by Ruth Belena

Created on: May 29, 2008   Last Updated: April 29, 2009

If you are self-employed, working as a freelancer, earning money from referrals, marketing affiliate products or writing on the Internet, you will benefit from promoting your work on a personal website or with your own blog.

You should really only start a blog if you are prepared to keep it updated with regular new content and to take an active part in the blogging community.

Blogs take a lot of commitment and effort to maintain, so you should not make the mistake of thinking you can create one with a single introductory post and then hope people will find it. You will need to spend a lot of time promoting and networking so your blog will be found, read and will stay active.

A writer has a big advantage when it comes to blogging. A good writer has the skill, the imagination and the enthusiasm to post regularly on their blog. A blog will get a higher page ranking with search engines when it has new content added all the time.

Being part of the blogging community is a great way of networking and getting the high quality traffic to your blog. It does not have to be a blog about writing or about making money on the Internet. Your blog can be used as a showcase for your talent as a writer and, of course, it will help to promote your work. For a serious freelance writer there is no better way to promote your work than to have a blog that will demonstrate the quality and range of your writing.

If you have articles earning a residual income from page views, you will make more money from them when visitors to your blog click on the links to read your articles. You can post an extract of an article with a link to the full article, embed relevant links to articles into blog posts, or add a list of useful titles and links at the end of each post.

If you place links to your articles on a personal website, or include them on your profile at a community website, you will need to promote those sites also to get your links seen. It is easier to get traffic to a blog using SEO techniques, and each individual blog post can show up in search results.

The question is whether it is better to put up a website to promote your work, or simply to blog about it. If you like to write you should post regularly on your blog about the different ways to earn money on the Internet. You can post about your own activities, post whenever you get paid and include any relevant referral links. This will help you to earn additional money from your referrals. For anyone who earns money and makes an income online, having a blog is definitely good for promoting your work.

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