LinkMoney.org

Almost every day on various message boards or Blogs you will see a common question, “How can Blogging make money?” Many people get in to Blogging because it is a convenient way to write about subjects that they know about or want to promote.  After a while once the Blog has taken on a certain character and established a direction, then it becomes a pretty normal thing to want to earn a little income for your efforts.

There is nothing wrong with that.  Do not think that if you start to advertise products on your website or Blog that you will lose readership.  That does not happen.  As a matter of fact, most people expect some sort of advertising.  You are certainly allowed to reap a little benefit for your efforts.

So once you have decided to run some ads then what to do?  Well there are various ways that you may want to try.  I say try because this business of Internet Marketing is a constant effort of testing, testing, testing.

One easy way is to insert some ad blocks of Google Adsense text ads.  You will need a Google account, then use the simple set up procedure to select the size and type of text block ads and Adsense will generate the html code that includes your advertiser account number and you copy that block of code over to a text box section on your Blog.  You will want to experiment with different size ads that will match your Blog layout and you may also select different color schemes.

Now as your Blog is published Google analyzes the information on your website and decides what the theme or subject matter is of your Blog and will automatically generate ads for products that their computer determines would be a good fit for your Blog.  Some times the fit is not appropriate and there are ways to block certain advertisers but generally speaking the ads do match what you are writing about.

These Adsense ads are Pay Per Click ads in that if someone reading your Blog sees an ad of interest and clicks on it you make a little money.  You must NEVER click on your own ads, or have any of your friends or family members click on any of your own ads.  Google wants it to be a natural thing and they do have ways of knowing who clicked, and if it was out of real interest or a case of click fraud.  Do NOT under any circumstances do this, take my word for it.  If you do click your own ads you will be banned, your funds will be seized and there is no negotiation.

Another method to answer the question of how can blogging make money, is to use Affiliate Advertising.   We will cover this in another Blog post here on LinkMoney.org.

You no doubt know the power of Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and several other Social Networking Websites online.

This writer has made many nice connections in the past year through the use of these social networking websites.  Probably my all time favorite is Twitter because it causes you to think and react in short bursts of creativity.  Sometimes just a simple little bit of humor, one liners, so to speak, are enough to bring people to your profile and then that creates traffic to your website.

When I write a post for one of my Blogs that I feel is worthy of some attention, I just post a tiny description of the post on Twitter with a link to the site and traffic builds.  The more traffic you get and if you have good content, the visitors will subscribe to either your email or rss feed and you have a potential customer.

Twitter is very easy to use, just get an account and start reading some of the tweets, and “Follow” some of the fellow posters that you are interested in and then maybe they will follow you back.  Soon you will have a hundred followers and then more keep coming.  Try to make your 140 character posts of interest or exciting and you will soon find many new friends.

I must admit that of all the social networking sites online I probably spend more time on Twitter then all the others put together.  I read in a recent report that Twitter’s subscriber rate more than doubled last year.  So if you are not a fellow tweet, then hurry on over and join the other rare birds.  They say that birds of a feather flock together.

You will want to get yourself a handle that is easily recognized and in some way will represent you at a glance.  Mine is linkmoneydotorg for obvious reasons, and my image is actually a favorite photo of my Dad when he finished digging the cellar for our house with a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.  Dad would get a kick out of knowing that his picture is scattered all over the world.

If you have a website and you want to put a cute graphical link on it, then you can go to http://www.twitterbuttons.com/ and just put in your Twitter name and select from many of the nice designs available.

One really handy site that will help you keep up on the messages that your friends are posting as well as your @replies and direct messages is to use TweetDeck.  The normal Twitter page scrolls by quickly when you have many followers and people you are following.  TweetDeck handles this problem nicely.  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

Our next post is going to tell you about a place where you can go and see a list of social networking sites and also see if your handle of choice is available on all of them at one time.

Twitter is one of the most popular of all of the social networking websites, but in the next few posts we will be explaining what some of the others are and give our opinion of what the benefits of each are.

Come follow me on Twitter @linkmoneydotorg and I will follow you back.

Please feel free to comment here on this Blog about this Twitter post.

For once this post is not about me.  Go figure.

I want to call your attention to a really cool website that hit the ground running because it was dreamed up by our friend Garry Conn.  The site is http://www.BloggingQuestions.com and it is in a regular WordPress Blog format but works quite like a forum.

Here questions are posed by the readers and answered by the readers.  No matter what you want to learn about in the fields of Blogging, Hosting, Domaining, Internet Marketing, Social Networking, and the Search Engines.   This is a great venue to use to broaden your knowledge.

When you read down through the questions it is very easy to hit the comment reply box and put in your own two cents.  The site has been up a couple of months or so and is getting major traffic already, but the more the merrier.  Check it out.  This is one big happy family and I have seen none of the usual caustic replies that you get on some forums.  There seem to be No Spammers and No Scammers.

Here are some of the recent questions:
Do You Use The Google Keyword Tool To Create Post Titles?
Do You Include External Links In Your Content?
How Often Do You Use Images In Your Posts?
What Is The Best Hosting For a Blog?
Please Vote for Your Favorite Hosting Company for Tech Support
How do I upgrade from WP 2.6 to 2.7?
What to do with your empty domains to turn them into money makers
How Do I Find A Blog Writing Job Online?
Why Do Most People Fail At Making Money Online?
How To Get Traffic From MySpace.com
How Much Traffic Does The Average Blog Get?
What is better? Domain name prefix or suffix?
Unable to Register Another Blog Account in WLW
How Do I Add My Avatar To My Blog Comments?
What do you think the Google Page Rank will be for BloggingQuestions ?
How Do I Make My Blog Search Engine Friendly?
What Is The Best SEO Blog?
What is the best Social Bookmarking Badge or Toolbar?
What’s Happening To The Blog Commenting Community?
Do you submit the pages that you comment on to social networks?

That is only a partial list.  There are lots more.

You can sign up as a user and get access to the Blog dashboard and post your own questions.  The answers come from all over and are very informative and helpful.

Hope to see soon you over at Blogging Questions

Wishing you all the best for the Holiday Season.

Thank you all for reading LinkMoney dot org.

Rich

Update ***
A Very Merry Christmas update:

I wrote this post earlier today without knowing anything at all about the following.  But they say great minds run in the same gutter channel so I must have had a premonition.  Garry is giving away some excellent prizes and if you read this quick go follow his instructions to win.

Garry Conn wrote a post on his blog titled, A Surprise Christmas Bonus With Over $1500 In Free Gifts and I thought that you would like to check it out.