Blogging System
Lately there is a move towards using a blogging system rather than a traditional web site to make money online. At least for individual webmasters. It's all to do with the old adage "content is king". A blog is an easy way to publish content to the web.
Blogging Software
By installing a standard script such as Wordpress and customizing the template. You can quickly have a fully-functioning web site that is ready to start being grown by publishing your articles. The software takes care of all the navigation links and organisation of the files into search engine friendly pages.
Because the pages are dynamically generated, there is less of a need to plan the site structure. Changes are easy to make at any time in the future. You don't have to upload pages and re-build your site each time something is added.
User interaction is catered for in the form of comments. You may have thought about starting a forum. But with something like a 10:1 lurker to user ratio it can be difficult to get a forum off the ground. In Wordpress, comment spam is mostly dealt with automatically with the Akismet spam filter.
Making Money
So how do you make money from a blog? It's very much like with any other kind of web site where you try and monetize your visitor traffic. Since a blog is steadily growing all the time with fresh content, getting search engines to notice you is not so difficult. Also, the ping system alerts sites such as Technorati.com about your new content.
You theme your blog around your niche of interest or expertise. Then you can link to related affiliate programs and host advertising. Or you could drive your traffic to your sales web site for example.
Permalinks etc.
In the admin area you can specify the format of permalinks so they include keywords from the article titles. Permalinks are urls to the archived versions of your posts so they are like your web pages. There are fixed pages too for things like your privacy policy.
There is a membership system too where people can register and gain various levels of publishing rights. So you could even build a list of customers. These registered people can then access private pages on your site.
A large number of plug-ins have been created to extend the functionality of the script. So there is not much you would be short of compared to making a custom web site with a web authoring tool.
Blogging as a Business
If you are taking your web business seriously, I would advise avoiding free blogs and get your own domain name and hosting. Then you have total control and avoid the problems of moving things between domains in the future.
How much money can be made with a blogging system? Well, some people that have been blogging for a couple of years and posting daily to their blogs such as Danny Warner (author of theBloggingCashMachine) are making 5-figure monthly incomes. I would imagine this figure would grow and grow as their blogs get bigger and more people come online.
Ned Storm - Article Writer
