Google Adsense is something that every blogger entering the blogging world had heard about, and often thought about how much they think they could make with it. You’ve probably heard about some of the more successful bloggers who use Adsense. There are two sides to the coin, hopefully you will consider both sides before going with Adsense.

Google Adsense is one of the highest ppc (pay per click) advertisers out there. They make millions to billions of dollars a year simply with their Google Adwords and Adsense ppc advertising. You receive a code to paste into certain areas of your site, and then it will automatically refresh with ads displayed inside of them. Whenever somebody browsing your blog gets interested in the ad and clicks on it, you are paid a small fee for bringing them a potential customer. It’s as easy as that, getting people to click on your ads.

If you go with ppc, Google Adsense will be your best bet as they have the highest ppc out there. They have a minimum payout of $100 via check. You must be 18 years old to use it. They will also check your website out before allowing you to sign up for your first account. After that you can apply the codes wherever you want them. There are some very strict rules to the ads such as your account could be banned if you in any way try to encourage users to click on the ads by rewarding them or any other sort of incentives.

My personal statement about Google’s Adsense for blogs, ‘don’t use it’. The space you use to put up decently sized banners of Adsense ad’s could easily be filled with private ad sales. These tend to be more profitable towards you because they pay for time of advertisement versus traffic actually sent to them. With 3 125×125 which would take the place of a the Adsense banner in one side bar, you can easily make $120+ a month after you get some decent traffic and subscribers. $240 when you put the 3 next to them in your second sidebar.

Why is it not very effective? Well to the argument, there are browsers, and fire fox plug ins that automatically remove Google Ads from every page. So they come to your site and see a blank spot instead of the ads. Wasted space because to make money with them you must have people click on them which they can’t do if they can’t see them. Secondly, they pay very minimal per click. It first varies on keyword. Blogs generally don’t seem to get too highly paid keywords due to some varying content. It’s pretty hard to make close to what you could on private sales when you are depending upon traffic. Even if you had a high enough traffic level to match the $240 a month you could be making with private ads, at that point charging $40 per sidebar ad would be too low. The point is you can’t beat private sales where you don’t split the money with a middle man.

There are some instances where Google Adsense does seem to have a positive outcome. Niche blogs for example. By this I mean a niche blog you put up, throw up 10-20 articles and leave it be. You won’t have people interested in advertising there, but Google Adsense will. Over time your blog may get some decent traffic from search engines and you’ll make some money with it. Forums work well with Google Adsense due to limited room for private sales, plus nobody likes big flashy banners or ads on forums. Most people don’t have forums on their blogs, so for the most part, I’d stay away.

If you have a site currently running Adsense, or if you are looking into it for your blog, leave a comment with your blogs address and I will come take a look at it. I will help you decide which way you would be most successful in monetizing your blog.

A safety post would be considered a post that you write up days, weeks, or months in advance just in case something comes up. The more safety posts you have, the better off you will be. It will make your life much easier in the future. Let’s say you are going on vacation for a week. WordPress blogs have a feature that will let you automatically have drafted posts get published on scheduled days and times. While you are away simply schedule the post you want published each day and then you are worry free during your time of absence from your blog.

If you don’t have safety posts, you either have to slop together some quick posts, or even worse, tell your loyal readers that you are going away for a week and you won’t be publishing anything new. This will not only hurt your readership, but may even cost you a few of your RSS Subscribers while you are away.

You never know when you will need them. Unexpected things happen all the time, and safety posts are going to help keep you prepared for when they do. If you have writers block and just can’t seem to get anything written that day you can use one, however be aware that you are taking from your safety posts and that you will need to make those up sometime in the future.

A good idea would be when writing posts for your blog, try to be at least a week ahead. So maybe every Saturday you write the posts for the upcoming week. If something new and unexpected comes up that has to be written you can simply take a post out of the scheduled week. This post then can be saved in your drafts as one of your safety posts. In order to grow this list, depending on your topic you can either keep doing the above process and then anything taken out of the weekly line up can be saved for the future, or during the week, since you already have the entire weeks posts written, you can spend some free time writing future posts.

Obviously safety posts must be on a topic that isn’t a current event. Safety posts must be about something not pertaining to the present time. You can’t use a safety post about a new product that is just announced or released. That is something current, and you may not be using these posts for a while. If you save this, not only do you lose the traffic searching for this current topic, but you also will have a horribly outdated post in the future.

I try to keep a decent sized draft box with many different posts. In fact, before I actually launched this site I had enough posts for almost two full months. That way when I’m going through the hard time of blogging I can pick and choose which posts I would like to use, as well as go over them to make sure it still expressed my opinion on the subject.

It’s better to be prepared and not need them, than to desperately need them and not have them. I challenge you to create at least a weeks extra worth of posts. You will need them sometime in the future, it’s just a matter of time.

Well it’s gotten to be 1:30 am here and I realized, I haven’t published a daily post yet. I’ve had plenty of time on my computer to day that I spent wasting my time checking stats for various blogs, as well as spent times on forums, and even reading other make money blogs. When you want to run a very successful blog, you have to set your priorities. If you want to make money with your blog, you have to follow through on these priorities on a daily basis.

One way to make sure you have a post to publish everyday would be by writing the next days post the day before. Then when tomorrow comes and you realized you haven’t written that days post you will have time to make up for it yet by writing one up and publishing it.

It’s all about getting into a routine. I’m still rather new to having my own self hosted blog and have to find a way to work in the daily tasks required into my time on the computer. It may take a little getting used too, but the main point is, don’t delay.

If you delay writing it once, you are sure to delay it again, and again, eventually failing to do it at all. This is not something that will happen again in the near future. This is to make up for yesterdays lack of focus, and I’ll be up bright and early tomorrow to start your day off with another useful post. Ok so I usually publish mid afternoon, but keep your eyes out.

It’s getting close to that time of year, summer break. Schools across the United States, and England are getting finished up with school for the summer. These are two of the biggest countries we get traffic from. What does this mean for those of us out there who are starting niche blogs?

There will be a large number of internet users from the ages of about 8-24 who will be getting increased time allowance on computers due to an extra eight or so hours a day being added to their schedule. You could start to earn some pretty big checks if you learn how to take advantage of this three month period. If you do it successfully enough, by the time fall comes around you will have a large enough audience that you may be able to keep a pretty strong level of income streaming in even after they’ve started school again due to your search engine ranks.

By summer niches, I mean niches that will take advantage of the above information. What sort of things are kids searching for on the internet? I have several ideas of blogs I’m thinking of starting up. It shouldn’t be too hard to think of your niche. You will have to decide how you want to go about monetizing it, and if there is enough content to minimally get you through the three months of summer (90 posts).

A drawback to teenagers and younger kids is the fact that 17 and under aren’t supposed to have paypal, they don’t generally have debit or credit cards, and even if they did, they are closely monitored by their parents. That leaves many affiliate marketing system to be rather hard to work. Even if they saw a link on your blog, by the time their parents did order it you’ll probably have lost your affiliate cookie on their computer.

There are ways to monetize these blogs though. There are the usual 125×125 ads, and blogroll links. These are easy enough to sell, and the fact that your audience probably has no interest or capability of financially rewarding the sites doesn’t affect your income. Another option, similar to those two would be selling paid plugs. These paid reviews do have a better profitability option for the customer, and are an easy way to monetize your blog. Lastly, believe it or not, I’m actually saying that AdSense and all the other pay per click advertising may also have some success. Remember, your audience is young and more likely to click an ad than an adult. Also, the viewer doesn’t have to pay for you to get paid. Since they can’t do much purchasing of their own, this is one way to get clicks to convert to money.

Starting a blog in this niche would have been smart to have prepared weeks ago. It’s not too late though. Get started on your blog that will take advantage of the added browsing time of the younger internet views. It will be very profitable if you set it up correctly. Good luck.

When starting a blog, the hardest question is generally, ‘What do I want to write about?’ You will have to write about the same general idea for the life of your blog. The longer your blog is up, usually means the more traffic you will receive. If you can’t provide content for at least a year and you plan to make big money on your blog you may want to rethink this.

Before some of the more experienced bloggers start jumping to conclusions, I am not saying blogs can’t have less than twenty posts and continue to make money for a long time. They can easily do that, if they are doing affiliate monetizing. If this is going to be a blog like this one, something you wish to sell paid plugs, 125×125 ads, banners, links, and several other advertisement options, you will need to have content and plenty of it.

To find a niche that is best for what you plan on doing, you must first determine what your plans for the blog are. I will stick with a blog where you wish to sell advertisements for this post. There are plenty of options out there. The most crowded niche by far is dealing with making money online or making money blogging, my niche. These are very competitive, which also leads to some pluses and minuses.

A less covered niche that has a large audience is basically a hidden gem. Good luck trying to find one. Even if there is not a powerhouse blog in that niche, it may be a topic covered extensively in normal websites. This would take away from the potential audience, and affiliate sales would be harder to complete.

A site on NFL football may be practically empty in the blogging field. There are a few reasons for this. It’s a very popular topic, but when people want to know about it there are so many places that contain more up to date content and usually better quality than you can provide. ESPN, NFL.com, even Yahoo and MSN have updates for them. Then you have the television updates which are even more popular than the websites.

You will rarely find a blogger willing to share their extensive list of niches so choosing your niche can be pretty difficult. Not only do you have to find something you feel like you know enough about or are willing to do the research on, but you also have to make sure this topic has profitability potential. There are a few ways to determine this. You can go with what AdSense and AdWords charges per click. These will basically set the standard for what to expect. The higher the price you get from these, generally the more profitable the niche can be.

In the end, go with what you want to write about. I enjoy reading about how to make money blogging, and I enjoy writing about it. Blogging can become a nightmare if you don’t enjoy your topic. There will be some way to monetize your blog, it’s just a matter of how much potential it has. For your very first blog, pick something you enjoy writing about. Publish daily, and you will start to see an increase in profits, readers, and how much fun you’re having.

Just thought I’d let all of you bloggers out there using the ever popular cpanel. It is probably the biggest site for hosting. Almost all of the larger hosting companies point you there. Unless you are a brilliant coder and experienced with cpanel you probably aren’t able to install the WordPress blog by downloading and editing the files like WordPress teaches you.

We settle for an option called Fantastico where it will install the blog, and sign you up. It’s very easy. The only thing was, it was a bit lagging behind in WordPress updates. They were still running 2.5, but they just updated within the last week to the newest 2.5.1. Feel free to update your blogs now!

Is it just me or does every single make money blog out there seem to have contests as a large source of traffic and gaining RSS Subscribers? I realize there are some people that sign up for content, however it seems as though many people will sign up simply for contests. Are you really helping your blog by running these contests? Some of my personal thoughts on this.

First of all, the traffic you are receiving is not real. It will be mostly one or two time visitors that heard about your contest from a post on another blog. This will lead them there for one purpose and one purpose only, your contest. They will probably sign up for your RSS Feed if it’s a RSS only contest. After the contest is done they either forget your site, or drop it from their feed. After a contest it wouldn’t be unlikely to see a drop in subscribers.

You can benefit from these contests. Let’s say your blog is big enough that companies or bloggers donate your prizes. If your prizes aren’t purchased by you, you’re not going to lose anything. No matter what you think, if you’re paying for your prizes it won’t make you back your money in the long run. The contest will be the extent of your benefits with the extra traffic sent to your site.

What types of contests are the most beneficial to the blog? Contests that are “random” drawings. The entrants name is played in the drawing x-times. A way to get in the drawing could be through comments, guest posts, writing a review of your blog, or many other ways that will benefit you. Make the time line around a month if there are a couple of good prizes. If there are indeed more than one good prize you may actually have quite a few people actively trying to obtain as many submissions into the drawing as possible.

Another cool contest idea was one I saw on a make money blog called bloggernoob. It was a domain tournament, but it’s not so much the domain part of it, rather the tournament. The contest was a free entrance and for each entrant he would put in $x. After 32 people entered it was like an NCAA tournament. 32-16-8-4-2-1. You could vote only once per ip address. It seemed to receive a decent amount of traffic. The sites entered in it will most likely alert their websites readers of the contest in order to get votes, and this will increase your chances of getting some targeted readers.

These are just two of many different contests. Experiment with them, some things may work better depending upon your niche. Do I plan to hold contests? Yes, but they wouldn’t be with my earnings. Bloggers are generally earning less than they would make at minimum wage, and I can’t afford to donate my earnings towards contests at the current time, because there are no earnings. I would be more than open to a contest where I received some donations because I believe if you run it correctly you can get quite a few subscribers and make a few bucks off of it.

Obviously one of the largest ways of making money with your blog is through affiliate accounts. An affiliate  is when you get paid for bringing business to a site. It usually involves either the person clicking on one of your specially coded links that have a referral code on them, or a banner displayed on your site with the same referral code on it.

The question is, when do you review these affiliates? If you are in the same niche that I’m in, then there may be a wise time to review them. If I were to put up some reviews of the sites I wish to show you in hopes of you signing up, I wouldn’t want to do that as my first post. Not many people search through your archives, especially if they aren’t easy to search through.

If you post it after you have 200 RSS subscribers you will have 200 people who will potentially read the post and maybe even sign up. Keep in mind a review should be honest to your readers because there is no point in lying to the reader, they will only sign up and quit. You will get nothing out of this, and you will have wasted your readers time.

You should review them after you get a decent amount of daily traffic. This amount will vary depending upon your blogs niche. I would suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of 200+ daily uniques, or 200+ RSS subscribers. The longer you wait, the better your success.

If you happened to have posted these offers before why not throw links to yourself in the middle of an article? Point an article on the topic of the affiliate site to your review. People will generally click this link to another one of your posts if they are interested in the topics.

Another rather common way of getting these links out there would be in a monthly earnings report. If you share with your readers how much you are making each month, why not put amounts you earned from each program. Then with links right next to the earnings you can have your affiliate code in there. This way they will choose some of the more profitable sites and hopefully sign up.

The longer you wait to actually dedicate a post about them, the better you’ll do. If you have reviewed them already, don’t republish it. You can use many techniques to display your affiliate codes elsewhere on your site.

Anybody else read the latest monthly earnings report from johnchow.com? He made $32,529.40 in April alone! That is just incredible. If he makes 30k a month every month for a year, he’s making more than just about every average profession out there! $360,000 a year, not bad at all.

How does he do it? Well the majority of his income comes from private sales, 16k of it did. 26k comes from private ad sales and affiliate offers. He doesn’t even do 100% of his posting anymore. He gets guest posters who are more than happy to post on a blog with almost 26,000 RSS subscribers. This is where the estimated “price per subscriber” must have been established. You can see that he makes about $1.10 per subscriber.

Anyways he is the leading blogger in the make money blogging niche. You will hear a lot about him. In fact, numerous blogs are copycats of him. Blogs like johncow.com, and then of course the smaller blogs that pretty much reword his posts everyday.

His earning report can be found here.

There are many different reasons why one would start a free blog. There are also many different places you can set up your free blog, each with it’s own benefits and downfalls. Over the next few days I will help you pick out the blog service that will be right for you, as well as help you get started on your way to making money with them.

The two major blogging platforms are Google’s Blogger and WordPress. Each service will allow you a few different services that will cater to different bloggers, and different blogs in general. The follow guides will be based on completely my opinion. Having used both extensively for free blogs, you can trust that I know what you are looking for.

WordPress has been around for about five years now. It was developed by a team of coders, and now owned by it’s creator. It has not been sold to any large industry like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. It has more freedom because it’s creation was purely for bloggers, versus the various Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft blogging services who were only looking for financial gains. With this comes many features that can help you create an award winning blog.

There are several features I like about this blog. The autopost has got to be the biggest. I can schedule a post to automatically be posted at whatever time, day, month, and year of my choosing. That way I don’t have to worry about upsetting my audience while out of town. I can simply write some posts ahead of time and enjoy my vacation. The provided themes seem to be of a lot better quality than those of Blogger. They have a stats system implemented into your blog so you can discover how many people view your blog each day, what posts get the most views, what the most popular search engine terms used to find your blog are, what links they clicked on your blog, and much much more.

Then there would be the top dog Google’s blogging service called Blogger. Blogger contains a few things that you may like especially for a free blogging service. You can find certain themes online that are made with CSS to update your blog. They allow you to change the layout without paying monthly fees. Their widget system is a lot better. Not only do they have more, and better widgets, but customizing them into the layout is much easier as you can get a visual while doing it. The last big point is you can sell advertisements on your blog. They are Google Adsense capable, and also will allow things like Entrecard, Yahoo Ad’s, Project Wonderful ads, and any other ad service you can find out there. You could also sell 125×125 ads on the side.

So which should you choose? It all comes down to the purpose for your blog. There are many things to consider. Both blogging services are great, however I personally have a favorite. Once again, the below suggestions are simply my opinion.

WordPress Users:

1. Interested in auto-posting
2. Dislike Google Analytics updating stats daily, WordPress does every new visit
3. Wish to move their blog to their own domain eventually (you would want to use WordPress for your own domain instead of Blogger for many reasons)
4. You have no interest in putting up ads
5. You don’t wish to spam your readers with ads in order to get a reader base
6. Your only way of monetizing is with affiliate links in your posts and you could also secretly sell links in the blogroll

Blogger Users:

1. Want their free blog to be able to make a lot of money (not a sure thing, you need to put effort in to get money out)
2. Interested in ad services like Entrecard both for traffic and advertising
3. Have no plans of moving to their own domain in the future
4. Willing to use Google Analytics

So there you have it. The big differences between the blogging services, as well as which free blogging service you should use when starting your blog. I hope this has helped you, if you have any questions about which you should use feel free to ask in a comment.