My Make Money Guide

Welcome to the first part of the 10 part series focused on leveraging the money making opportunity of blogging.

Blogging is a great way to earn money online and, as well as easy to set up and maintain.  If you can imagine a life where you earn money to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are, then you are part of the way with blogging for profit.  In addition to the flexibility blogging provides, you have the possibility of producing a nice residual income source.

If you follow this article, you will be helped through the process, step by step, to setting up your own blog.

First thing you need to do is to set up your blog.  You have two options here -get a free blog or host a blog on your own domain.  We will talk about the free blog option first.  You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com.

Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster.  Wordpress.com, however, is a relatively new option, and may take longest to be indexed.  Wordpress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features, such as managing your sidebar links effectively and efficiently.

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/signup.g) or Wordpress (http://wordpress.com/signup/).  After you have it set up, make a first post.  Play around with some of the options and get used to the settings and features.

Over the course of this article, and as you get more into the world of blogging, you will run into new words.  Below are some of those new words, with explanations to help you out.

1.    Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section.  This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.
2.    Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.
3.    Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays.  Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website.  This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

Make sure you familiarize your self with the free blog that you setup.  Spend time learning features.  The following articles will discuss how to begin to gain profit from your blog.  In addition to that, you will also learn how to write posts that will keep traffic flowing to your blog.  The more traffic you have means the more potential to earn profit.

In our second part of the 10 part series, you will learn about blog content.  It will give you insight into choosing the right kind of content and how to produce the right kind for your blog needs.