Blogging For Profit

By now you may be wondering how I could have been blogging for several months now, but have just written about setting up my blog. Easy to explain: I kept notes of my experiences and have been trying to get them all transferred into my blog. Looking forward to finally getting caught up in "real time". So, that's that!

One of the new "terms" I picked up from Honest Riches is to "monetize" a blog or website. With Blogger.com you can monetize your blog in two ways: AdSense by Google or sign up and incorporate banner and link advertising through affiliate programs.

My first choice is to implement AdSense advertising. If you are not familiar with the AdSense program, it is run by Google and to participate you enroll in the program. After you are accepted, you follow the directions and with Blogger, you use the easy to navigate options to ad the text and image ads to your site. It's automated so that the ads are chosen by Google and are targeted to be relevant to the content of the page they are appearing on. The "monetization" is created by revenue generated on either a per-click or per-impression basis. From what I've gathered, think in terms of less than pennies on the dollar. A low return, but again, all you are doing is letting the ads appear on your site.

At least by adding AdSense I have taken the first step towards "blogging for profit".

A Blogging Belly Flop

Well, I wanted to make a splash in the blogging experience pool, but instead, I did a belly flop. Here I thought I was signing up for a blog hosting site, but come to find out, PayPerPost.com is really a site where you can get paid for blogging about particular topics. But, to do that, you must have your own blog! Arggh! Of course, I don't realize all of this until I've spent all the time it took to sign up and get my account open.

By this time I was determined to create a blog before I called it a night, so I decided to turn back to Honest Riches where I compared and contrasted between the choices she offered on Web 2.0 sites and made a decision: I would sign-up with HubPages.com. Alright, I go through the registration process, get into the site and start looking around and reading some of the profiles, sort of to get an idea on how to set things up. Well, the more I look, then go back to Holly's book, then go back to the HubPages site, the more I think I need to find the tutorial and online help section, for I just was not understanding where the Blog section was and how it fit with the rest of what I was seeing on HubPages. No worries. I began to read.....