If you read my previous article, you know that the goal of these articles is to teach you ways to start making money online without spending money.

This is the second in the series and this time we take care of having your own blog. There are endless ways to make money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you traffic. The income that we will see today will come from Google Adsense.

There are multiple benefits to blogging, including low cost (or no cost), resources to help drive traffic to your blog, and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates in their RSS reader.

Let’s start with our 6 steps.

1. Set up your blog. You will have to decide what you are going to write a blog about. You must decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately.

There are several free ways to set up a blog and host it for free. We will be going with Blogger.com for our first blog.

Blogger will let you set up a blog for free, they will host it for free, and it will ping search engines every time you update, which means it will be tracked and found.

Visit blogger.com and click the “create your blog now” button on the home page, then follow the step-by-step instructions provided by Blogger.

Some key settings you’ll want to get right are:

1. ‘Host your blog on Blogger’ = Yes
2. ‘Add your blog to our listings’ = Yes
3. ‘Ping Weblogs.com’ = Yes
4. ‘Publish site feed’ = Yes

2. Write some content. Before proceeding, there has to be some information on the site and that means you have to make some entries. Some of these posts you can write yourself, and some may be quotes from sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google toolbar.

You can download the Google Toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com. The toolbar includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest to your readers, you can highlight the appropriate text and click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link to the site.

3. Once you have some content, say a week of blogging with 1-2 posts for every day, you can apply for an AdSense account. When you sign in to Blogger, you’ll see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and request an account.

You can find all about AdSense on the AdSense page, but basically you get Google ads on your site and get paid if your visitor clicks on them.

Google will decide which ads are shown on your site based on the content it finds.

You should be aware that Google will reject your request if your site is deemed to have no content. No one outside of Google knows the precise rules about this.

Once you’ve been accepted, you can get some javascript from Google to add to your site. Copy this and then log in to Blogger.

Once you’ve logged into your blog, you’ll see that one of the tabs at the top of the screen is labeled ‘Template’. Click on this. You will need to know a bit of HTML to help find the correct location to paste your Google code. But with a little experimentation, you’ll find the right place for you. See the resource box at the end of this article for more help.

I would suggest that the ads should be seen when the site loads, but should not be too obvious or dominate your site.

4. Write some more content. Try to keep your content at regular intervals as various directories will check your site at regular intervals and the smartest ones will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule. They will probably figure this out in the hours after you first send it to them. Which is what we will do next.

5. Submit your site to blog and RSS directories. Because it’s hosted on Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your blog. (That means every time you make a new entry, they’re automatically notified.) You will need to manually submit to the other directories, some of which will require a link on your site to theirs.

You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a directory listing to get started, visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss

6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally, you want people to come back again and again. Just like with customers, it’s harder to get a new visitor than it is to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact, make it so interesting that they can’t help but tell all their friends about it too.

As with most free ways to make money, it will take time to get up and running, but if you can build a following, you will make money.

Copyright 2004 Darren Power