1.1 Blogging

1.1 Blogging 

The act of blogging in and of itself is often free, but that doesn’t mean that blogging can’t serve as a useful platform from which you can earn money online. Many people are earning over 5 figures a month “just blogging”, by combining it with things like affiliate sales, ad networks, and paid reviews. Go to the last chapter of this post to see all of the blogger income reports I have collected. There are thousands of blogs started everyday and most of them die off over the course of a few months/years. From personal experience I think it is best to start a blog with a purpose/passion – aside from making money. This will help you to be successful in the long run, as it is normal to spend many months blogging without earning anything. Here are some of the best blogging sites you can use to get started:

How To Start A Blog - a post I wrote that will get you up and blogging in a matter of minutes. Blog.com - Creates a free blog and hosts it for you for free. Your domain will look like yourdomain.blog.com. 

Blogger.com - Free weblog publishing tool from Google, for sharing text, photos and video. Quick and easy to setup and links with your Gmail account.

 Livejournal - A service for journals and blogs, that also offers privacy controls, photo storage, publishing tools, style templates, and online communities for many interests.

Tumblr - Post anything (from anywhere!), customize everything, and find and follow what you love. 

WordPress.com - Free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. Includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, automatic spam protection . You domain will look like yourdomain.wordpress.com It’s different from Word Press.org. 

WordPress.org - A web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog, with your own domain name. 

1.2 Blog/Website Monetization

If you have a blog or a website with content and a following, I’m going to discuss a few ways you can monetize it through advertising and information products. Concerning the latter, you certainly don’t need a blog to pull it off. Anyone can sell an ebook, for example. But it is just so typical for bloggers to do these things, because they tend to be more successful when you have an audience, that I decided to include them in this section. Still, if you don’t have a blog, you just need to think of another way to reach your target audience (like a forum, or a simple landing page). 1.2.1 Contextual Links and Sponsored Posts If you have a blog there are many ways you can monetize the writing portion of it, such as reviews, sponsore