MAKE MONEY WITH A FREE BLOG!

How to Create a Blog Site

Nowadays the most effective way to share your thoughts and opinion is to create your own weblog a.k.a blog. But how to start your own blog? Fortunately, starting a blog site is an easy task.

• You do not need to know anything about web development to start blogging: you can create and manage your blog site using some of the free blog tools that are available;
• All you need to do is open a hosting account where you can have a blog application installed and activated. At SiteGround we offer FREE blog installation with our blog hosting package and you can start your site right away.

Advantages of using a ready-made blog tool

• The blog application has many built-in functionalities such as posting articles, HTML editor, commenting, archive, menus, themes management, etc.
• The most popular blog tools have a large supporting community. You will be able to find free themes for your blog and customize it the way you like.

Which blog application to use?

With the help of a blog application you needn't be a web designer or developer to share your thoughts with the world. In the following pages you will find brief instructions on how to build your own blog by using some of the most popular blog applications:

• Learn how to create a blog with WordPress;
• Learn how to build a community website with BuddyPress plugin for WP;
• Find out how to create a blog with Drupal;
• Find out more about the Pixelpost photo blog system;

Define: blog

There are different descriptions of that concept. According to most of the articles on the Internet 'blog' is short for 'weblog', a frequently updated publication of comments and thoughts on the web. Usually it is reflecting the views of the blog's creator. Blogs consist of text and images and are sorted by date. The newest information is on the top and there is an archive of the old one. People create blogs to share their thoughts with the world. A person writing in the journal is called a 'blogger'. Bloggers write about different topics: from the typical daily situations to the progress of some scientific researches. The readers also can leave comments and thus make the whole blog more interesting and useful.

History of the blog

Blogs are part of the World Wide Web since its creation. In the beginning they did not have a defined name, but their purpose was more or less the same as that of contemporary blogs. Here is a list of the first blogs:

• Dawn of Internet: Tim Berners-Lee at CERN begins keeping a list of all new sites as they come online.
• June 1993: NCSA's oldest archived 'What's New' list of sites.
• June 1993: Netscape begins running it's 'What's New!' list of sites.
• January 1994: Justin Hall launches Justin's Home Page which would become Links from the Underground.
• April 1997: Dave Winer launches Scripting News.
• December 1997: Jorn Barger coins the term 'weblog''.

How do I start?

To start your own blog site, you need to sign up for a blog hosting package. SiteGround has long experience hosting blog applications, such as WordPress. Our servers are perfectly optimized for blogs. We offer FREE blog installation and immediate activation of your blog hosting account.



HOW TO MONETIZE BLOGS 

If you want to monetize your blog, you have to ask yourself a series of questions, starting with what kind of blog is it, and do you have any readers? If you’re not getting readers at your blog, you might as well put all your money-making plans on hold. Even if you got the greatest pay-per-click program in existence with the highest rates (which won’t happen if you don’t have readers) you can’t make money because there’s no one there to click the ads. Generate traffic first, and then worry about monetizing your blog.

If you have a steady stream of traffic, then the best ways to make money from your blog depend on the type of blog you have. If your blog is a general interest blog, it’s probably harder to make money from that than a specialized niche blog. Of course, if you have thousands and thousands of readers, you can run general advertising for things people typically need like credit cards, mortgages, insurance and very general basic things.

If your blog is general interest, though, no one is coming to your blog searching for cheap insurance, the best way to refinance a mortgage, or a better rate on a credit card. They’re coming to read how you burned the cookies, your thoughts on today’s politics, and the latest celebrity gossip, or whatever you’re blogging about.

But if you pull in thousands of unique visitors over a month, you could still make some money from these kinds of advertisers because a certain percentage of them will click the ads, and a certain small percentage of them might buy. This is a hard way to monetize that requires thousands and thousands of readers.

If your blog is smaller and more of a niche blog, you have many more options. Lots of people use Café Press or other sites that will print custom t-shirts, mugs and items for you. You could have some principle of your blog, your logo, or some great concepts you created printed on these items and link to them from your blog.

You can use the mother of blog money-makers, pay-per-click ads like those through Google and Yahoo. Don’t just sign up and assume it’s all automated, though. You have to watch the ads that show up, the click-through rates, and your pricing. If the ads that are showing up aren’t targeted closely enough and aren’t getting good click-through rates, you’ll get less per click than otherwise .So watch your statistics and make adjustments as needed. These pull off your keywords, so be keyword focused when you write posts.

Affiliate marketing is a top way to monetize a blog, too. If your blog is about how to lose weight, for instance, you can promote a weight loss product or information that has an affiliate program. When people follow your link to that product and buy it, you get a commission. The more narrow your niche, the easier it is to monetize your blog because the people coming there are looking for specific information and products.