The things in my head go 'round and 'round

In this, the next installment of my blogging tutorial written just for you, we are going to talk about setting up your blog.

Calm down, there is some reading that needs to be done here.

So now you have decided to be a blogger.

You have chosen a host.

And if you are anything like me you have already set up a blog with a name. But we need to talk a little bit about the name of your blog.

As we discussed earlier, people start blogging for different reasons. Some people do it to work through issues. Some people do it because they like doing it, it is fun. And some people blog to make money.

Yeah. Cash. At some point in time everyone looks around and thinks to themselves that wouldn’t it be cool if they could make money blogging. And yeah it is, but there is a science to it. And I am going to be the first one to tell you that I don’t fully understand that science, but the one thing that I do know is that traffic is king when you want to make money blogging.

Before we talk about traffic, let’s talk about the various ways you can make some cash off of your blog.

Adsense. This is a program offered by Google where you sign up, and ads are placed on your site that people click on. This is called Pay Per Click, or PPC. And that is the simple explaination of it. There is a whole science to where the ads should be placed, what colors they should be, etc., etc. Be my guest to do all of that study. There are folks that are making big bucks off of Adsense. And there are folks who aren’t making much from it. What you put into it is what you will get out of it.

Private ads. Once you get a large enough amount of traffic on your blog you might want to consider selling ads to other bloggers. The success of doing this depends on the focus of your blog, though there is a niche out there for everyone not everyone would be willing to advertise on particular blogs. I am establishing a blog that is about composting with worms. Yeah, my Wife says I am crazy too, regardless. I don’t ever see myself selling private ads on that blog, but I do see doing well with Adsense. I also have a blog that reviews the beers that are brewed in Pennsylvania that I will be interested in private ads in about another 6 months when I get my readership up where it needs to be.

Pay Per Post, Social Spark and the like. These are companies who sell advertising to customers who are looking for exposure in blogs. Companies who are looking for traffic to their web sites. This is a great way to pick up a modest amount of money in a relatively short amount of time. And there are a lot of companies out there that do this sort of business.

So there are a few ways that you can make some cash off of your blog, but all of them require one very important thing. Traffic. You need lots, and lots of people coming to your website on a daily basis. So how do you do that?

Let’s talk about the name and the web address of your blog. When you do a search in Google, what do you put in the search line? You put in specifically, or as close as you can get, what it is you are looking for. The more specific you are, the better that chance you have of finding what it is that you are looking for. Right? Ok. The name of your blog, if you want to make some money from it, has to be as close to the subject as it can be. If you are writing about knitting patterns, then the title has to have knitting patterns in it. That will enable the search engines to put you on the front page, or close to the front page on a search for those patterns. Get it? If your title doesn’t have anything to do with knitting patterns, then you won’t ever get noticed. Being not notices equals not being paid. So forget cute names. Be specific to what it is you are writting about.

If you have already paid for a domain that isn’t specific to your subject, don’t worry. Use that domain to send people to where you want them to go. You do this through links in your content, and through your blogroll.

We up to speed here? Play with that stuff for awhile and we will continue later.

namaste.