Of Monetizing Blogs, Text Links Ads, Peel-Away Ads and Hover Ads – Part 1

This is a multi part series to create awareness and educate the people on how blogging can be a fulfilling and profitable enterprise. Blogging can be an engaging and liberating way of engaging oneself. I shall cover the basics on how one can start, content creation and optimization, and finally see how monetization works on the Net. In between we shall cover Blogging Technologies for Dummies and sort out the techie stuff, especially for dummies 😉

The Internet is awash wish the so-called web 2.0 tools that should take you to a palm tree shade in Maldives for a year, as your account fattens in autopilot. This is when you fully monetize your blog. In a blog all the owner does is register a domain name, get a web hosting solution, create content, do some SEO (as in search engine optimization), slap the relevant ads, and hey presto …. off to Maldives, no packing required. If it is that easy, why are we not all in Maldives? For one the hotels there would not be enough to accommodate us all ….. Seriously though, the thing is that it’s not that simple … Read on….

Preliminaries —- buy a domain name that is catchy yet descriptive. Also aim to brand yourself with the domain name. Choose a hosting plan that puts you in control, and has all the relevant tools to make customization of your blogs easy. Ensure that you can easily put plug ins and other whizzy stuff to make your blog snazzy, but not too busy as to loose your readers attention. It is also important that you OWN your domain name, (be careful when registering, else one year down the line, the domain name owner will sell the domain, and you are left wondering what hit you). It happens. Details shall come in part 2.

Then second step is one needs to create niche content. Create content that you are passionate about, what is called USP – unique selling point. This is really the easiest way, since you are an expert on what you passionate about. What will make your blog stand out from the millions on the same subject that exist out there? And more importantly, what will make the people flock to your blog, read the content, comment, sign up for your newsletter, sign up for your RSS feed etc. The answer is content. Which really means that we should all be blogging about something, since content is inexhaustible, right? True, scratch and you shall find content to blog about under the surface.

It is important to ensure that your blog has fresh content. Repeat, fresh content, as in keep it updated. This keeps everyone happy … you the blogger shall be excited since you are writing daily about a passionate subject (content), your visitors / readers shall be happy since you are providing them with the content they crave, Mr. Google (that king of search and indexing) shall be very happy as he sends his spiders to crawl your site and report back to the index, your advertisers shall be hearing the cash clicking in the bank as the customers click through their adverts, the hosting company shall be happy to keep the servers cool, secure and running, the web master shall be happy to keep the site in shape …………. the whole world will be happy. In fact we have just discovered the solution to world peace. Happy blogging!

Comments on blogging and monetizing blogs are welcome.