Blogs, or web logs, have been around for some time, and most of us know that money can be earned from blogging. The question is, how does one go about monetizing one's blog? There are various methods including Adsense, affiliate marketing, text related advertising and CPA. There are other methods, but here we are going to concentrate on promoting products, related to your blogs subject matter, as an affiliate.

If you have not even started a blog yet, then your subject should be something you can talk about on a regular basis, with some authority and passion. Pick a subject that you are familiar with, like a hobby or passtime, that you know others would like more information on. If at all possible, get yourself a domain name that contains your subject, for example, if you were keen on natural vegetable gardening and wanted to start a blog about this subject, try to get a domain name like naturalvegetablegardening.com. Having your main subject in the name of the domain helps towards search engine optimisation or SEO. Dot coms are the best to have, with dot net and dot org coming an equal second.

There are lots of domain hosting companies out there, and they all charge a monthly fee, however I have used a free webhosting company for over a year, never had any time offline and they dont put adverts on your site. You can host your domain at this company for free, for ever.

000webhost

You will need to change the nameservers on the site from which you purchased your domain name to NS01.000webhost.com and NS02.000webhost.com - the help section of your domain provider can give you instructions on how to do that. Alternatively, ask me on my profile page at Mahalo and I will guide you through it.

By far and away the most popular service for creating blogs is Wordpress. They have templates and provide an easy to use admin area for you to maintain your blog once you have installed it.

Now comes the tricky bit, there is a little bit of coding here, seriously nothing to be scared of, but you will need to follow some very specific instructions, and to the letter. So rather than put all that techy stuff on here you can follow this link "Denise Allen dot Info" where I have a PDF file for you to download and follow as you set up your wordpress blog.

To get your free copy you need to visit this site Denise Allen dot info and look down the right hand side for the image for Blog setup tutorial, click on it and you will be taken directly to the PDF.

When your blog has been basically constructed, you will be wanting to include one or more products which, when you have built up some traffic to your website, should start to generate you some income.

There are quite a lot of places on the internet where you can search for related items that you can sell on your blog, and make a commission for each customer you introduce to the creator of that product. I name but a few here, these are well known and well respected sites, some listing digital products or eBooks and some listing physical products that you can promote.

• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
• Paydotcom
• Amazon
• eBay

You could also try doing a search in your favourite search engine using the type of product you are looking for, followed by the word affiliate. For example "gold jewelry affilate products"

To include the code or link into your website you will need, once again, to refer to the book I suggested above "Blog Setup Tutorial".