Blogging for dollars is relatively easy, requiring no special skills and talent aside from a passion and commitment for a certain topic or subject. You don’t need a university degree to begin blogging for dollars. Anyone with an expertise on a specific subject can create their own blog and start blogging for dollars.

Know What to Blog About

Prior to you start blogging, it’s essential to know what to blog about. It could be a topic that you know very well and in which you have the passion and commitment to write about it. It would be a bad idea to blog about something that you have no interest or knowledge in just because it is very popular. If you don’t know how to cook a complete meal, it makes no sense to start a blog about Italian cuisine.

Find an interest, hobby or activity that you love to do, then blog about it. It doesn’t matter how popular or how obscure the topic is, as long as you have the passion and interest to write about the subject.

Build a Blog and They Will Come

It’s very easy to create a blog nowadays, thanks to blog publishing platforms like Blogger. There are basically two main types of blogs – the remotely hosted blogs such as those published using Blogger and LiveJournal, and the self-installed blogs using software like WordPress and MovableType.

Which kind of blog should you choose? Each type of blog has its own advantages and disadvantages, so choosing your blog depends on your own preferences. If you want a personal blog and you want blogging to be as easy as possible, then have your blog hosted remotely. But if you want a more professional-looking blog with a lot of features, create your blog using a software like WordPress, hosted on your own web server. It is quite interesting to learn how to set up a blog.

Monetizing Your Blog

When you see that your blog already has a loyal readership, you can start placing ads, affiliate links and other income streams on your blog. The most popular sources of income for bloggers are:

•           Advertising programs (Google Adsense, Chitika, Adbrite, etc.)
•           Pay-per-post programs (PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Blogitive, etc.)
•           Affiliate programs (Amazon, CommissionJunction, Linkshare, etc.)
•           Donations and tip jars
•           Selling ad space and sponsorships

There are so many ways you can make cash from blogging, and a lot of websites and companies offering cash to bloggers, that it would be wise to pick only a few that provide the most income generation. Build a blog, add good content, and you will soon be blogging for dollars.

While it is true there are many other blogging tools, if you really want to establish yourself online and make money. The best choice is WordPress.  

Why?

As this is an open source platform you have access to free themes for your new site.  You also get literally thousands of free plugins. Plugins are additions to the platfrom that enhance the blog and the user experience. 

WordPress is also a state of the art platform with many big name companies using them, such as The New York Times and CNN.

Let me tell you a secret, you can also blog from your iphone!As someone that did not make money using PPC with iPhone, this was the best aspect.It does not matter where I am as I can update my blogs simply from my iPhone.I actually blog whenever and wherever I want. The train, airport, even the beach. I put out the right message and information as soon as I think about it.I am in constant contact with my readers.

So you are ready to start blogging?  Keep in mind that you need to know what your passion is as you may  struggle to produce the content and longevity to keep blogging to make money.

Let’s briefly look at installing wordpress, the easy way.To start with, you need to register a domain name. That is the easy part. There are plenty of registrars out there. I personally use Planetdomiain simple to use and straight forward.

Now, I don’t however use their hosting services, I use Hostgator for the reason you get, unlimited disk, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited number of websites, which is very important if you find yourself with an online empire.Last, get FileZilla. This is a free FTP program that you will need to upload wordpress themes and plugins to your site.

Now that everything is setup, simply log onto your host account and acces the cPanel.  Within cPanel there is a tool called Fantastico, this is a utility that has a lot of scripts that you can install for your webiste such as ecommerce, forums etc.  But the one we want is WordPress.

There are a number of options here, but WordPress should be udner ‘blogs’ in the second header.  You simply need to click on WordPress and then ‘New Installation’.Once you complete the details, take note of your adminstration username and the password. You will need these to log into the WordPress admin area.

Your blog is now up and running!  I strongly recommend that you do the following straight away.

Now log into the administration area www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin and delete the “Hello World” post and any other posts or comments that are there by default. Simply go to ‘manage’ then posts and delete.

Go to Manage’ and then ‘Pages’ and select ‘About’.Change the ‘About’ information to wherever suites you best.

Now head over to wordpress.org and click on the menu item ‘extend’ and then ‘themes’.Select from one of the many free themes that you like, download and then unzip it to your local computer.

Open Filezilla, put in your FTP details and upload your new theme.  Note that the file path is. Public_html ->wp-content -> themes.

There, you are now complete and ready to start blogging and generate traffic.There is a lot more to WordPress then just posting.  There are a lot of plug-ins that really enhance your site and can add a lot to user experience, everything from social bookmarking tools, automatically insert adsense to postings and many more.

If you enjoyed this information and would like to understand more about how to turn your WordPress Blog into a money making machine you can get started with our FREE 6 part mini-course at MasterBlogProfits

I have found that setting up an independant blog (separately from your site, different host if possble, different IP address) and writing fresh content each day (1 – 3 posts) that point to and reference directly back to your main site.  This is further enhanced by using keywords in your anchor text pointing back directly to the targetted page, adding keywords in the main body and staying within a healthy density will only help further.

It is essential that you are not seen to be spamming and that excessive links are seen to be incoming from one IP address (your host server), this alerts Google and I have definitely seen a downturn in ranking for excessive anchor text use.

Using a blog to boost your main site ranking is extremey effective, I have achieved No. 1 Google position and multiple page 1 Google positions just by using the above techniques, in only one week I have improved by 800 positions purely by effective blogging, this pulled one site out of the Google sandbox from scratch and then took only two more weeks to hit page 1 ranking!  This for a very competitive keyword and keyphrase.

I prefer to use WordPress rather than blogger or other platforms, WordPress offers greater flexibility in themes and add ons and you can get right inside the CSS to adjust the look and feel to how you want it.  Useful add ons are  All in One SEO Pack which assists in meta tagging posts for your chosen keywords and key phrases.

Each post that I write is optimised by using All in One SEO Pack, 2% keyword anchor text pointing back to site and then a further smattering of  keywords across the post (not too much).  In addition to this I Stumble, Digg, Furl, Spurl and ping and tag upto 30 other social bookmarkers to alert the masses to my posts.

A Very effective process and assists in building long term equity within your website empire.