If you read my previous article you will know that the goal of these articles is to teach you ways to get started making money online without having to spend any money.


This is the second in the series and this time we deal with having your own blog. There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come from Google Adsense.


There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you get traffic to your blog and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader.


Let's get started with our 6 steps.


1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog about. You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately.


There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted for free. We will go with Blogger.com for our first blog.


Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will host it for free and they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning you will get spidered & found.


Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page labelled 'create your blog now' then follow the step by step instructions that Blogger provide.


Some key settings you will want to get right are:

1. 'Host your blog at Blogger' = Yes
   
   
2. 'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes
   
   
3. 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes
   
   
4. 'Publish Site Feed' = Yes
   
   

2. Write some content. Before we move any further there has to be some information on the site & that means that you have to make some entries. You can write some of these entries yourself & some can be quotes from sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google Toolbar.


You can download the Google toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com. The toolbar includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest to your readers you can highlight the appropriate text & click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link back to the site.


3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging with 1 or 2 entries for everyday, you can apply for an adsense account. When you sign in to Blogger you will see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for an account.


You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page but basically you get Google ads on your site & get paid if your visitor clicks them.


Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on the content it finds within.


You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your site is not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules on this.


Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript from Google to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to Blogger.


Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one of the tabs across the top of the screen is labelled 'Template'. Click this. You will need to know a little bit of HTML to help find the right location to paste your Google code. But with a little experimentation you will find the right place for you. See the resource box at the end of this article for more help.


I would suggest that the ads need to be seen when the site loads but should not be too obvious or dominate your site.


4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content coming at regular intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular intervals & the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule. They will probably determine this in the hours after you first submit to them. Which is what we will do next.


5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you are hosting at Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your blog. (That means that every time you make a new entry they are automatically notified) You will need to manually submit to the various other directories some of which will require a link on your site to theirs.


You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a list of directories to get you started visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss


6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come back again and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor than to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that they can't help but tell all their friends about it also.


As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going, but if you can build a following you will make money.


Copyright 2004 Darren Power






Darren Power is the author of The Money Seed, your step by step guide to making money online. For supplimentary information & free resources related to this article visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss