Using Blogs to Make Money

There are a number of different ways in which you can use blogs to make money. Some blog owners constantly put up content-intensive, frequently-updated material; whereas others simply add a new post every once in a while. Both models can work reasonably well at generating revenue.

Let's look at the first model and what is required: in order to make money with a high quality blog, you will want to generate most of your traffic through word of mouth recommendation, rather than through search engine optimization, which will not give you any benefits for producing superior material. This means that you will want to promote your blog through different avenues.

I personally suggest that you consider two different avenues: 1) using social bookmarking sites to gain steam; and 2) promoting on forums.

Doing well with the first option entails creating something that is legitimately interesting; and then facilitating its circulation by submitting that page to social bookmarking sites, such as http://del.icio.us and http://www.digg.com. Additionally, on your blog, post a link that brings users to a social bookmarking site on which they can vote for your video or whatever it is you created. The more who vote on your blog, the better that blog post will rank on the social bookmarking system, increasing the amount of people who read your blog.

Now, if you prefer to take a different approach – to create multiple profitable, but low-maintenance blogs – you can simply create a blog and purchase information for it. For instance, you could setup a blog about dieting; and then purchase a set of 15 articles from a ghostwriter. Every 3-4 days, you could post a new article about dieting. Once you have a blog running, you can then move to the next one while you wait for the first to begin getting search again traffic.

With this method, you will want to get natural search engine traffic, rather than referred traffic, as the content you post will be high-quality, but not anything that will elicit some type of viral effect from social bookmarking sites.

Furthermore, when generating traffic, you will want to find ways to recycle it to ensure that your traffic constantly grows in the future.

Last, you will want to figure out how to monetize your blog or blogs. You can do this with advertising, by selling products, or by setting up some type of subscription. I personally suggest that you leave your blog unmonetized until you begin to build a regular base of visitors; however, if you are planning to go the multiple blog route, you may simply want to throw up Adsense ads immediately.