by Tracy Lynn Smith

Created on: September 13, 2009

A blog is a site, usually set up for free, with posts about anything. Although you can put anything on your blog, the blog will not make money unless you have something interesting to talk about or share that will keep readers or traffic coming to the blog. A blog that gets traffic can make money from ads or affiliate links. To make a profitable blog, a blog must have traffic. When a blog stops getting traffic, the blog is consider to be dead and will stop being profitable.

Choose a topic to write about. Keeping a blog down to one topic will help readers to find your blog when they are searching for that topic. If you want more then one topic you can make a blog for each topic. Be careful and don't spread yourself too thin. Blogs take work and continual updating to keep readers coming back to see what is new on the blog.

Deciding what to blog about is the hardest decision to make. You need to write about something that you are interesting in. For example, if you are interesting in knitting, you could write a blog all about knitting. Other people who are interested in learning more about knitting would be drawn to your blog. Readers will revisit to check out the new updates.

Now we need to find a location to host your blog. There are many sites that will give you a free blog page. You will need to read through all the terms and conditions offered by each blog site. Some sites like blogger.com will allow you to add ads like Google Adsense to your blog. Some sites give you a free blog providing you split the profit with them. You will want to compare the blog terms and conditions to determine which one will best suit your needs. If you are not sure, I would suggest blogger.com to start out with.

After you decided where to put your blog, you will need to come up with a name for the address that is not already in use. You want your address to be easy to understand for yourself and your readers. Having an easy address to remember will help your readers to pass the news about your blog to other potential readers.

Next you get to set up all the details of your blog. You can choose the colors, templates and backgrounds on most blog sites. Look at the gadgets offered by the blog site. By searching through the gadgets you can find many interesting items to add to your blog. Be careful not to overcrowd your blog with gadgets. Too many gadgets can be overwhelming and look messy to your readers.

After you have the blog set up the way you would like, add in ads or affiliate links. With ads you get paid per view and/or per click. On Affiliate links you can be paid for clicks or a percentage of what a readers buys. Affiliate links can be great, but many required an established blog with traffic. Sites like Amazon or Walmart have Affiliate program located on the bottom of their pages that can be joined. Google Adsense is one of the most commonly used ads, but there are others. The ads should be related to your blog so your readers will be interested in them.

Promote your blog on social sites like facebook, myspace, or twitter. You can also submit your blog to search engines. You can go to each search engine and submit your blog or use pinging services like pingomatic.com. Pinging service will send you blog to all the search engines for you. Some require you to put a small ad on your blog for this service.

Don't get discourage if your blog doesn't make money right away. It may take sometime to get the word out about the blog. Try to make at least weekly updates to your blog. Blogging can be fun as long as you find a topic you enjoy writing about.

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