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6 more free steps to making money online
6 more free steps to making money online
by: Darren Power
If you read my previous article you will know that the goal of these
articles is to teach you ways to get started making money online without
having to spend any money.
This is the second in the series and this time we deal with having your
own blog. There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic,
and your blog will get you traffic. The income we will be looking at
today will come from Google Adsense.
There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost
(or no cost), the resources that will help you get 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 into their
RSS reader.
Let's get started with our 6 steps.
1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog
about. You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately.
There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted
for free. We will go with Blogger.com for our first blog.
Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will host it for
free and they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning
you will get spidered & found.
Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page labelled 'create
your blog now' then follow the step by step instructions that Blogger
provide.
Some key settings you will want to get right are:
I) 'Host your blog at 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 we move any further there has to be some
information on the site & that means that you have to make some entries.
You can write some of these entries yourself & some can be quotes from
sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google
Toolbar.
You can download the Google toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com.
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 & click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your
blog along with a link back to the site.
3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging with 1 or
2 entries for everyday, you can apply for an adsense account. When you
sign 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 basically
you get Google ads on your site & get paid if your visitor clicks them.
Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on the content
it finds within.
You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your
site is not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows
the precise rules on this.
Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript from Google
to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to Blogger.
Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one of the tabs
across the top of the screen is labelled 'Template'. Click this. You
will need to know a little bit of HTML to help find the right location
to paste your Google code. 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 need to be seen when the site loads but
should not be too obvious or dominate your site.
4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content coming at regular
intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular
intervals & the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your
update schedule. They will probably determine this in the hours after
you first submit to them. Which is what we will do next.
5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you are hosting
at Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your
blog. (That means that every time you make a new entry they are automatically
notified) You will need to manually submit to the various 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 you started visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss
6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come
back again and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor
than to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make
it so interesting that they can't help but tell all their friends about
it also.
As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going,
but if you can build a following you will make money.
About the Author
Darren Power is the webmaster at www.ireviewguru.com where you will
find reviews of the products we use to make money online.
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