How to Start a Blog

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So Why do You need a website or blog for? There are several very profitable ways to make money with a website. It consists on establishing a website using affiliate marketing that will run on autopilot after you set it up. You should probably know what affiliate marketing is… if you don’t know, well it is basically promoting and selling other people’s products and/or services and get paid a commission for referring sales to them.
The advantage of having your own website or blog is that you can integrate affiliate program products and services in your page content. i.e. : You can create a website about “Cooking”, which has a variety of news articles, new cooking appliances, discussion boards and links to other cooking and recipes websites, etc. and let’s say you have an article about a new unique recipe. The article talks about the ingredients, how it should be cooked, etc… then you put a link to “X” store (i.e. “for more delicious recipes like this one, click the following link) and when people click they are sent to the website where they can buy the hard cover book or ebook where you got this recipe from. The Key Element here is that the link you insert into your article contains your unique affiliate “id”, so when a person clicks the link, they will automatically land in the product page they were looking for, but you are referring the sale. That means you will get a commission if the person who clicked on your link buys the product. Pretty easy huh? … well it’s not as easy as it may sound if you’re a beginner, but you can do it if you put the proper effort into it.

What in the world is a Blog?

The word “blog” is a contraction of Web-Log. In Basic terms, it is a normal website, but presented in the form of a diary, in which the author or publisher can write every day or as frequent as he likes and visitors will see the latest entry first. A blog is written like a diary because it makes reading a snap and finding content is easier than traditional website layouts. So now that you know that a blog is a website, let’s keep going.

How do I Start a Blog?

First of all, you need to know that there are many blog platforms available online to start a blog. A blogging platform is a software that helps the author or writer of the blog, manage the content easily and be able to interact with the visitors by allowing comments on each entry. The most popular platforms are Wordpress and Blogger. These two blogging platforms offer free blogs for the general public and you can start a blog in as little as 3 minutes; But there is a catch! yes, some free blogging platforms do not allow bloggers to use their blogs for commercial purposes, and that includes not being able to monetize your blog with advertisements or affiliate links (check their terms of use for the latest details) plus, your blog address will look something like http://yourblog.blogspot.com which is not as appealing as having your own domain name like http://Yourblog.com which is more attractive and you own the contents of your blog. Read the rest of this entry »