Way #3 (Alternate Income Streams) - Blogging for Cash

Hello everyone.
I hope that all of you had a wonderful weekend. Today's post is going to be about how to make money through blogging. Since you're on my blog, I will assume that you know what a blog is, and not insult your intelligence. However, in this post, I will outline different ways to attract viewers and subsequently advertising attention to your site, so you can make some money.

In order to have a successful blog that people want to look at, you must have something interesting or worthwhile to talk about. For me, it's obviously personal finance. Ever since high school, I've been intrigued by the way people handle money - largely, I guess, because I didn't have particularly copious amounts of it growing up.

So after you figure out what you'd like to write about, be it baseball, politics, personal finance, or home decorating, you want to go to http://www.blogspot.com and set yours up. It's really easy to do and Google makes the whole process user friendly. You have the ability to add "page elements" such as links to other websites, news articles relating to your blog topic, and AdSense to your blog. AdSense allows advertisers to place ads on your blog and through the 'pay-per-click' model, whenever someone clicks on an advertisement on your page, you begin receiving checks.

So, in order for blogging to be lucrative financially, you have to post consistently and have a relatively large following of readers who click on ads. How does one go about building this large following? One of the methods I've used is creating a group on the Facebook (www.facebook.com) and inviting all of my friends. Word of mouth is very powerful, I've found, in the internet age and if a group resonates with someone, he or she will join it. My Facebook group contains a link to this blog and I'm also in the process of creating a MySpace page to connect with even more people.

In addition to using social networking sites to draw more people to your site, if you include fun features such as daily quotes, or video clips pertaining to your blog topic, readers will be more likely to return. For instance, I am in the process of developing a podcast for Gen Y Financial Freedom in order to inform more people and increase financial literacy. All of this will and does make for a more heavily-trafficked website.

In my next couple of posts, I will talk about other ways to use the internet as a cash-generator. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to post them or ask me directly by email at jcp182000@yahoo.com or jcp182000@gmail.com. Thanks for reading and I'll see you all back here tomorrow.