How to Start Blogging – A Beginners Guide to Making Blogs

If making money through blogging is your intention, then creating a popular blog is your key to success. If you write something which is not useful to your readers its very likely that you’ll receive very low traffic unless you do some strong on-page and off-page SEO or probably indulge into some Blackhat SEO techniques. If you receive low traffic, you will not have much success monetizing it. That’s for sure. If you have a large readership, you will find success – no matter which method you choose to make money from your blog. Hence making a popular blog and growing readership should be your primary target.

To make a popular blog, the first thing you should consider is to target your audience or who you’re writing for. You should always select your topic which interests you and on which you think you can write about while keeping in mind whether it will interest others. You may think that what you are writing about is very interesting and informative, but there might not be many people who want to read what you write. I would personally suggest targeting a topic which has proven huge readership though some experts will suggest writing on niche topics as the competition will be less there. But I think niche markets are good for creating small websites with only a few articles/pages and make some quick money out of it. It may also be helpful to target niche topics if you’re planning to create an autoblog. If you really love the topic you want to write about and have some really useful information to share with your users, then I would suggest not considering about the competition.

The best thing about blogging is that you need not be a professional writer to create a popular blog. The only thing is you should follow the basic grammatical rules and should be able to put a few sentences together and express yourself. In this context, thought clarity is very much required i.e. you should be clear to yourself about what you’re going to write today. But the bottom-line is you do not have to be a highly skilled writer.

The main reason why a “normal blog reader” becomes a “regular blog reader” is because of interesting and relevant topics. Mind it – a blog reader never looks for the next work of Shakespeare from a “Make money blog”. So make sure that what you write is interesting, to the point and sometimes even controversial. Your aim should be to add value to your readers’ lives through information or entertainment. This will help you develop a large fan base.

Now that you have decided the topic to write about, start thinking about many ways to popularize it. Making a blog popular depends on how much traffic you can drive to your website/blog. Try to find places to link back to your blog. That’s a good way to drive traffic to your blog. Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Youtube provide a lot of opportunity for this. Other ways for link building and driving traffic is Social bookmarking sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can also create a blog on popular platforms like Blogger and WordPress and link back to your own blog.

Whether you blog on a blogging network or you have an independently hosted blog, you should make sure that your blog is designed clean & well. It is true that content is king and if a blog has great content is may receive lots of traffic even though it is ugly, having a well-designed blog that is not ugly or annoying will help to drive returning visitors. You may want your blog to look unique, but not too unique to break the basic internet formalities such as blue links and using large font for headings.

Break your post up into small paragraphs, preferably each having a headline or the first line on the paragraph in bold letters. If you think from a readers point of view, you should quickly realize that readers tend to scan the screen looking for relevant information rather than reading every single word. Make sure not to contrast your colors too harshly and the font that you use is readable to the human eye easily. Using a clean design will make your blog aesthetically pleasing and make readers come back. Apart from writing useful, informative and unique articles, aesthetics also add to a blog’s readership and makes readers more likely to come back and spend more time on your blog.

Coming to the monetization part, no matter where your blog is hosted, you should try to get it indexed by all major search engines. Most forms of blog monetization require your blog to be indeed by search engines before they’ll allow you to participate in their program. The more visitors you receive, the higher your blog will be ranked on search engines and thus your blog becomes popular.

Before you try to implement your monetization strategies, make sure your blog has enough readers to make your efforts work. If there is no one to click your ads, visit your affiliate sites, or read your reviews, you do not stand much of a chance of making money.

So don’t waste time in thinking and take action. Create an engaging blog.