Earn Money With a Blog By Kris Beus

Blogging in the past five years has become a driving force behind not only website marketing, but stand alone revenue generators. The most important aspect that you must understand before beginning a blog especially if you are creating the blog as a supplemental income is there will be competition. So as you create your blog be sure that it will be something you will post on when you are sick and tired of blogging. Personally the one aspect in my life that I am able to write about whether I am tired, burned out, or I would just rather be doing something else is making money which has given me the ability to get not only my blog, but also a static website to the top of Google SERPs (search engine ranking pages) for some very competitive keywords. Personally I believe if someone loves their web space no matter what it is about they will be able to make money off it.

Before you begin blogging you must decide if you really want to make money online. Remember there is over a trillion unique URL's by Google's calculation so no matter which niche (category of website) you select be prepared to work hard for the top spot in Google. After you choose your niche it will be important to research your competitors so you will have an understanding of how much promotion it will take to reach the top of Google. It is good to search google and find a keyword density checker and run it on your competitor's site then attempt to match or increase the density of keyword or phrase you would like to be on top with. The second important part of researching your niche competitors is to find out how much and who is linking back to them. If you would like to find out how many and which websites are linking to any given site go to yahoo's site explorer and type in their URL. Once you see how many links a competitor has it will be much easier to gauge the work necessary to overtake them within the SERPs.

Once you have the position within the SERPs and you begin receiving a reasonable amount of traffic there are some different ways you can choose to make money. The biggest tip I can give any blogger recently gaining prestige within the blogosphere is do not begin a spam campaign. Now this will be hard to do because it will consist of turning down offers of people wanting you to post about their website or product. If you decide to become a complete sale out more than likely all of the one way links that people give you because you run an excellent blog will be taken away meaning you will drop in SERPs losing everything your worked for. Now it is ok to occasionally post about someone else's product or service just be sure to first get a free version for yourself and test it then write a realistic review about whatever the product or service is. Now perhaps you would rather just place ads on your site if this is the case then the easiest route would be Google AdSense either way once you get the traffic monetization should not be difficult.