How to Make Money with your Free Blogger blogspot.com Blog

Yes, it’s true – you can make money from a free blog like a Blogger blog. Get yourself set up with a free blog and start putting in some work to make money with your blog. Ok, you do need to have Internet too, so it’s not totally free, but if you already use the Internet for your emails, or for watching You Tube videos or for hanging around on Facebook then it’s still pretty much like totally free to just also start blogging. If you blog a lot though, and do not have too much Internet bandwidth, you may have to get some more.

So, how do you make money with your free Blogger blog?

It doesn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that. You do have to put in some work, but work is work and if you work hard, you are likely to reap the rewards. The harder you work, the more you may earn. I cannot tell you exactly how much you might earn, because it depends on a lot of things, and everyone is different.

Things that can help you stand a better chance at making money with your free Blogger blogspot.com blog than the next guy who doesn’t put in much planning or effort:

• choosing a good name for your blog that contains a word or two that people are actually searching for on the Internet – that quite a few people are searching for on the Internet every month, even every day – for example if your blog is going to have articles about ideas on how to make some extra income howtomakeextraincome.blogspot.com would be a better name than broke.blogspot.com
• writing articles or stories or ideas for your blog that relate to your blog’s name
• writing articles of at least 300 words, preferably even as much as 1 000 words or more, instead of just 50 word articles that search Engine spiders are not going to think are really all that much of a good result to show on the first page of Google search results (to people looking for that kind of information on Google.)
• taking note of what words or phrases come up when you start typing something into the search bar of Google, that relates to the topics you write about or will write about on your blog (use those words and phrases in your articles)
• using a free tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get hints of how many people are searching for the kind of topics you write about or want to write about on your blog
• getting as much traffic as you possibly can (get people to visit your blog) – some simple ways to get more people visiting your blog is to write lots of interesting articles for your blog, often, and to keep doing it, and leaving links on other sites that lead back to your blog
• when you have about 50 visitors a day, apply for a Google Adsense account, and once your application is accepted add Google Adsense ads to your blog – never click them yourself – go through the Google Adsense program policies very carefully and abide by all their rules at all times – they can be incredibly strict, so be sure to follow all rules
• also join the Amazon Associates Program and put Amazon product ads on your blog too
• continue driving traffic to your blog and continue writing and adding new articles to your blog
• in your blog settings allow only 2 or 3 blog posts to show on your homepage/per page otherwise people scroll down a long way seeing only one lot of ads in the sidebar – whereas if you have only 2 or 3 blog posts per page, you have more pages with ads showing up in the sidebar
• the articles should be unique and original and never copied from somewhere else
• you can also advertise services you are offering (like freelance writing services perhaps?) on your blog
• when you are writing an article that mentions something you have already written for the blog, link to that article in your new article
• from time to time go through older articles and see if you can add a link in them to one of your other articles on the blog, or even add two or three links if quite a bit of the wording in the article is appropriate and somewhat related to another article on the blog
• try place a lot of your ads near the top of your pages – in case some readers do not read an entire article you have written and do not scroll down, at least the ads might catch their eye
• when choosing the theme for your free Blogger blogspot.com blog try not to get too excited about getting your first blog or overly creative where you may end up having a red background with yellow text – choose colours that make the content easy to read
• if you sometimes link out from your blog to other sites, from time to time be sure to check that the links are still working (that those sites or pages you are linking to still exist) as people may get tired of visiting your blog and clicking links that go nowhere
• sometimes include an Amazon product in your article if the product relates to what you wrote about on that page – or even look through a whole lot of Amazon products like handy books for example, that relate to your blog, and get ideas and write something related to that book or product and then include that book or product in your article
• join a free online writing site like HubPages where you can sometimes write and add articles that contain a link back to an article on your blog, and while on HubPages get involved in the community – read other people’s articles and get tons of tips from reading these articles on HubPages – tips that can help you do better with your own blog
• read a lot (not just on HubPages) – anything and everything related to making money online with a website or blog – read and learn; soak all the information up and use what you learn

You need to treat making money from a blog just like a real business. This sort of thinking will help you work harder. It can be hectic work, working at making money from your blog, and only those who are prepared to put in a lot of time and effort will succeed in making any money or a nice amount of money.

You also need to be patient as the earnings may take a while to grow or even start coming in the first place, but you should not give up, and just keep trying and reading a lot too, and learning more as you go along. You can always go back to old articles on your blog later, and edit them to improve them.

Due to the time it takes to get a blog filled with lots of content, school children in grades 9, 10, 11 who are already starting to worry about if they will find a job or not after matric (or their parents are starting to worry!) can start fiddling with adding content to a free Blogger blog in their spare time, to see how it goes, and who knows, by the time they finish matric (and may not be able to find a job) they may be able to see that devoting more time to their blog may be worth their while, and they could consider becoming a fulltime blogger! And at least they would have already started their blog.

If under 18, teenagers’ parents may need to get the Adsense account or Amazon Associates account, but the teenager can get his or her own accounts when he or she turns 18.

A unique domain name where one pays for domain registration and hosting seems to work best for myself (rather than a free Blogger blog) and may be a better option for some, but there are people who do very well with making money with a free Blogger blogspot.com blog and it’s generally easier to use than other sites like WordPress sites (.org ones not .com ones) which I prefer and which do better for me, but there doesn’t seem to be any harm in choosing to start with a free Blogger blog and then perhaps also getting a unique domain name kind of site only later – can always link the two together a lot which would be a great idea to give each site more exposure, but your free Blogger blog may do so well that you may never even think of getting another site, or even need to.

It’s hard work, it is, but it is possible to make money with a free Blogger blogspot.com blog

For those who are absolute beginners and are still wondering exactly how you make money with a blog:

When the Adsense ads on your blog are clicked by your visitors, you earn a small amount of money – when all the monies you’ve earned add up to R1 000, Google sends you a cheque. You can continue earning more after your first cheque too.

When Amazon ads are clicked by your visitors and your visitors then buy a product on Amazon, you earn a small commission. Once you have earned a certain amount, Amazon sends you a cheque.

From the two paragraphs above you should get an idea why it is so important to work hard at your blog – working hard means often writing and adding new content, and also working at leaving links back to your blog all over the Internet – the more visitors to your blog, the more people clicking the ads on your blog, from which you earn an income. Not every visitor to a blog clicks ads, so you have to work very hard at getting lots of visitors to your blog.

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011