. I would never place more than three Amazon ads on a blog, too many can turn the reader off and create a kind of ad blindness where they just don’t see the ads anymore.

Don’t get disheartened if you don’t start making money from day one, that isn’t how it works. Try to resist the temptation of checking your account each day, once a week is best. You will never forget the feeling when you see your first earnings, it is all the encouragement you’ll need to continue blogging.

Explore other ways of making money from writing online with sites such as webanswers.