I blog about whatever I want, whenever I want, to whomever I want. Well, actually, only those who will listen...shut up.
So, you’re one of those kinds of people who spends way to much time on the internet, right? (cough totallynotme cough) It’s probably crossed your mind more than once: “I sure wish I could make money while I spend my life feeding my addiction being completely productive on the internets.”
Well good news, you can, and if writing is your thing, it’s easy! I’m going to run it down step by step:
Step One: Choose Your Topic
Now you may be all “but it’s a blog I wanna blog about whatever” but no, that’s my job. Believe me, it’s much easier to make money by blogging if your content has a specific topic, so what better to blog about than something you love?
Like football? Blog about it. Like cars? Blog about them. Like rollerblading? Blog about it.
You see, the more targeted your target is, the more specific the ads displayed on your site (we’re getting to that later) will be, and your target audience will be more likely to be interested in whatever the ads display.
Step Two: Getting Your Own Domain Name
Now, before we get all giddy and run off to create our domain name, lets go over a few tips when picking out your domain name:
Got that down? Hope so, it was a short list. Now scoot your butt over to Namecheap (featured premium registrar) or Co.CC (for a free yoursite.co.cc “domain”). When you get the domain, hold off setting up the nameservers until the next step is finished.
Step Three: Finding Webhosting
Now we need a place to store the files that make up your website, so what we need is a webhost. Since you’re just starting out your site, you probably wont need any expensive hosting or packaging, so here is what I recommend:
Once your hosting account is setup, the host you chose will likely send you an e-mail detailing what nameservers to point your domain to. This is where you put in the nameservers for the domain name you picked in step two.
Step Four: Installing and Theming WordPress
So, I’m not going to lie, my absolute favorite blogging platform is WordPress. It’s quick, lightweight yet feature filled, and is highly supported by a community of themers and plugin developers to make your WordPress site do whatever you want it to. There are two ways of installing WordPress:
Once you have that setup, it’s likely you’ll want to use a new theme (If you want to use TwentyTen go ahead). I recommend picking up your themes from ElegantThemes, although there are tons of free sources around the internet for free themes as well. If you are having troubles installing your new theme, refer to this WordPress document on it.
Step Five: Write Content and Get Established
Sorry, the money isn’t going to flow in instantly, you still have to put in some work. Once your blog looks the way you want it, the next step is to fill it with some quality posts about the topic you choose. Don’t rush it and do it all in one day; write unique, interesting, quality content. If you don’t, you’ll go unnoticed by potential readers and search engines, which isn’t exactly very good.
So take your time, and see if you can get 10 or so posts in within a month. By that time you should be considered established and ready for the final step.
Final Step: Apply Advertising
So here’s where the money-making comes in. Your site is established, it gets it’s share of visitors. Now it’s time you put a few ads on your site (note the few, meaning about 2 or 3 per page, keeping your content near the top and the ads unobtrusive). The easiest system to use is Adsense, provided by Google. Sign up for it, and wait for your site to get approved (it wont get approved without quality content!).
Once that’s done, create some properly sized ads and place them on your site (good spots are in the header, in the sidebar, and above or below the beginning of posts). Some themes come with panels for easily adding your own ads, but some will require some plugins that create widgets for your html code, or you might just have to edit the html manually.
Give it a few days, and BAM, ads relevant to your blog’s topic should start being displayed. Don’t stop writing for your blog though! Keep writing new content to keep visitors interested and draw in new ones. Otherwise nobody will be there to click your ads!
Final Tips:
And that’s how it’s done. Best of luck with your new site!
UPDATED
So, since I finally got new webhosting, I’ve been busy setting up my old sites (including this one, which is now more geared toward a normal blog look rather than magazine styled). This means I had to resetup MusicProwler, my mp3 search site. It’s not done at the time of posting this, but it’s still up for example.
ANYWAY, I install it like any normal script, but I run into problems when SHAZAAM none of the source work properly! Local: broken. API: broken. Uh oh, how can I have an mp3 search site without it pulling mp3′s from anywhere?
Well, like some stuff (but not most), I decided I’d do a little programming of my own and get my own working sources. So, after hours of working, I managed to get 3 sources working: 4shared (was getting wrong url’s and song titles for me), kohit, and mp3realm (last 2 are also available in x10media’s mp3 source addon). I thought since the script really isn’t working at all on its own, I’d release the 3 sources I made for public use:
Click here to download
(See update below)
For those who don’t have the mp3 search script but would like to get it, it can be purchased here.
*P.S. The kohit source is VERY resource intensive. It can pull a max of 30 results per page, but it is not recommended! 6 is pushing it! <– Fixed!
Made Kohit more efficient so you can make use of all 30 results. Download the new pack below, unzip, and upload to the root directory.
Okay, here’s the deal: I made a plugin and it’s fucking awesome right? It lets you put a goddamn search form in your fucking sidebar that also includes options for which fucking category they want to search in. Your users will be “Holy shit this guy/girl/other is treating me like a fucking king/queen/other by giving me all these fucking options I better give them my bank account info and shit so they can have all my money”.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “How can I trust a motherfucker as bad as mc2w to make a plugin that isn’t just a fucking troll?” I present to you MY MOTHAFUCKIN SIDEBAR BIOTCH. Look at that advanced search shit. Even though it only one category to choose from, it’s still the mothafuckin shit right? Even the people down at wordpress approve of that shit BAM OFFICIAL WORDPRESS.ORG PLUGIN LINK WHAT WHAT caught you off guard didn’t I? Yeah I do that because I’m so god damn fucking awesome.
So what do you do now? YOU DOWNLOAD THAT MOTHERFUCKIN SHIT ONTO YOUR WORDPRESS SON. You’ll have traffic beating up your servers left and right and you’ll make millions if not bajillions of motherfuckin dollars on ad revenue all the girls will want you and your Ferraris* (THATS RIGHT, ITS PLURAL).
So yeah, if you appreciate the work that sort of went into this and would like to donate, you can’t because I don’t have a *verified* paypal account yet! However, if you need hosting or some new kickass themes, you could perhaps make a purchase off the footer link linking to Elegant Themes or the link up top to Cirtex Hosting.
*results not typical, use as recommended, flammable, not for oral use
