Blogging to make money?

The short definition of blogging is the author of a blog. Blog is actually short for weblog and these are web pages available to the public with personal views, ideas and thoughts from a person. Many times they are on a specific topic or theme are updated regularly.

Different Software Platforms

There are many different software programs to start your own. If you are wanting to make money by blogging make sure the software program you want to use has that ability. Listed below are a few programs available but not all.

• Wordpress.com - Free, but very limited on themes and cannot use Adsense or any other type of money making advertisement on the site. If you are an affiliate marketer you can use affiliate links within your posts. You do have stats available on your blog of your views, how visitors found you and such. Plugins for wordpress.com are not available

• Wordpress.org - Need to set up on a web host. Average cost is approximately US$6.95 a month. You have more control over the look of your blog. There are hundreds of plugins available. You can create sitemaps, add Google Adsense or different types of advertising, search engine optimization. This list goes on and on.

• Blogger.com - Free. You do have some control using Blogger, and you are able to set up Google Adsense easily. Set up is easy.

• b2evolution.net - Free/Paid. This can be run on a free web host but you need to make sure your hosting company meets the requirements. As like wordpress.org, you can add this using your hosting company or purchase a web hosting plan.

What can I write about?

The great thing about being a blogger is there is no limit to what it can be about. You can have cat blogs, personal, general, business or anything in between blogs.

Free Software vs Using Web Hosting

What you really want to know is if you create a free one can you still make money? My opinion of this is yes you can, but using the free software comes with many limitations and if you are serious about trying to make money online then without a doubt you have more of an advantage when you use web hosting for your blog. You have more control over the look and have more creativity to your site and more ways to montinize your entries.

When you have your blog through a web hosting plan you do have many more available tools. Like all of the cool plugins. You can make it more optimized to help the search engine spiders. Yes, you still can get page rank for a free blog and even though that helps with traffic, many of the searches coming from the search engines will not give you what you need: targeted traffic.

Say you decide to use free blog software. After maybe a year or so your blogging efforts are high in the search engines, have good page rank and have used Google Adsense or other ways to generate money and you are making a little bit from it, then one day you go into your blog to add more posts and can not get into it, but you get a notice that says something like: "We have decided to end our free software, if you would like to continue blogging you have to use this web hosting program." or "If you are using this, that or the other type of program to generate income on your blog, it is against our Terms of Service"

You may say, "Oh that will never happen." Never say never. Because it could happen. Then all of your hard work may be lost. Many times to make money you have to spend money (sometimes not alot).

Just remember that if you are looking for fast money, blogging may not be the way to go. Most bloggers will tell you that it is hard work to make money blogging. But with a little luck, a lot of dedication and don't lose sight of your goal, you can make come extra cash.

Here is a great reality check about blogging for money written by Darren Rowse, a pro that has earned in excess of $250k a year blogging.