Start Your Own Blog In 3 Easy Steps

By Michael Fleischner | Marketing Expert, Internet Marketing Secrets*

Blogging is a great way to reach your audience, share your thoughts, and even help you with your Internet marketing. I’ve been blogging for nearly 3 years and continue to enjoy the benefits of not only communicating with an audience, but engaging in meaningful dialog. Starting a blog is easy to do and pays huge dividends.

There are a number of free services available that offer free blog services. Sites like Blogger and WordPress only require a brief registration and set up. Once you determine a theme for your blog and a template, you’re ready to begin posting. Posts are entries you make on your blog that are published instantly.

Some bloggers post comments to their blog each and every day, others once a week. Regardless of how frequently you post to your blog, content can be focused on a specific theme or random topics. The most popular blogs focus on a specific niche and provide valuable information, content, and commentary that encourage interaction with blog followers.

Sign up for a blog service. Begin development of your blog by signing up for Blogger or WordPress. Once you have an account, you can quickly set up your blog. Consider the goal of your blog and what type of commitment you are willing to make. Start small and be consistent.

Determine how you will monetize your blog. If you want to use your blog to generate revenue, there are a few techniques you can apply depending on which platform you’re using. One of the most popular methods of monetizing your blog is with the help of Google Adsense. This is a popular option and very easy to add to your blog. Not only does it generate a small amount of revenue for you on a weekly basis, but it also provides relevant links based on your posts.

Another great way to monetize your blog is through paid links. The concept of offering paid links is pretty straight forward. You create a section of you blog that lists recommended sites. In this list, you only place links that people have paid you to post. There are some tools you can use to automate this process. I simply add a link to a post that says, “How to post your link” with directions and a pass through to a Paypal page. You can set up a single time payment or subscription, allowing would be advertisers the opportunity to purchase a link on your blog monthly or for a longer period of time.

Many individuals are monetizing their blogs by using pay per post or other blogging network. Essentially, advertisers search for bloggers who are willing to write a post to promote their product and services or brand. You can sign up for one of these networks quite easily and be contacted when advertisers feel that your blog would be ideal for distributing a message. You write a blog post and get paid for doing so.

One thing to keep in mind is that the success of you blog is based on a number of factors. I believe that having a targeted blog that offers original content is ideal. You will build a large following. This is essential because most of the monetization methods are based on having enough traffic to make your blog appealing to advertisers as well as blog readers.

About the Author

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Maximize Your AdSense Earning Potential

Six Strategies to maximize your AdSense earning potential

As an AdSense publisher you may like to take some strategies to maximize your AdSense earning potential. Here you can review 6 easy ways to become sure you are getting the most out of AdSense:

1. Just focus on location: in case you do not pay attention to the location of your  AdSense ads to place your campaign properly, you probably leave money where it is. Generally, ads should be placed as close as possible to your main content.

While this seems like a common sense observation, one of the biggest challenges to effective ad placement is conflict with design. While a 728x90 leader-board at the top of a page or a 300x250 rectangle ad unit on a sidebar might fit well into a design, in my experience these placements are generally better suited to display ads because they are often not close enough to content to produce an optimal level of clicks. Google offers some useful guidelines for AdSense placements that all publishers should heed.

2. Use section targeting: your website's pages almost certainly contain content that isn't really useful for AdSense targeting -- headers, footers, sidebars, etc. While Google's contextual targeting technology usually does a good job at picking out the most relevant content on your pages, you can assist Google by suggesting the portions of your content that Google should pay the most attention to through the use of section targeting tags.

To emphasize content, add and before and after content that you want Google to pay the most attention to. You can also tell Google to ignore a block of content by using as a start tag.

With section targeting, you may be able to produce incremental improvements in the contextual relevancy of the ads that your users see and that can generate more clicks.

3. Pick the right unit size:  a blog I help run nearly doubled its AdSense revenue when the ad units that appear in the middle of post content were switched from the standard 468x60 banners to 300x250 rectangles. To find out which unit sizes produce the best results, there's no substitute for a little experimentation. A/B testing is a great way to do this.

4. Apply the right colors: in my experience, non-negligible increases in clicks can be realized by choosing the right colors for your AdSense units. In general, choosing the right colors means using the background and link colors that are used with your non-ad content. Again, A/B testing can be useful for optimization in this area.

5. Try AdSense for feeds: if you have an RSS feed, AdSense for feeds can be a great way to develop an additional AdSense revenue stream. In general, I have always found that eCPMs for AdSense for feeds is higher than the eCPMs for websites so if you have a lot of RSS subscribers, it can be especially valuable.

6. Add a search box: chances are you could use search functionality on your site. If that's the case and you don't need a complex solution, consider using the search box functionality Google offers with AdSense. Not only is this an easy way to implement search functionality, it provides an additional means to generate AdSense revenue.