6 more free steps to making money online
Copyright 2004 Darren Power

If you read my previous article you will know that the goal
of these articles is to teach you ways to get started
making money online without having to spend any money.

This is the second in the series and this time we deal with
having your own blog. There are endless ways of making
money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you
traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come
from Google Adsense.

There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the
low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you get
traffic to your blog and the fact that you can provide your
blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to
automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader.

Let's get started with our 6 steps.

1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are
going to blog about. You should decide on a theme and name
your blog appropriately.

There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have
it hosted for free. We will go with Blogger.com for our
first blog.

Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will
host it for free and they will ping search engines every
time you update, meaning you will get spidered & found.  

Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page
labelled 'create your blog now' then follow the step by
step instructions that Blogger provide.

Some key settings you will want to get right are:

I)   'Host your blog at Blogger' = Yes
II)  'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes
III) 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes
IV)  'Publish Site Feed'  = Yes

2.  Write some content. Before we move any further there
has to be some information on the site & that means that
you have to make some entries. You can write some of these
entries yourself & some can be quotes from sites of
interest to your reader that you can post using the Google
Toolbar.

You can download the Google toolbar for free at
toolbar.google.com. The toolbar includes a Blogger button.
When you visit a site that has something of interest to
your readers you can highlight the appropriate text & click
the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your
blog along with a link back to the site.

3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging
with 1 or 2 entries for everyday, you can apply for an
adsense account. When you sign in to Blogger you will see
an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for
an account.

You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page but
basically you get Google ads on your site & get paid if
your visitor clicks them.

Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on
the content it finds within.

You need to be aware that Google will decline your
application if your site is not considered to have content.
Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules on this.

Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript
from Google to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to
Blogger.

Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one
of the tabs across the top of the screen is labelled
'Template'. Click this.  You will need to know a little bit
of HTML to help find the right location to paste your
Google code. But with a little experimentation you will
find the right place for you. See the resource box at the
end of this article for more help.

I would suggest that the ads need to be seen when the site
loads but should not be too obvious or dominate your site.

4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content
coming at regular intervals as a number of directories will
check on your site at regular intervals & the smarter ones
will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule.
They will probably determine this in the hours after you
first submit to them. Which is what we will do next.

5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you
are hosting at Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be
notified when you update your blog. (That means that every
time you make a new entry they are automatically notified)
You will need to manually submit to the various other
directories some of which will require a link on your site
to theirs.

You can add these links to your template below your Blogger
logo. For a list of directories to get you started visit
www.themoneyseed.com/rss

6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want
people to come back again and again. As with customers its
harder to get a new visitor than to keep existing visitors.
So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that
they can't help but tell all their friends about it also.

As with most free ways to make money this will take time to
get going, but if you can build a following you will make
money.   



About the Author:

Darren Power is the author of The Money Seed, your step by
step guide to making money online. For supplimentary
information & free resources related to this article visit
www.themoneyseed.com/rss