Making money from niche specific sites – Blogging

Blogging is one of the ways to publish your self online.

As wikipedia quotes

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

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From money making stand-point blogging is something which allows you to create a niche informative website with just a few clicks & enables you to make money online by displaying other’s websites. However it is really necessary that you give at-least a year to blogging before you can become a very successful blogger.

Just to make you confident about blogging i will name a few popular bloggers who make a hefty income from their blogs.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
2. http://www.gizmodo.com/
3. http://icanhascheezburger.com
4. http://www.labnol.org

If you check all these guys blog about almost anything. Huffington Post is a political blog, while Gizmodo & Labnol are tech blogs & Icanhasacheezburger.com is a blog based on LOLCATS (Funny cat pictures). All these guys are making a fortune from blogging. These are my personal inspirations for blogging.

Okay so by now you understand what blogging is; Now let’s setup a blog for your self.

I give you 2 options:

• Blogger.com – Free one (No coding or technical skills required.)
• WordPress – Self hosted,Self managed(I personally use this for my self)

I would recommend you start with blogger.com as it is a free service by Google & they’d also allow you to display advertisements. Nothing beats blogger’s free service as long as you don’t want to spend some money.
But however when start making money i would recommend you to move to wordpress, If you can spare some money say around $100 (Rs.5,000/-), You can get a good webhost & everything will be self managed.(We will cover more about Setting up with wordpress in upcoming posts.)

Okay now follow these steps:

• Decide what you want to blog about? Any specific idea? What is your hobby?
• make list of things you can blog about your hobby.
• Visit www.blogger.com & create your first free blog.