Making Money With Blogs

One of the first questions people often ask when learning about blogs is “how can you make money doing this?”.  Certain individuals on the web make millions of dollars a year by monetizing their blogs.  Monetizing a blog literally refers to turning your blog into a tool for making money.  There are three main things one must consider when monetizing a blog; content, search, and monetization method.  By understand how each of these three factors affects the success of your blog, you will soon understand how to create a niche for yourself, become visible on search engines, and make money from what you’re writing about.

Content – Deciding What to Write About:

The first step to developing a successful blog is choosing something to write about.  If you do research on the web, you’ll notice that when you search for a given keyword on Google, Yahoo, or other major search engines, there are hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of search results.  If your intention is to monetize your blog, you’ll want to give some serious thought to writing about something that not only excites you, but is also not heavily competitive with regard to how many other websites or blogs are competing to make money off the same topic.  For example, say you have decided to create a blog about “cheap flights”.  A quick search for this term on Google reveals that there are over 25.8 million relevant search results for that particular search phrase.  This means that if your intention is to monetize a blog about “cheap flights”, you’ll be competing with nearly 26 million other sites that Google has indexed on the same topic; probably not the greatest idea.  Alternatively, you can choose a topic to write about which is far less competitive.  Let’s look at the search term “umbilical cord blood” for instance.   A quick search of these keywords on Google shows that there are only 629,000 results for this particular string of keywords.  Now this may seem like a lot, but considering that today there are over 1 trillion websites which make up the internet, this number begins to look a lot more managable.  Generally speaking, when choosing a topic for the purposes of blog monetization, if there are less than 1 million results on Google for that topic, you have probably found a topic that is worth writing about.

Below are some valuable tools offered by Google which you can use to conduct keyword research.  By becoming familiar with keyword research tools, you’ll soon begin to understand how to choose content topics for your monetized blog.

Google Keyword Tool

Google Trends