OK, I’ve promised to show you how to begin your journey to making money online without spending a penny. So: here goes.
I’m making the assumption you own a computer and have an internet connection, otherwise you’re unlikely to be reading this. That’s the only financial outlay you’re going to need, unless you decide to go for a paid hosting account (there are many free ways to get a blog going, but if you decide you want your own domains and hosting, I recommend these: Godaddy and Hostgator. If you buy their services through these links I will make a small commission – which is one way of making money online). The advantages of buying your own domain names and hosting are the freedom to do what you want with your site: freedom to choose your own themes, your own domain name, etc. The only disadvantage is that it costs. Now on to the free ways. Two places you can get your own website for free are www.wordpress.com and www.blogger.com. Sign up, go through the setup wizards and in minutes you will have your own website without paying for hosting or domain names. Another option is to sign up for sites like Hubpages or Helium which will publish your work on their site and share any advertising revenue with you. These can be great ways to get started and not only cost you nothing but may pay you as well!
OK, so you’ve got a site up and running; now what? We’ll assume that your aim is to make some money, so we’ll see how to set up a website with that in mind. Now, there are many schools of thought here, most of them contradictory. All agree on one thing, however – publish high-quality content on your site that answers reader’s questions or gives information about your chosen topic. But what topic to choose? Once again, many schools of thought here. The old school says you should do a lot of keyword research to find phrases people are typing in to Google to find things; more than that, you should be concentrating on ‘buying’ keywords like “cheap iPads” which indicate the searcher is actually looking to buy something. More recently, the smart thinking is not to pay so much attention to keywords and their competitiveness, but choose a niche that isn’t too competitive and write loads of articles covering everything about the subject. I think it’s best to find a subject that interests you, because you’re going to have to write hundreds of articles on the topic in great depth. If you hate the subject, you’re not going to be able to do it (I have a site about athletic underwear that frankly I can’t face writing for very often). The beauty of writing lots of articles about one topic is that you will organically get traffic for what are called ‘long-tailed keywords’; these are phrases of 5 or more words that you would probably never expect to get traffic for: one of my articles got found for “disadvantages of ATMs also ferret fighting”; now I could never have predicted that, and I don’t expect its a very common search (never had it again since) but it indicates what surprising things can happen. The more articles you write, the more you’ll pick up long tails. Pick up enough of them and you get more traffic.
Now, I hear you say, that’s all very well, but how do I make money? Well, a couple of main ways. Sign up as an affiliate with Amazon and eBay and they will pay you a percentage of any sale generated from someone clicking through the special links on your site. Another way is Google Adsense; get an account and place ads on your site and Google will pay you a small amount for every click.
In the next post I’ll discuss ways of promoting your site to build your traffic and start earning you money. Thanks for reading, and I’ll be happy to answer questions and give more specific advice in the comments.
