How to Make Money Writing A Blog

Find Your Niche
1. List all of the topics you are comfortable writing about, and areas where you have personal experience and knowledge.
2. Research the popularity of the topics to ensure that you choose something people search for. Writing the best blog on the Internet about purple dogs is meaningless unless people actually want to read about purple dogs. Use programs such as Market Samurai or Google's keyword tool to assess how many people search for those particular topics each month.

3. Perform an Internet search for the topics you think you want to write about, and take a careful look at the sites that show up on page one. Those sites will become your competition, and you need to be sure that you either cover the topic better or approach it in an entirely different way.
Create Your Blog
4. Determine the right platform for your blog. Blogger.com and WordPress.com allow you to create a blog at no cost, but there are drawbacks. If you have a few dollars to spare, you can buy a hosting plan where a larger company holds your blog on its servers making it accessible to the public, and use WordPress.org to structure the blog.
5. Create a catchy name for your blog, making sure that it is reflective of what readers will find when they read it.
6. Start writing. To ensure a successful blog, you should write at least one blog post in the beginning, and then on a regular posting schedule of at least once or twice per week after that.
Monetize It
7. Research the different types of monetization and choose the ones most appropriate to your topic. Some blogs are better suited for selling e-books, white papers or e-newsletters, while others lean toward selling specific products or simple text or image link ads. ProBlogger Darren Rowse uses several types of monetization, including placing image and text ads from Google AdSense and Chitika on his site, selling products through Amazon's affiliate program and selling private ads to relevant companies.
8. Look for profitable, commercial blog networks that fit your topic, and apply for acceptance into them once you have a substantial amount of posts on your site. Networks such as FoodBuzz have hundreds or thousands of blogs that are networked together, and they provide an additional income stream through their own advertising.
9. Determine the best placements for ads on your site, whether they are banner or text ads, or a simple link to your e-book or e-newsletter subscription. Make sure that the ads are a good fit for your site, and do not overpower your blog with ads.
Get Traffic
10. Learn the techniques you need to get your blog ranked highly in the search engines, and how to write compelling text to draw a reader in. No matter how well you have monetized your blog, you will not make money unless people visit it.
11. Research and apply on-page optimization factors, such as keyword placement, and off-page optimization, such as backlinks and metatags. Enroll in a reputable program, such as The Keyword Academy, to learn the right techniques and strategies.
12. Engage in social marketing by creating a Twitter account and Facebook fan page for your blog.