Okay, so you’re looking to make some money online but you don’t quite know where to start. You think you need some sort of affiliate product to sell or a website of some kind and are maybe a little intimidated by the whole undertaking. I’ll try to keep it simple, for beginners the best way is to earn extra cash writing with Blogger.
Blogger is a free program online that allows you to set up your own blog with a unique sub domain; like this blog you’re reading right now! You can name your blog whatever you want (ideally after the keyword you’re targeting) and it will end with .blogspot.com. For this site my address is earnextracashwriting – my keywords are earn extra cash– so having a blog with those words right in the URL is a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tip! The great thing about Blogger is that it is user-friendly; you don’t need to be a programmer to add or move widgets around – so you can get it set up as you like and be ready to earn extra cash writing in no time at all!
The rest is now up to you – you need to provide the content, you need to write something to build up your blog with good, original, keyword-specific and search engine optimized content to start drawing in organic (non-paid) traffic. Once you have traffic, you can monetize your blog easily in just a few minutes by adding the Adsense widget and signing up for an Adsense account. You can now start earning extra cash for your words – pretty cool eh? You don’t have to pay for anything, Blogger is free and the Adsense program is free. Your only upfront investment is researching how to find the right keywords, how to write posts focused on your keywords and how to optimize your content for the search engines. Once you have a solid grasp on all that, you just have to write, write and write some more.
As I mentioned in my first post on this blog, if you have a passion for writing, and you’ve chosen a topic that you enjoy – this will be easier for you to do. You don’t have to enjoy what you’re writing about, but it helps. If you’re disciplined enough to write about anything that pays, and are willing to write your own content and do some research at times (since you’re not fully knowledgeable about your content) you can earn extra cash writing as well. I can’t think of an easier business to start up besides writing online for cash. Many people are happy to write and never see a dime for their work, while website publishers are using their content to drive in organic traffic and make money from advertisers. The benefits of writing online are many – here are just two reasons to give it a try.
1. Costs nothing upfront – you don’t need to buy programs, and chances are you’re already paying for a computer and an internet connection. Technically, you can get free access to the internet and computers at many public libraries, so there’s no reason why you can’t go into business for yourself and earn extra cash –for free!
2. Create once, get paid for months or years later – how much is your time worth? $15 per hour? $20? $35? Would you rather get paid $35 to write 500 words or get paid $10 per 1000 visits to your site for the rest of your life? I hope you said $10 cents per 1000 visits, because with some effort and patience, you can steadily increase your traffic to thousands a day. You can also improve click-through rate and how much you get paid per click to earn a lot more than $10 a day or even per hour.
These are just two great reasons to earn extra cash writing with Blogger. Nobody can do it for you, you have to decide to give it a shot and go for it. Do you want to just dream of getting paid while you sleep, or do you want to make it happen? You can read all this info 100 times over, but nothing will happen until you actually start to act upon it and start making things happen. Write now – the sooner the better. However, before you dive into this with a hunger to start earning cash, make sure that you have some solid content and traffic before you monetize your blog.
If you put ads on your blog before it has been indexed (located by Google), you’ll usually end up being penalized or sandboxed by the search engines. This means that nobody may be able to find your site online for up to six months or more. Wait until you’re getting steady traffic, have at least 10 pages of content and your site is three months old or so you should be able to start throwing in the ads. Right now I don’t have ads on this blog for this same reason. I want to earn extra cash writing with Blogger by putting into practice all the tips I’m sharing with you now, but not before all the proper groundwork has been covered. You need to be able to walk before you can run. Having patience will serve you well in this business.
While you’re waiting to monetize your blog you should write as much as you can. Even though you’re not getting paid for your time, think of it more as an investment – the money will be delayed but it will come. Once it starts, it won’t stop either (unless you piss off Google!). The other important thing that some may say is even more important than content is to build up back-links to your articles using your keywords as the anchor text for the link. This means that if someone wanted to link to this blog they should use Earn Extra Cash instead of Mike’s Writing Blog. This will increase the quality of your back-links, which will increase your Page Rank (PR) with Google. All this stuff boils down to more people finding your site and possibly clicking on your ads which will allow you to earn extra cash writing, which is why we’re all here.
Back to Blogger; besides the ease of use there is another deceptive fact about using Blogger to earn extra cash– Blogger blogs look ugly and are optimized for SEO. What this means is that it’s easy for you to set up your posts so that the search engine bots can easily determine what they’re all about, and the fact that the blogs are ugly means a higher click-through rate. People that have been online for any amount of time start to get judgemental about the sites they visit. Often, one look at a Blogger blog and people will click on an ad to get away quick rather than stick around and actually read your original and helpful content. This works to your advantage, because if they click on an ad to leave your site than you just got paid. It’s not your fault that they didn’t bother to stick around and read. This puts Blogger ahead of most of the other free blog software out there – it’s easy to use, is Adsense compatible and looks ugly, resulting in a higher click-through rate - right out of the box!
Wordpress is a hugely popular blogging platform in its own right, but the free version that they host for you doesn’t allow you to monetize it. You have to buy a domain name and a hosting package to be able to set up your Wordpress blog with ads to be able to earn extra cash writing. I use Wordpress and like using it – but the lack of the monetization with Adsense is pretty limiting, even if their blogs are ‘prettier’ to look at. There are other free programs out there, so far the only one I know of that easily incorporates Adsense is Blogger – probably because both are owned by Google. You can use Wordpress to make money, but not directly – and when you’re just starting out, earning extra cash by placing ads directly on your blog is the easiest and best way for you to learn and understand the basics. You could build up the authority and traffic of a Wordpress site and use it to point to other sites that you have monetized, but leave that until you have a better grasp on what you’re doing.
Anyway, if you’ve managed to read this entire post you’ve learned the basics to get going with your own online business so that you can start to earn extra cash writing with Blogger. Start up a blogger and adsense account right away and get writing. There’s no time like the present to build up a solid foundation so that you’re earning extra cash steadily for years to come.
Thanks for reading earn extra cash with Blogger.
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