Can Blogging Help You Make Money?

A blog is simply a blog – an online discussion or informative site published on the World Wide Web containing concise, usually informal blog-style text posts. Posts are commonly displayed in either reverse chronological order, or in alphabetical order, with the latest post appearing at the top of the page. Most blog services offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing tools and other internet marketing strategies to promote your blog. But not all blog marketing strategies are equal. Before you embark on a blog marketing campaign, consider whether or not your blog will generate the desired traffic and profits to justify the costs involved.

Some blogs aim only to provide information. Such sites may not attract the same number of visitors as more focused ones, but their purpose is often the same: to offer information. In this case, a blog post may be solely devoted to an explanation of a product or service. If you want to attract a larger audience, however, you may want to supplement your content with links to related posts and web pages; these should direct readers to additional material on your or affiliate company’s website.

Some bloggers, called gurus, treat blogging as a money making machine. These individuals treat every blog entry as a potential “viral” promotion, hoping that someone will link to and follow the entry. While viral marketing can help one to place a link to another web page or blog, this does not always work.

Other bloggers, called hobbyists, treat blogging more as a way of life. In this instance, the blog is not used to make money, but instead to engage and share knowledge with others. For these bloggers, blogging is fun and holds little personal value apart from sharing knowledge with friends and sharing information with others interested in the same particular field. For hobbyist bloggers, SEO isn’t an important factor in their blog. This doesn’t mean that they don’t want visitors to the blog, but if they have little or no SEO knowledge themselves, it isn’t a priority to them.

Regardless of what type of blogger you are, if you blog often and have a strong social media presence, you can use blogging as a way of generating income. There are many ways to do this, but one way that should never be under-used is social networking. A few years ago, blogging was a time-consuming project. Now it’s easier than ever to generate income simply by sending out a few blog entries and linking back to social networking profiles such as Facebook. A great way to get started is to set up a profile for your blog so that readers can read about your daily adventures and maybe “like” your page and follow you on Twitter, if you have one.

Nowadays, blogging is a great way to get your blog noticed around the world. Search engines recognize blog code much better now than they did before and your blog can easily show up in search results, which increases the number of people who will visit your blog. When someone does come to your blog, chances are that they will be interested in what you have to say. This is why so many successful bloggers are also great speakers and prolific writers. So the bottom line is that blogging can help you earn money, if you do it correctly.